Did You Check Your Plank Before Pointing Out Their Speck?

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” — Matthew 7:3 (NIV)

Have you ever read a Bible verse a hundred times, thought you understood it, and then one day Jesus shows you something that makes you realize you weren’t understanding it nearly as well as you thought? Well, welcome to my morning! 😂

I’ve been reading Matthew 7:3–5, and for some reason, I kept coming back to the part about the speck in someone else’s eye. I couldn’t figure out why it kept standing out to me. Until this morning. Jesus never said the speck wasn’t there!

Read that again.

He never said the other person didn’t do something wrong. He never said they didn’t hurt you, betray you, lie about you, or treat you unfairly. He said to look at the plank in YOUR OWN EYE first! Suddenly, something that happened recently made so much more sense.

I walked away from a difficult situation, and what surprised me more than anything was my own reaction. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t sitting around plotting what I was going to say next or figuring out how to prove I was right. I simply asked Jesus to soften the other person’s heart.

But then I did something the old Bobbie probably wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. I asked Him to touch mine, too. I even put my own name on a prayer candle. Now, let me tell you something about the old Bobbie. She would’ve been standing there thinking, “Excuse me! Why are we praying for ME? I’m not the problem here!” 😂

But that’s when I realized something. Just because someone else has a speck in their eye doesn’t mean I don’t have a plank in mine - or that I have to point out theirs. Just because someone else needs Jesus doesn’t mean I suddenly need Him any less. For so long, I thought that acknowledging my own faults somehow meant I was excusing someone else’s behavior. But that’s not what Jesus is teaching us.

He’s teaching us to examine ourselves before we start examining everybody else. Matthew 7:5 goes on to tell us to remove the plank from our own eye FIRST so we can see clearly enough to help our brother with his speck.

FIRST! Not instead of. FIRST!

Just like that, that one word changes everything. Maybe the reason we can’t see someone else’s situation clearly is that our own pride, anger, bitterness, or need to be right is blocking our vision. I’m learning that I can recognize when someone has done something wrong without allowing their actions to determine the condition of my heart, I can pray for someone who hurt me without pretending what happened was okay, and I can ask Jesus to work on my heart without taking responsibility for somebody else’s choices.

That’s growth, y’all. Trust me, the old Bobbie and the woman Jesus is making me into don’t always respond the same way!

TRUTH DROP: Jesus never said your brother didn’t have a speck in his eye. He said to check yours before you start digging around in his! Maybe today, instead of asking Jesus to show somebody else where they’re wrong, we should ask Him to show us what we’ve been overlooking in ourselves. Being right about someone else’s behavior doesn’t automatically mean our own hearts are right. Sometimes the greatest change Jesus makes isn’t in the person standing in front of us.

It’s in the person staring back at us in the mirror.

Prayer:

Jesus, thank You for loving me enough to correct me instead of leaving me the way I was. Help me recognize the areas of my own heart that still need Your attention. Remove the pride, anger, bitterness, and anything else keeping me from seeing people the way You see them. Teach me to extend grace without compromising truth, to forgive without excusing wrongdoing, and to remember that I need Your mercy just as much as the next person. In Your precious name, Amen. ❤️