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?… You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3, 5)
Are you ready to let go of your long list of reasons that justified your anger and bitterness towards the person who wronged you? It might be pretty old by now. Maybe you’ve hung onto it so long that the pages are yellowed and worn. It has almost become an old friend to comfort you when you are down. Unfortunately, that is how some people view their list of justifications. When they are depressed and wonder why they feel so bad, they go back and reread the list and then say to themselves, “No wonder I feel so bad, look what they did to me!” The problem with that thinking is that you need to do that quite often because the depression comes back quicker each time. You found a little relief, but not a real cure.
God has the cure for the misery you have been carrying around. It doesn’t matter how long you have had it or how severe the offense was against you. Matthew tells us that we need to stop trying to remove the small speck of sawdust in the other person’s eye until we remove the large plank in our own eye. We can become so consumed with the sin of the other person that we can’t see the sin in our own life. God calls us a hypocrite when we do that! When we focus on the long list of things that they did to us, we never stop to think of the list of offenses against us. The only way we can forgive is to see that we are sinners too, when compared to a Holy God. We need to understand that we will each stand before God alone and He is not interested in our list of grievances. He already knows what we have been through. He wants us to clean up our hearts so that He can use us in the other person’s life. He can’t use us when we are burdened down with sin. There is no room for both sin and the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our heart. We have to let go of our sin and then we can be filled. We need to remove the plank!
Plank Removal: Take a piece of paper and make two columns. On the left side make a list of all the things that others have done against you. On the right side of the page make a list of all of your wrong responses to the things that were done to you. (Anger, nagging, bitterness, revenge, etc.) Ask God to forgive you for each wrong response on the right side thanking Him for the forgiveness that He freely gives you. Now forgive each person for specifically what they did to hurt you. Take your list and shred it. You will no longer need it. Use this tool regularly to keep your heart cleaned up and ready to be used by God.
Other Resources:
Choosing Forgiveness by Nancy Leigh DeMoss