I could choose from dozens of appropriate verses to write about today—One of the reasons there are so many verses in the Bible on correcting people is because it really takes a lot of godly wisdom to do it well. But one of the more pervasive problems we face when we want to help someone in a corrective way is ourselves. So we’ll begin with Jesus’ own words:

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” Jesus asked in Luke 6:41. His point is, the very desire to help someone repent can come from trying to avoid dealing with our own sinful failings. So when we set out to help a repentant friend, motive is huge.

Because we are completely dependent upon God granting the other person repentance, the most effective place to begin helping that person repent is to look at ourselves. The key idea from Jesus’s log in the eye imagery in today’s verse is how the log is always in our eye, not in the other person’s eye.

If our starting point for change is not with ourselves, the result will fail. It will spin us and the other person into ongoing relational wounding. If we try to change them before we carefully address our own hearts, both of us will be wounded and our relationship will be, too.

Why is it so hard to address our own spiritual condition before we help someone else? Often there’s a mixture of pride and frustration along with impatience to fix the other person. Fixing our eyes on the other person and their problem distracts us from fixing our eyes on Jesus (the solution for both of us)…and when our eyes stray from Jesus, the result looks a lot like judgement.

Few people get judged into life change. Far more get loved into it. Few people are helped through the judgmental attitudes of their brothers and sisters. In people, presence of judgment betrays an absence of love.

Which seems to be Jesus’ point in today’s verse: When we start dealing with the planks in our live, we encounter a loving God who forgives us despite our failings. We find mercy triumphing over judgement. We find that He’s on our side.

And having been loved, we can love others, in spite of the specs in their eyes.