September 25, 2018

Good Morning Fellow Travelers,

Read: James 1:22-25 and I Corinthians 3:16-23

“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” James 1:22

There is something that I have seen under the sun that is quite strange, and I wonder about it. This strange thing is that we seem to know others better than ourselves. A thing that is still more strange than that, is that we seem to know more good things about ourselves than bad things, and also that we seem to know more bad things about others than we know of their good things. I wonder why that is?

Let’s discuss the first issue. We should know ourselves best. After all, we live in the same house as ourselves. We always know the people we live close to better than others. You know your own brother John better than you know cousin Harold. At least this is true if you live in the same house with brother John, and cousin Harold lives at your uncle’s house.

There is a way to know ourselves. As we read in James 1:25, we can look into the mirror of the Word of God and find out who we are. If we do not know who we are, it is because we are looking in the mirror and forgetting what we saw there. The Word of God is not biased toward us, but rather toward the truth. Most often the truth is that we will find more wrong about ourselves than right. “Let no man deceive himself” (I Cor 3:18).

The second strange thing we mentioned earlier, about knowing others better than ourselves, and then highlighting the bad things more than the good, is a problem of a lack of love. Here again we have failed to see clearly what the mirror showed us. We missed some pretty big pimples. Philippians 2:3 says that we are to esteem others better than ourselves. We do not look into the mirror to see others. I think till we get done dealing with all the things we see in ourselves, we will have little time to spend on others’ faults.

– James Baer