New Morning Mercies #178

When you think you’re righteous, you expect others to be righteous as well, so you become demanding, judgmental, and constantly disappointed.

So much of our disappointment in relationships is not because we have an unrealistic view of others, but because we have a distorted view of ourselves. When we are harsh, impatient, critical, irritated, judgmental, curt, and unkind with others, we are revealing more about what we think of ourselves than about them. Confused? Let me explain.

Late on a Thursday night, you go into your teenager’s room to ask him something. You can barely open the door because of the debris that is in the way. There are dirty clothes, spoiled food items, and pieces of tech gear in a tangled pile from yesteryear. You can’t believe it! You have had enough! So you explode: “I never thought one of my children would turn out to be such a slob. Don’t you have an ounce of self-respect? I should take every piece of your junk and lock it away and leave you in an empty room until you put on your big-boy pants and grow up. Why, in my day, I never would have thought of treating my stuff this way.” Now, unpack this statement with me. As you’re going off, your teenager isn’t saying to himself: “My, this is helpful. This is a truly wise person who is saying very helpful things to me. I am so thankful that this person is my parent.” No, that’s not what the teenager is thinking, because in that moment you’re not part of what God would do in the heart and life of that kid; you’re in the way of it. And why are you in the way? Well, the final part of the statement, “in my day . . .,” gives it away.

It is your self-righteousness that permits you to be angry and unkind to your child. You’re not greeting his laziness with gracious parental wisdom, because you think you are essentially different from him. You’re saying, “If you were as righteous as me, you wouldn’t live like this.” When you assign to yourself righteousness that you don’t have, you expect the people around you to be as righteous as you think you are, and you greet them with judgment when they aren’t. Like the Pharisees, you tie burdens on others that you are not able to bear yourself (see Matt. 23:1–12).

You deal with others with grace when you walk around with the humble realization of how deep your need for grace was and continues to be. When you enter that teenager’s room with the recognition that you are more like him than unlike him, there is compassion in the way you handle his wrongs. When you admit that there are few struggles in others that don’t exist in some way in your life as well, you caress them with God’s grace rather than hammering them with the law. The appropriateness of my responses to others is directly related to the accuracy of my view of myself, and for that there is grace too.

For further study and encouragement: Matthew 23