to the ring to the right point of view

You know, I think as Christians we tend to put up with a lot more from ourselves than we ever would with anyone else. When we sin, we can shrug it off. “Oh, yeah, I shouldn’t have done that... sorry God.” You agree with yourself not to do it again, and the matter is settled. Or even if we are very repentant, we know that we have Christ as our savior and don’t spend too much time agonizing over it. It’s not like we sit around thinking, “Oh man, I can’t believe I did that- I must be a terrible person!” Not after we’ve repented and Christ has forgiven us. We tend to think of ourselves as being “good” people, in the end of the day.

Yet when others sin... our attitude is vastly different. We tend to freak out. “Oh my goodness, she must not be a Christian.” Or, “He has some serious growth to do.” We can’t believe that someone we thought was such a good Christian would ever do anything like that, and we reflect every little sin into their innate character and make broad statements like, “She is not an honest person like I thought she was.”

It’s like we understand that the human heart is black, and we also understand that there is forgiveness in Christ, but we tend to apply the black heart part to others and the forgiveness to ourselves.

But what if we switched these two? What if we looked at our sins and realized that it did reflect something about our character, and went to great lengths to actively make changes in ourselves? Rather than just excusing ourselves because Christ has forgiven us? And what if we looked at other people and thought, “It’s okay- Christ has forgiven them and they are still the same person.”

Thoughts are originally Nse’s, of several months ago. Somehow they didn’t click until today.