No Smoking for You

    As a minister I find myself going into a lot of hospitals and nursing homes.  Something I have noticed that is fairly common to most every place is the crowd of nurses and staff outside the entrances smoking.  Even if I don’t see anyone, I often can catch a whiff of the stench left behind.  Every time I shake my head and think surely those that are in the health care business know of the health dangers of smoking!  Why would someone that works among the ill every day and probably has seen firsthand the effects smoking, choose to engage in such an unhealthy practice?

    It’s not just among health care workers and smoking that you see these strange contradictions.  Ministers that preach morality are often caught in lurid affairs.  Police officers that have worked the wrecks of people killed because of their speeding that think nothing of flying down the highway.  Lifeguards that warn swimmers to stay seated down the waterslide, try to surf down the ride, only to fall down face first and break all their teeth[1].  Why is it the people that should know better are the very people we see doing the thing that which should not be done?

    Why do we do that?  Why do we think the rules apply to others but not ourselves?  It is way too common of a phenomenon to dismiss.  People can be walking, talking contradictions.  Knowing something is wrong, even telling others that when they do it they are wrong, yet in the same moment doing the exact same thing themselves.

    In Romans 2 Paul writes to those very people. 

“Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.  And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things. But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God?”

    It is easy to see the speck in another's eyes and hard to admit the plank in our own.  Maybe that’s why we live in the hypocrisy.  We fool ourselves into thinking the dangers of bad behavior are reserved for others and not for us.  That kind of thinking can be even more dangerous that the original sin.  When we think our sin is acceptable, when we can excuse it away, when we dismiss it to the point that we don’t even think it is there, that is when we are the most lost. (1^st John 1:6-10)

    A sin is a sin even if it's our own.  My sin, their sin, your sin, is all equal.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise.  If they shouldn't be doing that, then YOU shouldn't be doing it either!

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[1] True Story! A kid in my youth group