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. (1st 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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