by Jacob Ninan
What is our normal reaction when someone points out one of our faults? Many people immediately take a defensive position. Some of them try to deny that they have any such fault or that they have done anything wrong which the others are talking about. If the situation is so obvious that there is no way they can deny it, the second ploy they use is to justify themselves, such as by saying they were forced to behave as they did because someone did something to them. If that also does not succeed, they try to find some excuse for what they did by saying that normally they would not have done that but they were too tired, something provoked them unexpectedly, etc. These are all different ways we try to protect ourselves from the pain that will come if we accept the blame.
This type of reaction is part of our sinful nature. Remember how Adam and Eve started blaming others when God questioned them after they disobeyed Him. Many times this self-protective reaction comes up spontaneously, even after we have become children of God, because this is what we have practised for a long time before. We don't believe we are without fault, and we do profess that we want to become more like Jesus, but this is what comes from our sinful flesh!
Let us look at another example. All of us who are alive constantly face the possibility of death, and we know it can come unexpectedly at any time, but this is a subject we don't want to discuss or consider for ourselves. Some people refuse to give this any thought and they are very busy planning for their future just as if they are going to live forever here. Some people don't want to visit a doctor at all for fear of what he might disclose. This is again due to our protective tendency trying to keep pain away.
If we want to become like Jesus, we have to overcome this self-protective tendency. The Bible tells us to judge ourselves. This does not mean that we condemn ourselves. But we need to examine ourselves truthfully and see if there are things we are doing wrong and then change. Paul explains this in the context of taking part in the 'breaking bread' or communion in the church (1Cor.11:28-32). When we examine ourselves, it is like testing ourselves, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, to see if we can pass the test. When we judge ourselves, we can discern ourselves and draw back from anything we are doing wrong. This will lead us to deeper cleansing of our life and a further step towards the nature of Christ. The Amplied Bible explains it like this, "For if we searchingly examined ourselves [detecting our shortcomings and recognizing our own condition], we should not be judged and penalty declared [by the divine judgment]" (1Cor.11:31). On the other hand, if we don't do this, it can bring judgment on us.
If we don't judge ourselves and get more cleansing now, we will leave more things for God to judge later. Also, we can't expect to make any spiritual progress or to be transformed in our life to become godly. If we keep protecting ourselves and avoid judging ourselves, we may even harden our hearts and make it more difficult for us to hear the voice of God.
Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would be given to us as our Helper. "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, so that He may be with you forever; the Helper is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him; but you know Him because He remains with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you" (Jn.14:16-18). He is called the Spirit of truth, and His work is essentially to lead us closer to the Truth (v.26). He will teach us things, and He will remind us in different situations what Jesus has taught us concerning how we should respond and what we should do in those circumstances.
A wrong teaching has come into the church that the Holy Spirit will do everything for us for our sanctification. It that were true, and it was up to Him to do things for us, all of us would have been entirely sanctified and become like Jesus long ago. But the fact is that while the Holy Spirit will help us, working inside us, it is we who have to respond by actually doing what He tells us to. For example, we who earlier used to yield the parts of our body to sin, have to now yield them to righteousness. That is what will lead us to sanctification (Rom.6:19). What happens in this process is that first the Holy Spirit will point out where we have been wrong, show us what we ought to do and then help us to do that. That is how He will try to make us more like Jesus in a practical way. Just think what will happen if we avoid the voice of the Holy Spirit convicting us of our wrong, by trying to defend ourselves from the pain. We will miss the actual process of sanctification. We will continue to remain as we were, perhaps hardening our hearts a little more.
What can happen at such times is that we defend ourselves, put away the conviction of wrong from our mind and claim the position God has given to us at the time of our justification. We remind ourselves that He has washed us from our sins, placed us in Christ and credited the righteousness of Jesus to our account (1Cor.1:30). All that is true. However, the process of sanctification is to make that righteousness of Jesus become practically true in our daily life, little by little.
Sometimes we hear the truth about our real condition from other people. Sometimes it is our enemies who point out what is wrong with us more honestly than our friends who may be trying to be polite with us. But whenever we hear this, whether we like it or not, if we can examine ourselves to see how true it is, then we can go forward in the direction of sanctification. Of course, we are not going to be sinlessly perfect in this life. But if we really want to become like Jesus, we need to go in the direction towards perfection.
Another thing we need to remember is that we all have a strong tendency to focus on the faults we see in other people, and we can use them in our mind to justify our own wrong action. It is to help us to overcome this that Jesus told us to focus on taking off the wrong attitudes from our own mind and not to focus on pointing out other people's faults (Matt.7:3). If we are willing to face the pain as we look at our faults, we will have the opportunity to be 'healed' in those areas, just as when we go to a doctor and tell him what is troubling us.
One day we are going to have to give an account of our lives before the judgment seat of Christ (2Cor.5:10). If we are children of God, He is not going to judge us for deciding whether we are going to hell or to heaven. He has already made us citizens of heaven. What we are going to be judged is about how faithful we have been with the talents and opportunities He gave us. In the parable of the talents, one man gave 5, 2 and 1 talent each (1 talent = 6000 denarii, each denarius being the standard wages for a day) to his servants to do business with. In our context, what we need to see is that the two servants who doubled their talents got the same words of appreciation from the master, "Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter the joy of your master" (Matt.25:21). So, it is not the one who brings out more results who is rewarded more, because some people are given more and some less. But the one who was faithful with what he was given was given appreciation or reward irrespective of the quantity of his output. On the other hand, the man with only one talent had no intention to be faithful with what he received, probably because he compared himself with others who had more and figured out he could not produce as much as they.
We can all see that we are all different from one another, having grown up with different circumstances, having different types of abilities and lack of abilities. But thank God we are not in competition with others. Let us learn to be faithful before God according to what He has entrusted each of us with. But I am not saying here about how much money or talents we have, but about how faithful we are with the opportunity we all have for judging ourselves. If we learn to listen to the Holy Spirit as He points our where we have gone wrong and the right way to proceed in, we can begin to bear more and more of His fruit in our life.Just think of the time we have wasted and misused in the past. Now we can use the same parts of our body to do the will of God in our life. We can now accomplish all that God has planned for us.