Happy Sunday,
“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.”
Jesus (Matthew 7:4-5)
Are we reading the news wrong?
Back in 2017, I thought having a Christian worldview meant sharing Christian opinions on the news, so I consumed a lot of news… and started getting a lot of opinions.
Every story presented a new, unique nut I needed to crack. I needed to determine who was right, who was wrong, and why that was the case, and then I needed to find out how I could prove to the world that I had solved the problem.
In case you missed that sleight of hand, I had stopped reading the news to be informed and was instead simply trying to notice others' sins and promote my own genius.
This endless game of “spot the sin” is exactly what Jesus was speaking against in Matthew 7 (read above), but I think it’s one of our favorite games (maybe just beneath Wordle). Whenever TPO pairs a news story about a politician lying with a reminder to love others or focus on eternity, we get replies that the “appropriate” Bible verse would have been a reminder that lying is wrong. Yes. Correct. You’ve found the speck. The problem is that we’re not writing to the lying politician; we’re writing to normal, everyday people like ourselves.
I can’t stop politicians from lying, but I can confront my own anxiety by reminding myself that God is in control even if the country is run by a bunch of liars; I can release my anger and work to see those liars as fellow imagebearers; I can humble myself, and recognize that I, too, am a liar and I likely don’t understand the full picture of why the politician is acting the way he is; and I can get off the couch and actually care for the people being harmed by the lying politician.
In other words, I can remove the log and worry less about the speck.
When you read the news this week, notice whether you’re primarily spotting specks or logs. I imagine life without a log in your eye is pretty great, but I can’t be sure. I’m still trying to find out.
What do you think?
In Christ,
Jason Woodruff
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