A
thought by Brant Hansen (2015-04-14) from his book, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better (p.
16). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title of the book to go to
Amazon.com to buy the book.)
The truth is
we can’t even trust our judgment of ourselves.
Brant says, “God
knows others’ private motives. We don’t. God knows our private motives. We
don’t. We think we can judge others’ motives. We’re wrong. We should abandon our ‘right’ to anger,
simply because we can deceive ourselves so easily.”
Proverbs 18:
17 says, “The first one to plead his cause seems right, until his neighbor
comes and examines him” (NKJV).
Brant goes
on, “Life is full of conflicts, disputes, differing perspectives . . . and in
all of those, guess whose perspective I hear first? That’s easy: mine. I
establish a story line, and I can get angry before I even hear the other side,
which is yet another reason to be very suspicious of ourselves.”
Brant then says,
“We simply can’t trust ourselves in our
judgments of others. We don’t know what they’re really thinking, or their
background, or what really motivated whatever they did. And since we don’t
know, let’s choose ahead of time: we’re
just not going to get offended by people. If I don’t need to be right, I
don’t have to reshape reality to fit ‘The Story of My Rightness.’ That makes
life much easier, and makes us much more peaceful, and even fun to be around.
Oh yes, the heart is deceptive. And that calls for humility above all else,
because my heart isn’t deceptive because it fools other people. It’s deceptive
because it fools me.”
But it doesn’t
fool God. That is why he is the only one
who can judge us and others. So give
that other person the benefit of the doubt.
We just don’t know their heart
So who is
always right, God or you?
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