SELFby Steve Brown
I’m an expert on self-righteousness… and you are too. It’s perhaps the most dangerous of all human sins. And we’re guilty of it. Five characteristics of self-righteousness:
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The Key to Getting Better.
It’s subtle. We don’t know it when is the reason Christians can’t get along, we’ve got it. why there are such divisions among us, It’s incremental. It never starts out as and why we can’t forgive. self-righteousness but as something In Luke 18, Jesus tells a story about positive and good. self-righteousness. The story has two It’s addictive. We love it when we’re people: a very religious man and a horrible sinner who was a dishonest tax right and want more. collector. Jesus said that the religious It’s indiscriminate. Once we see it, it’s man came to the temple to pray, looked everywhere and not just in religious down at the sinner, and then prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other folks. men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a It’s terribly destructive. week, I give tithes of all that I get.” Self-righteousness makes genuine love almost impossible. My friend, Fred The tax collector’s prayer was Smith, said that it is impossible to love considerably shorter. Jesus said that he anybody who has sinned unless you couldn’t even look up when he prayed, are aware that you are capable of the “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” same sin. Self-righteousness destroys relationships simply because it makes it Jesus said that the tax collector found almost impossible to love…impossible favor in God’s eyes (i.e. was justified) to love those who aren’t Christians and and the religious man didn’t. Then Jesus made an astounding statement. He impossible to love those who are. said, “Everyone who exalts himself will Ever wonder why Christians are so in- be humbled, but the one who humbles effective in our evangelistic efforts? It’s himself will be exalted.” because most people who aren’t believers think of us as angry, condemn- In its religious form, self-righteousing, uptight and judgmental. (I know, I ness is a conviction that one is better know, they are too; but that isn’t the than others—morally, spiritually and/ issue. We’re talking about us.) Do you or theologically. But the connotation know why they think that? God help us, of the word has come to mean someit is a lot truer than we want to admit. It thing more. In its broader form, it is the
