Doing it wrong

Have you ever noticed someone around you “doing it wrong”? Or perhaps you realized along the way that you yourself were “doing it wrong”. This brief blog post is to get us thinking about what we should do when we see someone doing things in what we believe to be a wrong way.

First of all, we are often quite astounded at how wrong other people can get things and curious how it is that they can’t see the right way to do it. I remember one time in my life projecting this conclusion towards someone and thinking “if I were in their shoes it wouldn’t take me much at all to fix what they are messing up”. Fast forward a few years, and guess what? I found myself in “their shoes” and the craziest thing happened: it wasn’t as easy as I thought and I actually found myself rethinking what I thought I knew. 

Secondly, Jesus, the perfect Son of God, said to His disciples (and to us) that by Himself He can do nothing including making any judgments. What kind of judgments do you ask? Well the context of His statements makes it pretty clear that He really means any judgements about anything. He says He can’t and won’t judge unless He hears His Father speaking a judgment. In other words, Jesus Himself reveals that He won’t decide whether a person is wrong or right or a particular behavior is sinful or shameful or whether a specific decision is God’s will or not until and unless He has first heard His Father speaking to Him regarding the matter.

So what are we to do when we see someone else doing something wrong? Three things: 

1. First, we must pray and ask the Lord to help us know whether it is any of our business at all, and furthermore what we can learn from observing and whether we should say or do anything at all except wait, pray, watch and learn. 
2. Second, we must go to the Bible and prayerfully search out what the Scriptures say about particular thoughts, attitudes, speech, actions and reactions. The Bible truly reveals the will and heart of the Lord and by searching it we can find out about leadership, decision-making, holy living, wisdom, timing, patience and humility. 
3. Finally we must approach every situation with the attitude and humility of Jesus. We might be the ones who are making a wrong judgment. We may be jumping to conclusions. We may not know as much as we think that we do. We might have a wrong motive or a wrong perspective (think: “viewing angle”) or perhaps God is allowing us to see in order to learn and grow.

Every day we will see people saying and doing things that perhaps we do not agree with and think “I would never do that if I were in their shoes”. God allows us to notice a lot of things. But remember we can learn from bad examples as well as good ones and furthermore learning humility is a powerful thing. The slower that we are to jump to conclusions or make judgments leaves us open to learning and helps us to have a teachable spirit. Being quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to anger helps us to be more like Jesus. Let us make sure that we try and give the benefit of the doubt, that we consider that the other person’s behavior or choice may have some wisdom in it that we can learn from. Finally if God does indeed confirm that what we are seeing is “the wrong way” or a wrong choice, then even then we can pray for that other person that God will lead them along the right path and that they will not be trapped by the enemy but instead will receive wisdom and deliverance from the Lord.