Practice What You Preach
It’s easy to tell people what they are doing wrong, while we do the same thing that we criticize them for. When we do this, we are being both sinful and hypocritical. How can we criticize someone for sinning, when we do the exact same sin?
In Matthew 7:3-5, Jesus tells us to worry about the log in our eye before we try to remove the speck in our brother’s eye. In other words, deal with our sins first, before trying to fix someone else’s. If we still have our sin in our life, it will keep us from being able to help someone else. How can we expect to be able to fix someone else’s problem, if we haven’t fixed our own?
Paul, in Romans 2:21-24, criticizes the Jews for teaching others, and not paying attention to what they are teaching, and asks them questions about what they teach and whether or not their lives reflect what they are teaching. There’s a lot we can learn from this passage. First and foremost, when you are teaching someone something about the Bible, make sure that you’re learning too. Don’t ignore what you’re teaching, because it all applies to your life too. Secondly, make sure that you don’t do what you are preaching against. It would be like me writing about forgiveness, and then refusing to forgive someone.
Not only is it wrong to not “practice what we preach”, it also makes us as Christian look bad. If we don’t do what we say people are supposed to do, why should anyone take us seriously? We should examine our lives carefully before trying to teach someone to make sure that we don’t have the same problem.
