Once I recognized the truth of the Bible and how it truly explained reality, it was only a matter of time until I came to understand who Jesus was and what he did. And once I knew that and came to recognize the seriousness of my own sin, the truth of the Bible meant I could trust Jesus to deal with my sin and bring me back into right relationship with God.
I’m listening to Francis Schaeffer’s book The God Who is There, which I’m really enjoying. In the book, he gives one particular illustration about the truth of the Bible which I wanted to share, because it encapsulates my own experience as I was first reading the Bible, and explains what started me on the road that eventually led to me becoming a Christian.
In addressing how we don’t arrive at faith in the God of the Bible solely by reason, but not also without reason, Schaeffer has the reader imagine finding a bunch of fragments of the pages of a book – perhaps the top inch of each page of a whole book, or something similar. If we had the top inch of each page, what we could read wouldn’t be enough for us to understand the whole story of the book, or even really to make sense of it – but it would be enough to give us some idea of what the book was about, and tell us something of the characters, etc. This, Schaeffer argues, is like what we can see and know about ourselves from looking at ourselves and the world we live in – we know a great deal, but we don’t understand the whole story, the whole picture, and can’t fully make sense of life.
Now, imagine having that set of page fragments, and then finding the remaining portion of all of the pages from the book somewhere, perhaps in the attic. By taking the newly discovered set of page fragments and placing them together with the pages you already have, you would be able to complete the book. It would be easy to tell that the remaining portions match the fragments, because taken together they complete the story. And once the story is completed, you could read the whole story and finally make sense of the whole book.
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Written by David L. Mobley |
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
I’m commanded to first take the log out of my own eye. I’m told that it’s there, and that I’d better deal with it first. So, I must get on my knees before God, metaphorically or literally or both, and ask God to help me see the log in my own eye and get it out.

As a father of six, I often feel like I’m constantly involved in conflict resolution —though not as much so as my wife, since she’s full-time with the kids whereas I have a “day job”. I suppose some of this conflict is almost inevitable —with eight people in the household, that means there are 28 different pairs of people who could have a conflict at any given time. But I digress. All this conflict keeps bringing me back to Matthew 7:3-5 (LSB):
“And why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is 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.”
This text is so simple, yet so deep and profound. Here, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses our natural propensity to judge others, and to judge them unfairly. When it comes to others, we’re ready to make a huge issue out of even something very small, which he describes here as a speck in their eye. But when it comes to ourselves, we’re ready to overlook even huge glaring issues, so much so that he takes it almost to a comical level and pictures us being willing even to overlook having a log in our eye. Imagine someone with a whole log in their eye, trying to help someone else remove a tiny speck! Clearly that would be impossible; if I have a log in my eye, there’s no way I’m going to be able to closely inspect someone else’s eye to help them get a speck out of it. It’s obvious —yet how much do we fail to do what this says?!?
So often, when there’s a conflict, our first response is to think of all the things the other person did wrong. This is how my kids often communicate to me about their problems —they bring a list of the ways they were wronged, and of course they must be an innocent victim. But it takes me back to my first year or so of marriage, when Maura and I fought so much —and I remember having all the same thoughts myself. If there was conflict, I could clearly see all the ways she had been wrong, but of course I was innocent, or at least I had good excuses for how I had acted. But I kept coming back to this passage, and to Ephesians 5:25-27:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.
Here, husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loved the church, wanting what’s truly best for them. This call to love isn’t limited to marriage, though —it extends to siblings and beyond. Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said (Matthew 5:44, LSB):
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