“If anyone thinks he is too great to stoop to this, he is fooling himself. He is really a nobody”
(Galatians 6:3, TLB). “

I would never do such a thing.” Those are the words I was thinking when the car merging into traffic cut me off. I felt rather smug in my appraisal of the situation.

Until….I merged into traffic ten minutes later and cut off someone else. My next thought
was: “How could that unsympathetic driver honk at me? His vehicle was in my blind spot.”

 

We humans tend to assume the worst in others while giving ourselves the benefit of a doubt.
Nitin Nohria, the present dean of the Harvard Business School, claims that none of us is as virtuous
as we think we are. Nitin identifies our sense of heightened self-appraisal as “moral
overconfidence.” Moral overconfidence is the gap between how we think we might behave in a
certain situation and how we actually behave.

 

In the brief passage above, Paul warns us to avoid such prideful thinking. The Christian life
is a life of humility. The mindset of every Christ follower should be “were it not for the grace of
God there go I.”

 

Sadly, we all fall prey to making false equivalences. We are prone to equate the egregious
sins of others with our own peccadillos. Yet comparing our actions to those of the other person is a
brand of works righteousness steeped in pride. The fact is that we all are saved by God’s grace
through our faith in Christ and unable to produce any right thing on our own.

 

Therefore, the next time you catch yourself thinking, “Why, I’d never do such athing.” Think, again. The person you accuse just may be staring back at you in the mirror.