express itself through
us.

When we have been broken at Calvary, we must be willing to put things
right with the others--sometimes even with the children. This is, so
often, the test of our brokenness. Brokenness is the opposite of
hardness. Hardness says, "It's your fault!" Brokenness, however,
says, "It's my fault!" What a different atmosphere will begin to
prevail in our homes when they hear us say that. Let us remember that
at the Cross there is only room for one at a time. We cannot say, "I
was wrong, but you were wrong too. You must come as well!" No, you
must go alone, saying, "I'm wrong." God will work in the other more
through your brokenness than through anything else you can do or say.
We may, however, have to wait--perhaps a long time. But that should
only give us to feel more with God, for, as someone has said, "He too
has had to wait a long time since His great attempt to put things
right with man nineteen hundred years ago, although there was no
wrong on His side." But God will surely answer our prayer and bring
the other to Calvary too. There we shall be one; there the middle
wall of partition between us will be broken down; there we shall be
able to walk in the light, in true transparency, with Jesus and with
one another, loving each other with a pure heart fervently. Sin is
almost the only thing we have in common with everyone else, and so at
the feet of Jesus where sin is cleansed is the only place where we
can be one. Real oneness conjures up for us the picture of two or
more sinners together at Calvary.

CHAPTER 7
THE MOTE AND THE BEAM

That friend of ours has got something in his eye! Though it is only
something tiny--what Jesus called a mote--how painful it is and how
helpless he is until it is removed! It is surely our part as a friend
to do all we can to remove it, and how grateful he is to us when we
have succeeded in doing so. We should be equally grateful to him, if
he did the same service for us.

In the light of that, it seems clear that the real point of the
well-known passage in Matthew 7:3-5 about the beam and the mote is
not the forbidding of our trying to remove the fault in the other
person, but rather the reverse. It is the injunction that at all
costs we should do this service for one another. True, its first
emphasis seems to be a condemnation of censoriousness, but when the
censoriousness in us is removed, the passage ends by saying, "Then
shalt thou see clearly to