Christ-centered wisdom for real life.
Practical, biblical counsel you can trust.
Get it free in your inbox.
Sign Up
Christ-centered wisdom for real life.
Practical, biblical counsel you can trust.
Get it free in your inbox.
Sign Up
0
Photo: ©Pexels from pixabay via Canva.com
Biff and Mable had been married for twenty-three years. He loves her, he really does, but lately he has begun to resent her. Mable could be cold, distracted, and sharp-tongued. She didn’t encourage him like she used to. She would forget things he said and seemed uninterested in what mattered most to him. At first, Biff handled it well, or so he thought. He prayed for patience, quoted verses about love, and even tried to do more chores around the house to “win her over.” But when nothing changed, irritation began to seep into his prayers. His tone grew shorter, his jaw tighter. He found himself daydreaming about what it would be like to be married to someone who respected him, someone who listened.
He still attended church, still read his Bible, and still led family devotions. But beneath the surface, Biff’s heart was growing hard. When Mable criticized him one night for forgetting to pick up milk, Biff exploded. “Do you even hear yourself? You’re impossible to please!” It wasn’t just milk. It was years of unmet expectations, years of being misunderstood, years of wanting something good—affection, partnership, peace—and not getting it. That moment, more than any sermon or Bible study, exposed what was happening in Biff’s heart.
It’s easy to confuse righteous concern with self-righteous control. You tell yourself, “I just want what’s best for them,” but underneath, you want what’s easiest for you. You want their repentance so you can have relief. You want them to grow so that your life will improve. That’s what Biff was doing. His prayers weren’t wrong, but they had drifted from being God-centered to self-centered. His frustration revealed a hidden belief: If Mable would change, I would finally have peace. But peace that depends on another person’s behavior isn’t peace; it’s idolatry. You can’t find joy in someone else’s sanctification. It’s wonderful when others grow, but if your hope hangs on it, you’ve misplaced affections. Biff had forgotten what Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” Change is God’s department. You can plant truth and water with love, but you can’t make a soul grow. The same is true in every relationship—parent to child, wife to husband, friend to friend. When you try to force change, you become the opposite of what you hope to be. You stop being an instrument of grace and start being an obstacle to it.
Think of yourself as a gardener in God’s field. You plant, you water, you tend, but you never pry open the seed. Only the Spirit can do that. Paul said, “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance.” That phrase—God may perhaps—teaches more theology than a dozen commentaries. It humbles the proud and comforts the weary. It means you can love faithfully without demanding results. You can wait on the Lord even when you don’t understand His timing. Biff had been trying to grow what only God could grow. He had confused planting with producing. He was angry, not because he hated his wife, but because he hated his limits.
Jesus once said, “Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but not the log in your own?” We usually read that verse as a warning against hypocrisy, but it’s also a roadmap for how change actually works. The log and speck imagery implies sequence: you can’t help someone else see until your own vision clears. Biff thought he was seeing clearly. After all, Mable’s faults were obvious. Anyone could spot them! But Jesus was telling him—and us—that the first work of love is not inspection but repentance.
Before you reach for the speck in another’s eye, you must face the log in your own. That log is usually made of self-righteousness, fear, and misplaced desire. We want something from others—respect, affection, obedience—and when we don’t get it, our desires twist into demands. Those demands then justify our anger. James said it plainly: “You desire and do not have, so you fight and quarrel.” Whenever you sin in response to what you’re not getting, even if what you want is good, you’ve lost sight of the gospel. Biff wanted closeness with his wife. That’s not sinful. But when he turned that desire into a demand, it exposed his heart. His anger wasn’t about her sin anymore; it was about his control.
Imagine standing at the top of a ridge during a rainstorm. The water that falls on one side flows east, while the water on the other side flows west. A few inches in the wrong direction, and the outcome changes completely. That’s how conflict works. When someone sins against you, you stand at a watershed moment. You can flow toward repentance or toward retaliation. You can move toward humility or toward control. If you choose to start with their sin, you slide down the wrong side. You begin saying what only God can say: “You have a problem. You need to change. Here’s how to fix yourself. And if you don’t, I’ll make you.”
But you are not the Holy Spirit. You don’t grant repentance. You can’t expose motives. You can’t purify hearts. Only God can. When you try to do His job, you may even be right in your analysis, but wrong in your attitude. You become the very kind of person you’re trying to help them stop being.
Biff couldn’t see it, but his “helping” carried five blind spots.
Those blind spots are universal. They’re what make us impatient with others, what make us repeat the same conversations, what make us walk away saying, “Why won’t they just listen?” The real issue isn’t that they won’t listen; it’s that we won’t learn. Until we address our own hearts, every word we speak to others carries a residue of self-righteousness.
Everything began to change for Biff one night after another argument. Mable had gone to bed crying. He sat alone in the living room, staring at the floor, exhausted. His Bible sat on the table, unopened. Finally, he reached for it and read from Isaiah 6, where the prophet saw the Lord high and lifted.
“Woe is me,” Isaiah said. “I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.”
Those words pierced Biff. He realized that before he could see his wife’s sin rightly, he had to see his own. He whispered into the darkness, “Woe is me. I’m the unclean one. I’ve been trying to play God in my marriage.” In that moment, something broke. The same man who had spent months dissecting his wife’s flaws suddenly saw his own pride for the first time. He felt small, but also strangely free. That’s what happens when the gospel collides with self-righteousness. God doesn’t humiliate you; He liberates you.
It’s possible to be right and still be wrong. You can be correct in theology and corrupt in posture. You can quote Scripture while living out the opposite of its spirit. Biff had all the right verses. He could diagnose Mable’s attitudes perfectly. But his rightness blinded him to his wrongness. His moral precision became his spiritual poison. That’s why Jesus said He didn’t come for the righteous but for sinners. The self-righteous never see their need; they only see others’ faults. For Biff to be useful in his wife’s restoration, he first had to experience his own. That night, for the first time in years, he stopped praying that God would change Mable and started asking God to change him. True transformation always follows a consistent sequence: recognition, repentance, renewal, reflection, and relief.
Biff realized how slow his own heart had been to change. That realization gave birth to something new. Compassion. For the first time, he felt pity for his wife instead of anger. He saw her not as an obstacle to his happiness but as a fellow struggler in need of grace. It’s amazing how your tone changes when you remember how patient God has been with you. The words you once used as weapons become instruments of restoration.
That is one of the sweetest gifts of self-examination: compassion. When you see how stubborn your own heart can be, it softens your view of others. You stop saying, “How could you?” and start saying, “I know what that’s like.” Grace turns critics into comforters. The best counselors, parents, and spouses aren’t those who’ve mastered techniques but those who’ve been humbled by grace. They know the terrain of repentance because they’ve walked it. That’s what Biff began to learn. His old way of loving had been loud and impatient. His new way was quiet and steady. He stopped cornering Mable with lectures and started creating a safe environment for honesty. It didn’t fix everything overnight, but it changed the atmosphere.
What if Mable never changed? That question haunted Biff for weeks. But the more he prayed, the more he realized that wasn’t the right question. The real question was, What if God uses her unchangeableness to change me? Psalm 51:17 says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Biff discovered that brokenness before God is freedom, not failure. When he finally let go of controlling Mable, the peace he’d been demanding from her came flooding from God instead.
He still wished she’d change, of course. But her resistance no longer ruled his thought life. He had found a deeper joy, one that didn’t depend on anyone else’s obedience. That’s the miracle of humility: it unchains you from other people’s sanctification schedules. Paul and Silas sang in prison because their joy wasn’t tied to circumstances. Joseph forgave his brothers because his hope wasn’t tied to justice. Biff began to love his wife again because his contentment was no longer tied to her behavior. He was free, even inside a broken marriage.
None of this happened overnight. Change rarely does. Biff stumbled often. There were days he fell back into frustration, days he forgot his own words. But each time, he returned to repentance more quickly. Over time, humility became his reflex. Before speaking, he would pause. Before judging, he would pray. Before demanding, he would remember the gospel. He wasn’t perfect, but he was different. That’s how the Spirit works—not in bursts of perfection, but in the slow, quiet rhythm of surrender. Every time you start with your own heart, you cooperate with God’s process instead of competing against it. Every time you bypass that work, you set yourself up for another round of disappointment. The most challenging work in love is self-improvement. But it’s also the most rewarding.
Starting with yourself feels unfair when the other person’s sin seems so obvious. But it’s the only way to keep your love pure. When you repent first, you remind your heart who the true Savior is. You declare, “I’m not the hero of this story; Christ is.” That humility is magnetic. It draws people toward grace. Gentleness isn’t weakness. Its strength under submission. It’s the posture of someone who knows what grace costs and refuses to weaponize truth. If you want to help someone change, begin where God began—with yourself. Let the gospel re-soften you because the same grace that broke you will make you useful.
Think about the person who frustrates you most. Maybe it’s your spouse, your child, a friend, or a parent. Picture their face for a moment. Now ask yourself, “What’s happening in my heart when I think about them? What do I want so badly that I’m tempted to sin when I don’t get it?” Then take that to the Lord. Confess, not their sin, but your own. Ask Him to do for you what you’ve longed for Him to do for them: grant repentance. You may discover that the greatest miracle of all isn’t when they change, but when you do.
That’s the paradox of grace: the moment you surrender the need to control others, you become the safest place on earth for them to change. That’s what happened to Biff. One night, months later, Mable turned to him and said softly, “You’re different lately. I don’t know what it is, but I feel safe again.” He smiled and said, “It’s not me. It’s the Lord finally changing me.” And that’s when change began to ripple both ways.
When God wanted to change you, He didn’t coerce you; He loved you. He didn’t pressure you; He pursued you. He didn’t shame you; He saved you. So start there. Let His kindness lead you to repentance, and then let that same kindness overflow to others. The most challenging work in love is always changing yourself first. But it is also the most liberating, the most fruitful, and the most Christlike work you will ever do.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
