Comparing upward or downward?

Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us. (Romans 12:3)

How many times do we evaluate ourselves against other people? It may come as no surprise to you that psychologists have actually studied how people either "Compare Upward" or "Compare Downward" when evaluating their own behaviors. When we go the upward direction, we perceive someone to actually be better than us at something, so we judge ourselves against their behavior or actions. When we choose the downward comparison, we perceive ourselves as better, so we are judging them against our behavior. Unfortunately, God says that either way is wrong! 

When we use others as our comparison, we find we either justify our behavior as 'okay' or we think we are so much worse than we should be. The first actually boosts what some refer to as 'self-esteem', while the latter merely pushes us further into a hole of excessive self-judgment, serving to put down our 'self-esteem' even further. We might do well to consider what God says about our 'comparisons' of one another. We need to make an honest evaluation of ourselves, and we cannot do that when comparing ourselves with 'faulty' examples. No one's behavior or actions are perfect, so by definition, they are faulty comparisons.

We each receive a measure of faith. When we put that faith to use, we are doing what God expects, even when we don't always hit the mark spot on. We might not be 'as good as' someone else who puts their faith into operation in a similar way, but we must remember that we are using a faulty set of values to base our evaluation on. We must use Jesus as our example. Obedience is probably not going to be 100% spot on every time Jesus asks something of us. Does that mean we are 'less than' someone else? Nope! It just means we aren't exactly like the example Christ set for us. The more faithful we are in taking steps of obedience, the more we will align with Christ's direction for our lives. The more we align with him, the more we are using a 'right' example for our "judgment" of our actions. Just sayin!