P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

“I AM NOT A CROOK”

One of the most delightful old books in the world is the classic bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. You try to pay attention to the marvelous principles outlined in it, but it’s awfully easy to just enjoy one story after another. He has anecdotes — all dust-covered and ancient from the Ulysses S. Grant administration, it seems, since the book was first published many decades ago — that are delightful and right to the point.

Our Bible topic this week is moral blind spots, and early on in the book, Carnegie makes this interesting assertion:

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no man ever criticizes himself for anything, no matter how wrong he may be.”

His point being that it’s generally ineffective to criticize other people for things, because they just can’t grasp what you’re saying. If you say they’re wrong about something, they can’t see it. Me? Wrong? No way! It can’t happen. So our jabs and pokes fall on deaf ears.

Then he shares a couple of anecdotes. Way back on May 7, 1931, the infamous gangster, “Two-Gun” Crowley, was finally captured by the police, or “John Law,” as he probably called them. It took 150 cops with machine guns to bring him in after trapping him in his girlfriend’s New York City apartment. Tear gas didn’t work; threats didn’t work. For more than an hour, then, they peppered his apartment with gunfire; Crowley, hiding behind an overstuffed chair, fired back enthusiastically, while ten thousand people on the streets below watched the gory spectacle. When they finally brought in “Cop-Killer” Crowley, the police commissioner said to reporters that here was one of the most dangerous criminals in New York’s history. “He’ll kill at the drop of a feather,” he said.

Did Crowley agree with that assessment? Was he a bad guy in his own eyes? Even while the bullets were whizzing past him, and he was firing back, he wrote a “To Whom It May Concern” letter which said this: “Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one — one that would do nobody any harm.” This from a man who had butchered a policeman who interrupted a romantic interlude Crowley was enjoying on a lover’s lane in Long Island. When this murderer went to Sing Sing Prison’s electric chair, he still didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. “This is what I get for defending myself,” he said.

Dutch Schulz, one of the worst hoods of that same era, who died in a hail of bullets in Jersey, once told a reporter that he considered himself “a public benefactor.” Another gangster, whose name you would recognize, who was a criminal mastermind, bootlegger and strong-arm thug, said this in his own defense:

“I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.”

That’s the one-sentence autobiography of one Mr. Al Capone. “All I try to do is help people,” he says plaintively. And his own little blind spot doesn’t allow him to see that it’s wrong to kill your enemies, wrong to operate prostitution rings, wrong to smuggle booze in from Canada, bribing or killing any customs agents who get in your way.

Dale Carnegie has a devastating soundbite from a Warden Lawes, who used to operate Sing Sing Prison many years ago.

“Few of the criminals,” he suggested, “regard themselves as bad men. They are just as human as you and I. So they rationalize, they explain. They can tell you why they had to crack a safe or be quick on the trigger finger. Most of them attempt by a form of reasoning, fallacious or logical, to justify their antisocial acts even to themselves, consequently stoutly maintaining that they should never have been imprisoned at all.”

It reminds me of the classic film line where actor Morgan Freeman, wearing the prison garb of an inmate locked up in a Maine penitentiary, says, “I’m the only guilty man here at Shawshank.” All the other convicted felons claim they’re innocent, that their lawyer messed up, that they were framed, that the system was just out to get them.

Well, friend, let’s leave behind the bullet-riddled streets of the underworld and return to OUR world, where blind spots are just as prevalent. Because Carnegie doesn’t suggest that 99% of the time, a criminal doesn’t think he’s wrong — no, 99% of the time NONE of us think we are! We don’t own up to our mistakes; we can’t acknowledge our sins. That’s why we have to humbly ask God to see the things we can’t seem to see ourselves. King David, who had a notoriously busted rear view mirror in his limo, once pled with God, in his 139th Psalm:

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

You have to wonder if, right after his affair with Bathsheba, he knew that he had done wrong. Probably — but as time went by that feeling no doubt faded away. “I’m the king,” he probably rationalized. “I deserve to get what I want.” Even after having Uriah the Hittite killed in battle, he was probably able to talk himself into a feeling of complacency again. “Guys get killed in wartime; he probably would have died anyway.” And until the prophet Nathan pointed a finger in his face and said, “This is your conscience talking! This is your rear view mirror screaming! Thou art the man!”, King David probably did not see the three letters, S - I - N, emblazed in that blind spot he was so carefully nurturing.

There’s one reality that should be patently obvious to us, if that truth itself weren’t so firmly parked in the blind spot of the human race. Who knows us better? Us . . . or God? We’re just plain folks, and He’s the DESIGNER of all plain folks. He made us. He fashioned us. He didn’t make our deceptive hearts, but He certainly knows. So this is a good prayer by King David: “Search me, O God, and know my heart.” Because the Creator of our heart DOES know our heart — without searching. But we need to invite Him to search, and also to send us a report of His findings.

Pastor Morris Venden has a cute illustration about how we sometimes ask God to reveal our shortcomings, to work with us . . . but we don’t really mean it. His essay goes like this:

“[One way to fight God is like when I] take my car to the garage,” he writes. “The mechanic opens up the hood, but as he does this, I poke my head in from the other side and say, ‘Now, be careful. This is a very delicate engine.’ And as he starts working, I say, ‘No, don’t touch the fan belt. I just put on a new one. And stay away from those new spark plugs. Keep your grubby little hands off the carburetor, because it’s very delicate, too.’ I can continue to harass the poor mechanic until he throws down his tools, throws up his hands, and says, ‘All right, I give up. Take your car and repair it yourself.’” Then Venden soberly adds: “God can deliver us only by taking over our battles for us.”

That’s an interesting Part Two to our discussion, isn’t it? We can’t really know our weaknesses until God helps us to know them. But then it’s equally true that we’re both blind AND crippled; now that we know where it hurts, we need God’s help in order to combat evil. The apostle Paul, who didn’t just have a blind spot — he was actually struck totally blind! — tells us in Philippians 4:

“I can do all things THROUGH CHRIST who strengthens me.”

I want to tell you right now, here on this Tuesday, that it isn’t God’s plan for us to go around both blind and crippled. God is a diagnosing doctor and a healing doctor. Nothing pains Him more than to see you careening into marital pitfalls, where your jealousy or impatience or lust is going to cause you and your family hurt. First of all, He sees those upcoming traps. And secondly, through His promised Holy Spirit living right there inside of you, right there in your home, you don’t have to pay the painful price of those triple killers: jealousy, impatience, lust. King David’s blind spot where he coveted another man’s wife, then took her, then committed murder . . . that whole mess cost the royal family big-time. There was hurt in Israel for generations to come; the entire nation ached over what happened that hot, steamy night. And God, who sees all — sees all with a tender eye. He believes in early detection and preventive medicine.

So — borrowing from that old book in the attic, How to Win Friends and Influence People — why not decide today to win God as your best Friend? It’s not hard to do; He’s a notorious pushover. And then let HIM be the first and best influence in your life.