Judging

Let me start with a thesis statement: the Disciples of Christ are to love unconditionally. By this, they can effect whatever their own divided and judiciously and conditionally offered love never could possibly achieve: radical condemnation of sin. So now, let me tell you how I came to this thesis, which is actually the logical conclusion. Let’s read Matthew 7:1-6.

“Judge not, that you be not judged. ² For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. ³ Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴ Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. ⁶ “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.

When we read this passage, Jesus starts with a maxim. That maxim is that if we want to live life without judging because that same judgment will figuratively and quite literally will come and bite us in the large hind area. Let’s look at verses 2-5. Here’s the scenario that is being presented to us in this passage: If we are on the look-out for evil in others, our real motive is obviously to justify ourselves, for we’re seeking to escape punishment for our own sins by passing judgment on others and are assuming by implication that the Word of God applies to ourselves in one way and to others in another. All of this is dangerously misleading and foolish. In making judgments of our own, we set up our own standards of good an evil and it is clear that those standards are randomly arbitrary. If you don’t believe me, just look at church history. Just look at our cultural history. Just look at societal history. At the end of the day you will realize that everybody, all societies and all cultures are arbitrary and that nobody, save God alone, has remained consistent. I make this statement all the time but not just fifty years ago separate but equal was “righteous” in the eyes of Christians. Twenty years before that, in the eyes of German Christians, genocide of people groups was “righteous.” I can keep going into slavery, witch hunts, feudalism, the Crusades. “Christian judgments” are so called Christian judgments are a joke considering the abuse of those judgments for the sake of power by the majority believer. You see, Jesus Christ is not the standard that we can apply to others. I say that because I know you’re thinking in your mind that Christians everywhere in the 21^st century at some point in Sunday School or in church services have said, “we need to be more like Jesus.” Jesus is judge of myself, revealing my own virtues to me as something altogether evil. I want to address two items here. Because I know the grumblings in people’s hearts. People believe we’re too logically and stepped away from the spiritual—we’re not enough like Jesus, as a church; but we haven’t—the spiritual moves us to understand God and be at awe in Him. Jesus did miracles, but more than anything he took logic and thinking of His day and turned it on its head—he deconstructed life so that people who followed him in “righteousness” knew exactly how unrighteous they were and therefore understand what type of mercy they need before a God that we couldn’t possibly follow without grace to rain upon us. Secondly, people believe that because we don’t focus on church building activities – doing things that build the inside of the church for the sake of building the inside of the church, we have shallow faith. The reason we focus on activities like VBS, and our witness in the workplace, school and family is because we spend most of our time there. Sure, we hang out here, we’re friends here, but there are people in our lives that don’t know the love of God without us and for us to spend time with people who know the love of God already and fail to make an appearance outside where people who need the love of God are, it would be a horrible way of managing our resources. So I want to say that we need to stop judging each other or the people that are around us for being more or less flawed Christ followers. We try to walk the way Jesus walked knowing that we can’t possibly walk the way he walked, but we try. What Jesus seems to be saying in this passage is deeper than it appears. What he is saying is that judging others makes us blind. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are. Wait, so let’s go back for a moment to the maxim just stated in the verse previous to this: “Judge not, that you not be judged.” Could he be talking about the judgment of sin? Why, yes, he is talking about the judgment of sin in our lives. Therefore, I am not permitted to apply to another person what does not apply for me. I’ll tell you why, listen carefully because this is confusing and hard to grasp if you’re not paying close attention. If I condemn somebody for his or her “evil” actions, I am confirming his “good” actions that are never the “good” that is commended by Christ. This means that if we set up judgment and decide on an arbitrary Christianese cultural standard, then we’re discounting Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Therefore the judgment of Christ, which is that we all deserved to die because we fall short of the glory of God in all our goodness and actions and motives, which led to his life, death and resurrection; we remove that person we judge from Christ’s judgment and therefore God’s grace. Let me push this one step further, in that judgment we are bringing God’s judgment onto our head because I don’t and can’t live any more on and out of the grace of Jesus Christ, but the knowledge of good and evil which I’m clinging hold to in my judgment. My conclusion: our judgment is the forbidden objectification of other people which destroys any notion of love. I want to make the distinction here in this passage between “judging” and having thoughts about the other person. That distinction lies in the intention. When we see this passage we see that the person wanted to take a “speck” from his brother’s eye. When we thinking about other people, we have to realize his or her shortcomings, but only to the extent that it offers me an occasion for forgiveness and unconditional love as Jesus proves to me. This is not the same as withholding my judgment to confirm a person’s “bad” so you should get that notion out of your head. That brings us to our thesis statement: the disciples of Christ are to love unconditionally. In the love of Christ we know all about every conceivable sin and guilt because we know how Jesus suffered and how all people choosing to believe have been forgiven at the foot of the cross. We sing songs about it every weekend. Love sees people under the cross and therefore we see them clearly forgiven and striving and yearning like we are. If we judged others, then our real motives probably was to destroy evil, but we should realize that the evil we sought to destroy was not in other people but in us, in our hearts. Therefore, we need to rely on Jesus Christ. We have nothing and received nothing outside of a relationship with Jesus. Just imagine a Christian coming to a non-believer or far away believer with the mindset of loving unconditionally by destroying the evil in their own hearts so that their relationship with Jesus can be the only thing by which they rely on. So because we have nothing to rely on (verse 5) because we have a log in our eye, have nothing except prayer. We have to pray to God for forgiveness, and we have to pray to God to remove the thing we’re judging in other people from our own hearts. Then and only then should those people whom we judge be healed. Do you see here, that nowhere do we or are we entitled to confront them with judgment. I’d give you another reason for that as a side note, but it’s simply because a hardened heart is not open to the Word of God. In fact, unless you are ready to be fanatical with the Word of God, which at that point ceases to be gospel and more ideological opinion, nobody will listen or care because of your self-righteous proclamations. If you really want to change somebody’s life, you have to change your own. We have to take the spec out of your own eye. But we can’t without prayer and without the unconditional love of God. So the next best thing to do is to form commonality with your fellow person so that you both can come to God unashamed, as we are all sinners before God and become cleansed. As long as we keep judging people as unworthy to commune with us because of whatever we’re judging in them, then your faith is worthless. It’s like verse 6 says, “you’re throwing pearls into pigs and the pigs will attack you.” If you can’t walk with the other person in their faults, then you too will lose. The only way you come out of this life is to give up your entitlements and start working on yourself with the sinners who are next to you with the grace of God and trust to continue on. If you don’t believe me, just see where verse seven goes from here. Its not here in your notes but I’ll read it to you because I’m sure you can all quote this: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” God is listening to you and He wants to help you find and open doors that you didn’t even know existed.  God is an awesome God. God gives good gifts. God judges us all by the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus.