MATTHEW 7:1-6 - How To Judge Others

Introduction

If you were to name the most well-known Bible verse in the world, what would it be? Most people would say John 3:16

John 3:16 (LSB)

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

And you could make a pretty good case for that right? A lot of people know that verse. Some might say Philippians 4:13

Philippians 4:13 (LSB)

I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.

runs a close second (just by sheer numbers of athletes who have it as a tattoo!)

But I want to suggest to you that there is another Bible verse that probably ranks as more well-known, more often-quoted, more appealed-to verse in all of the Scriptures. It is the first verse of our text this morning:

Matthew 7:1 (LSB)

“Do not judge, so that you will not be judged.

While most Christians have a favorite Bible verse, this verse has the distinction of being the favorite verse of a lot of non-Christians—people who have no interest in spiritual things whatsoever, people who are indifferent to the Bible or even hostile to Christianity will all quote this verse at one time or another—usually whenever they are arguing with a believer over questions of ethics and morality. If you raise an objection to gay marriage, for instance, you will almost certainly at some point have the odd experience of being chided by an atheist with an open Bible, saying, “Jesus says that you are not supposed to judge others. Love is love—who are you to judge two people who want to be together?” Matthew 7:1 is treated as the ultimate trump card to stop a Christian dead in their tracks whenever they raise objections to issues of morality.

And unfortunately it’s not just those outside the Church who like to shoot Matthew 7:1 from the hip, as it were—there are a lot of people inside the Church who appeal to this verse in nearly identical ways. If they begin down a path that looks to be taking them further away from Christlikeness and more towards the world around them—they haven’t attended worship for a month or they are immodest in their dress or they are making unwise choices in the media they consume—and a pastor or elder or mature Christian friend tries to counsel them about these things, they respond with a complaint that they “feel judged” and “Christians aren’t supposed to be judgmental”. “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged!”

But is that what Jesus is saying here? Is He telling His disciples that they must suspend their moral or ethical reasoning in the face of immoral or unethical behavior? The problem with this twisting of Matthew 7:1 (and to be sure, it is being twisted by those who use it that way)—the problem is that it does pull conscientious Christians up short. It does tend to stop faithful Christians in their tracks: No one wants to be considered “judgmental”; no one wants to be considered “Pharisaical”.

And so what I aim to do this morning is to take some time to untwist, as it were, these most-often quoted and most-often twisted words of our Savior. I want to equip you to be able to respond rightly when you are accused of being “judgmental”, and I want you to be free to speak with the right kind of judgment. Because in the verses before us this morning, our Lord is not calling us to suspend our judgment;

Jesus calls us to JUDGE with RIGHT judgment

As one commentator points out, Jesus is clearly not calling us to suspend all moral or ethical judgment, since the entire Sermon on the Mount is based on being different from the world around us. To pursue “a righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees” (Matt. 5:20)—that’s a moral judgment, isn’t it? Or in the chapter just concluded, to to avoid being like the “hypocrites”—there’s a judgmental word for you! How can we possibly obey all of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount unless we judge between our works and theirs? Judgment is inevitable—what Jesus says we are to avoid is judgmentalISM.

As with every other teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is concerned with what is in our hearts. What kind of heart you have determines what kind of behavior you exhibit. The Sermon on the Mount, as we have been saying, is Jesus’ teaching on “a new way of being human”—the kind of judgment that Jesus is teaching about in these verses is a judgment that can only be done with a heart that has been transformed by the New Birth of repentance and faith in Christ.

If you are going to obey Jesus’ command to judge with right judgment, the first thing you must do is look at your own heart. In verses 1-2 of our text Jesus shows us the first step to judging with right judgment is

I. Uncovering a heart of CONDEMNATION (Matthew 7:1-2; cp. Luke 18:11)

The first words on this subject are Jesus’ prohibition against wrong judgment— “Do not judge...” As we have seen, Jesus is not calling us to suspend all moral or ethical judgments; He is calling us not to judge with wrong hearts. Consider again the parable Jesus told in Luke 18 about the Pharisee and the tax collector who went up to the Temple to pray. Jesus’ description of the Pharisee’s prayer is a perfect example of the wrong kind of judging:

Luke 18:11 (LSB)

“The Pharisee stood and was praying these things to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

This parable gets at the heart of the wrong kind of judging that Jesus prohibits—we learn from this that we must

Watch for a SELF-RIGHTEOUS spirit

in the way that you pass judgment. The way the Pharisee spoke about the tax collector in his prayer is the kind of judging that Jesus is condemning. He pointed out the tax collector’s sinfulness in order to make himself appear more righteous.

This is an insidious sin, isn’t it? It’s not for nothing our Savior warns us against the self-righteousness that lurks in our hearts. In his commentary on this passage, D. Martin-Lloyd Jones pinpoints the fact that when we are self-righteous, we don’t really even care about the person we are judging:

The fact of the matter is that we are not really concerned about helping this other person; we are interested only in condemning him. We pretend to have this great interest; we pretend that we are very distressed at finding this blemish (in his life). But in reality, as our Lord has already shown us, we are really glad to discover it” (180).Storms, S. (2016). Biblical Studies: The Sermon on the Mount (Mt 7:1a). Sam Storms.

Wicked judgmentalism only wants to point out others’ faults in order to feed off of them; to “tsk tsk” and “isn’t it a shame?” and “I can’t believe people live like that” and list off all their addictions or crimes or dishonesty or laziness or wokeness because of how good it makes you feel about yourself. Jesus says don’t do that. Stop it. Quit feeding on other people’s failures and sins because they make you look good.

The first step in learning how to judge rightly is to look for and uncover the heart of condemnation that lurks in you—watch for that self-righteous spirit that feeds its pride on the sins and failures of others, and by the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit that dwells in you, Christian, kill it wherever you find it in you.

Jesus makes a stern warning in the rest of verses 1-2 that jolts us into vigilance against the self-righteous condemnation that we are so prone to pour out on others. He says

Remember you will be JUDGED by the same STANDARD (cp. 2 Cor. 5:10)

by which you judge others:

Matthew 7:1–2 (LSB)

“Do not judge, so that you will not be judged. “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with what measure you measure, it will be measured to you.

We are notorious, aren’t we, for applying different standards to ourselves? Your neighbor is “lazy” because he hasn’t cut his lawn; yours is ready for a brush hog because you’re “so busy”. Your brother-in-law is a spendthrift and has way too much credit-card debt; your Visa card is hot to the touch because “We just had a lot of extra unexpected expenses this month”. Your classmate is guilty of academic integrity violations, but you just used Google to finish that quiz because “the answers were just too hard to find in the book.” We do it All. The. Time.

Jesus calls you to consider that He is watching how you judge others’ behavior—do you want Him to evaluate your deeds the way you evaluate theirs? The Scriptures make it clear that a Day is coming when you and I and the whole of the human race will stand before Him to have our entire lives evaluated—not to determine whether we are saved (only Christ’s work determines our salvation!), but to determine what reward we receive for our faithfulness:

2 Corinthians 5:10 (LSB)

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

Christian—on that day your deeds will be weighed in the balances of Christ’s perfect judgment. Everything you have ever tried to do for Him—every time you tried to faithfully share the Gospel; every time you tried to serve the Body of Christ in the church; every time you set out to show compassion and grace in His Name; every time you tried to stand up under trials; every time you sought to glorify Him by your integrity—everything you ever did in His Name.

Think of that Day—because it is coming—and ask yourself: “Do I want my Savior to judge every deed I ever sought to do for Him the way I judge others’ deeds?” Do you want Him on that Day to go through all your attempts to serve Him with the same judgment you use? Will you be able to stand before Him on that Day and say, “Lord, please judge my works for You with the same standard I used to judge others? Treat me the way I treated my neighbor; use the same measure of compassion and grace and benefit of the doubt in looking at the way I served you that I gave to those who acted toward me!” Nothing uncovers a heart of condemnation like the thought that Christ will someday judge your works for Him the way you judge the deeds of others.

Jesus calls us in these verses to judge with right judgment—in order to do that we start by uncovering the heart of condemnation that lurks inside us. Now in verses 3-5, Jesus shows us that we learn to judge with right judgment by

II. Cultivating a heart of DISCERNMENT (Matthew 7:3-5)

Matthew 7:3–5 (LSB)

“And why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? “Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? “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.

Notice here that Jesus doesn’t say it is wrong to want to take a speck out of your brother’s eye. Those who want to twist Matthew 7:1 would have us believe that we must always ignore whatever speck we see in others’ eyes. But see here that it is not wrong to notice the speck; it is not wrong to want to point it out. In fact Jesus presumes that we should take the offending mote out of the eye of our brother, but we must do it the right way.

Jesus makes it clear here that it is a good thing to help your brother see better. This helps us to understand that our purpose in judging others is never to magnify our own superiority or make our failures look less by comparison. We are never to point out the speck in our brother’s eye in order to tear them down, but because we want to build them up. Cultivating a heart of discernment toward our brother’s faults means that we

Seek RESTORATION, not VINDICATION (cp. Gal. 6:1)

A “speck” of sin in your brother’s eye is not an opportunity for you to vindicate how righteous you are—it is not a moment for you to do victory laps around him because you are a better Christian. You look with judicious care and discernment into your brother’s life because you want him to be free of that sin. Your goal is to help your brother see better, not so that you can be seen as the better brother!

This is what the Apostle Paul is driving at in Galatians 6:1:

Galatians 6:1 (LSB)

Brothers, even if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, each of you looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted.

Take this verse in the context of Jesus’ image in Matthew 7—have you ever had something painful in your eye and needed to get it out? Or if you’ve been trying to help someone do so, you understand this as well. It has to be done gently, with great sensitivity and care. You want to go slowly and easily so that you don’t do more harm than good.

In the same way, it takes sober judgment to be able to do this kind of “soul-surgery” on your brother in Christ. Paul says in that verse that it also takes a great deal of humility to be able to minister to a fellow Christian this way. You can see, can’t you, how far away this kind of gentle, tender ministry is from the heart of condemnation that just wants to hurt someone who is tangled up in sin?

Getting a speck of sinful behavior out of your brother’s life takes careful discernment and sober, cautious judgment—not coming in hot with a wire brush and rubbing alcohol!

Judging with right judgment means that we will learn to cultivate a heart of discernment when we evaluate others’ sins and shortcomings—we will seek restoration, not vindication. And the second instruction we can draw from Jesus’ image in these verses is that cultivating a heart of discernment means that you

Do not CUT yourself any SLACK (1 Cor. 9:27)

Think about it on a purely mortal level—no one wants to be lectured on weight loss and healthy eating by a doctor who weighs 375 pounds! You don’t want to find out your Certified Financial Planner has thirty thousand dollars in consumer debt. In the same way, if your brother in Christ is struggling with a sawdust speck of watching Game of Thrones for the sex scenes, you aren’t going to be any help to them whatsoever if you have a railroad tie of a phone full of porn videos stuck in your eye!

Jesus says be vigilant in your own life that you are not tolerating or excusing any of the same kinds of sin that you seek to address in others. The Apostle Paul understood this—he never let up the reins in his life; he was always warring with his flesh to make sure he did not disqualify himself from ministering to others. He writes in 1 Corinthians 9:27

1 Corinthians 9:27 (LSB)

but I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.

There is a story told about Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian politician and ascetic who led the Independence movement in India against the British. The story goes that a woman brought her five year-old son a six-hour journey so meet Gandhi, telling him she wanted him to lecture her son on why he shouldn’t eat sugar. It is said that Gandhi told the woman to come back in two weeks. So two weeks later she returned with her son, at which point Gandhi grabbed the boy by the shoulders, thrust his face close to the boy’s, and said, “STOP EATING SUGAR!” The mother, a little exasperated, said, “Gandhiji, why didn’t you say that to him when we were here two weeks ago?” To which he replied, “Because two weeks ago, I was eating sugar...”

The Apostle Paul expresses this same idea here in this verse—he didn’t let the reins go slack on his own life; he didn’t give himself a pass on his striving for holiness and fighting his flesh. He didn’t want to fail in his own obedience to Christ after preaching obedience to the church in Corinth.

In order to judge with right judgment, we must uncover the heart of condemnation that lurks within us; we must cultivate a heart of discernment that seeks to help our brother see better and not just so we can be seen as the better brother. We don’t cut ourselves any slack in our own lives—we give no quarter to the sin that we battle and seek to eliminate the “plank” of sin in our own life before we reach out to try to help others.

And in the last verse of our text this morning, Jesus leaves us with a warning: When you seek to judge with right judgment; when you strive to be discerning in your judgment in order to see others freed from the sin that entangles them and speak the truth in love with all humility and patience for the sake of their eternal souls, you will have to deal with the reality that you will not always be loved for it. In fact, speaking with sober judgment about the sins of others with all humility and gentleness, speaking up for truth in a world that hates truth is going to cost you. When you judge with right judgment in this world, you will need to

III. Accept a reputation of JUDGMENTALISM (Matthew 7:6)

I think this is what is in view here in verse 6:

Matthew 7:6 (LSB)

“Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

At first this verse sounds unconnected with the previous five verses—so much so that some Bible editors tend to group this verse under its own subheading. But if you think about it, this verse is entirely relevant to Jesus’ teaching about discernment and judging rightly. If you seek to be as full of grace as possible in your judgment of others; if you are always ready to give the benefit of the doubt and evaluate others’ actions with as much mercy and generosity as possible, then you can actually wind up in the ditch on the other side of the road, can’t you? You can wind up becoming gullible and naive and foolish by treating wicked enemies as if they were brothers.

Remember that “dogs” in Jesus’ day weren’t house-pets; they were more like the infamous New York City rats in our day--feral scavengers that lived in the streets, feeding on whatever they could grab or steal, dangerous to be around. And swine of course were unclean to the Jewish mind—the only other reference in the New Testament to swine is in the account of Jesus casting demons into a herd of pigs belonging to Gentile residents of the Gadarenes. (It’s worth asking those of you who have ever hunted feral pigs—which would you rather face? A feral boar or a rabid dog??) Jesus is saying here in this verse to judge rightly who you are dealing with.

It has to be said, beloved, that this warning from the lips of our Savior is all too applicable in our present hour. The greatest fear that the evangelical church in America has is that we will be seen as judgmental by the world around us. We want to be “winsome”, we want to be “compassionate”, we want to be loving—and in doing so we have abandoned the distinctions Jesus is commanding us to have in these verses.

In an effort to be “winsome” and “loving” and “compassionate” to the world around us, the evangelical church in America has been trying to cuddle up to rabid dogs and feral pigs. We are becoming increasingly embarrassed by the plain truths of Scripture—truths that have stood without question for nearly two millennia—and so we decide to quietly ignore them. It started almost a hundred years ago when Christians became embarrassed with the first three chapters of Genesis and its account of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth. Then it went on to embarrassment over the doctrine of the deity of Christ, the Virgin Birth of Christ, the exclusivity of salvation through Christ as the only way to be reconciled to God.

In our day it has extended to our embarrassment with Jesus’ plain teaching that God created mankind male and female, and that a man and a woman are the only fit partners for a marriage (which He commands to last a lifetime), that marriage is meant to be the source of children (who possess the dignity of the image of God from the very moment of conception and are living human beings); when those children are born they are to be raised by a mother and a father, and that for a man to lie with another man as with a woman (or two women as with a man) is an abomination hated by God almighty, and that those who do such things will never enter the Kingdom of God.

But to say those things out loud and straight into the microphone in our day is judgmental—that is hateful, that is bigoted and unloving. And so in an effort to escape those accusations we jettison those teachings—we maneuver around those verses, we re-interpret, we qualify, we soft-sell. We believe that the rabid dogs and feral hogs that hate God and His Word will be appeased if we just throw those pearls of Jesus’ teaching, those words of Holy Scripture, at the feet of those adversaries. Tear Leviticus 18:22 and Matthew 19:3-9 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 out of your Bible and never speak of them again, and it will make them like you again.

But Jesus says plainly in this verse,

Your TRUCE will never be ACCEPTED

A few chapters later in Matthew, Jesus describes the Kingdom of Heaven—the kingdom inhabited by those who have received the New Birth by faith in the Gospel—as a “pearl of great price” that a merchant sells everything he has in order to afford it. And here the image of a pearl is used to illustrate what we are doing when we give up those great Kingdom Gospel truths for the sake of being accepted by the world—we are throwing the Good News of salvation in Christ by repentance and faith in the mud. We are saying that the Gospel of salvation in Christ is less important than being affirmed and thought highly of by our enemies—enemies who are no more satisfied with our compromise than a rabid dog is satisfied by chewing on a pearl.

You may think you are trying to be reasonable and accommodating by avoiding Paul’s warning that those who practice homosexuality will not inherit the Kingdom of God, or that if you just pass over Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:4:

Matthew 19:4 (LSB)

...“Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

that your adversaries will leave you alone, that you will be invited to all the respectable parties, that you will be safe from their rabid hatred and feral destructiveness? No—Jesus says it doesn’t work that way; these enemies will never stop until they have forced you to abandon everything. If you keep trying to compromise a bit here and a bit there; agree to drop this teaching or that teaching,

Your FAITH will eventually be SHREDDED

The rabid dogs and feral hogs will eventually “turn and tear you to pieces.” If your greatest fear in your life is being slandered by the world as a “judgmental Christian”, depend upon it that your Christianity will someday be ripped apart until there is nothing left. The current landscape of “exvangelical Christians”—people like Josh Harris, Rachel Held Evans, Paul Maxwell, Marty Sampson and others—are all examples of people who named the Name of Christ but wanted to be accepted by the world so much that they slowly began giving away what they thought were just little “bits” of their faith so that they would not be seen as judgmental. And their enemies did not stop until their faith was left in shreds and they had nothing left by which they could claim they were Christians at all.

When you judge rightly, Christian—when you uncover and battle that heart of condemnation that lurks in you and cultivate a heart of discernment that genuinely seeks the eternal good of those around you by inviting them to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as their only hope of salvation from the wrath of God, you will be called judgmental. You will be considered hateful. You will be slandered as cruel and hypocritical. But if you are genuinely seeking to be obedient to Jesus’ words here in these verses, those accusations will be just that—slanders that reveal the heart of those who do not want to hear and believe the Good News of salvation through Christ.

What will you do with what God has shown you in His Word this morning? What will you do with what He has revealed in your heart? Have you found a heart of condemnation lurking in you? Do you see in the light of His Word that you have a habit of pointing out others’ faults and sins because they make you feel so much better about your own secret sins? Then repent of that wickedness—come before your Savior and confess that habit of ignoring your own sin and condemning others for theirs; lay down before Him all of the twisted satisfaction you get from pointing out how much better you are than your neighbor, how the speck of sin in their eye is so much worse than the railroad tie in yours. Do you want Christ to judge you by that same metric on the Last Day when you stand before Him to have all of your deeds judged? Then cry to Him for forgiveness now, before you stand in His presence on that Day.

What will you do with what God has shown you in His Word this morning? Has He shown you that you are so afraid of what the world will say about you that you are ready to just “go along to get along”? That what you really want more than anything else is to avoid any kind of confrontation with enemies of the Gospel, and to have it you are willing to drop the “clobber passages” (as one former evangelical pastor calls them) from your Bible? Hear the warning coming to you from the lips of your Savior Himself—if you start giving away those parts of the Bible that your adversaries demand, you will wind up giving away the Kingdom itself. So repent of your cowardice and craven fear, be strong, play the man, and pray for the grace to “be strong in the LORD and in the might of His strength,

Ephesians 6:13 (LSB)

[…taking] up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.

What will you do with what God has shown you in His Word this morning? Has He revealed to your stubborn heart that your real conflict is not with “judgmental Christians”, but that your real conflict is in fact with His Word? You’ve been telling yourself that you don’t go along with Christianity because of all the “judgmental Christians” that you know, but here in the Scriptures this morning you realize that they are not being “judgmental”, they are being faithful. They are not trying to judge you; they are revealing how you stand judged by God’s Word.

What will you do with this? God Himself has opened your eyes to your real condition—you are not a misunderstood person who is being unfairly judged by hypocritical, arrogant Christians—you are in fact a guilty sinner who has offended a holy God. The people who have pointed out your sin against God were not trying to “hurt your feelings” or act superior to you, they were trying to warn you of your danger. Because even if you think your sin is a “speck” compared to other peoples’, the fact is that even that one speck is enough to earn you eternal damnation in Hell. And you know better than anyone that you don’t have just one little “speck” of sin, do you? You have an enormous sawdust pile of sin polluting your heart.

So let me plead with you—with no hypocrisy, no judgmentalism, nothing but a God-given compassion and desire for the sake of your never-dying soul—turn away from that sin before it is too late. Drop the act of being so “offended” that someone would faithfully point out your sin; stop pretending that you are the victim of judgmental hypocrites and listen to the living and active Word of God that tells you

Romans 3:23 (LSB)

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

And

Romans 6:23 (LSB)

For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And

Romans 10:9 (LSB)

that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;

Drop the pride, drop the arrogant refusal to listen, drop the slanderous accusations of judgmentalism and hypocrisy against those who have brought you this pearl of great price, the Gospel of salvation, and fly for refuge from the wrath of God against your sin to the open arms of the One Who died to redeem you from it—your Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Ephesians 3:20–21 (LSB)

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or understand, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION: Write down something you learned from this morning’s message that is new to you, or an insight that you had for the first time about the text? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down a question that you have about the passage that you want to study further or ask for help with: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down something that you need to do in your life this week in response to what God has shown you from His Word today: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________

Additional Notes: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________