The Kingdom Manifesto - 20

Kingdom Manifesto – 20

(Do Not) Judge Others

Matthew 7:11-6,15-20

Introduction

When I was in college, I was a student ministry intern at a church in West County St. Louis. Jodie and I had just started dating and we were at the Wednesday night programming. For some reason, one of the high school students told Jodie to ‘shut up.’

Now, let me set some backstory…I think ‘shut up’ is about the most offensive thing you can say to someone. We have banned the phrase from our house, and I have never said that to Jodie or to my kids. Never. And here is this punk kid saying this to Jodie.

Looking back there were, I am sure, a bunch of ways to handle that rightly. I handled it by getting in his face. That’s a relative term, because he was about 6’4”, so technically I got in his chest. I told him what I thought of him, the statement that he made, and what his apology was going to sound like. And, to his credit, he did turn to Jodie and apologize.

We recognize, do we not, that there are some things worth getting in someone’s face about? We understand there are reasons why someone should get in our face. This is an occupational hazard for those of us in pastoral ministry…a large part of what we do is say the hard things that no one else has said to people, but they desperately need to hear.

In Matthew 7, Jesus is coming to the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount. And as we have walked through it for over 20 weeks now, we can begin to see the climb to the finale. In this concluding chapter, Jesus presents some very challenging teachings. Now, he has already shared some very challenging teachings, hasn’t he? Lust is the same as adultery, hatred is murder, divorce, revenge, love your enemies.

But here at the end, Jesus lays out some increasingly difficult things to hear. He gets right up in our faces and lays it all out clearly. Here is the first one…

Matthew 7:1-5 - “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.

“And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.

By anyone’s standard, a crazy difficult passage. Let’s take the next few minutes together and simply walk through it and see what Jesus has for us.

“Do not judge others…” - this is one of the most quoted biblical commands. People who don’t know Jesus and have never read the bible still know and quote this one. Though it is one of the most quoted, it is also one of the most misquoted and misunderstood.

To ‘judge’ someone is to condemn them. To have a critical spirit towards people that tends to label them as something worse than you.

Luke 6:37 - “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn others, or it will all come back against you. Forgive others, and you will be forgiven.

Jesus links judgement, condemnation and a lack of forgiveness all together. So, to judge someone is to condemn them for something they have done and withhold forgiveness from them for whatever they did. To continually see them through that lens no matter what they’ve done.

This seems to be the default state of our hearts. To be critical of other people. To make judgement calls against people based on their actions. If you drive, you do this. We use ourselves as the standard for driving…therefore…anyone going faster than us is crazy, and anyone going slower is an idiot. We automatically label them as something based on how they drive.

Jesus commands us not to judge other people, not to condemn people.

Notice, however, that Jesus did not tell us not to judge actions. He didn’t say to ignore sin. Notice what Jesus says just a few verses later:

Matthew 7:15-20 - 15 “Beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep but are really vicious wolves. 16 You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. 18 A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. 19 So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. 20 Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.

We can identify what is right and what is wrong. We can determine what is godly and what is sinful. How? By God’s Word. We don’t use ourselves as the standard, we use God and His Word as the standard. We determine what is good and evil by what God says is good and evil. Not what we personally think. Not what our culture decides is good or evil for today. But by God’s eternal Word.

Parents understand this balance between judging actions and judging people. There is a huge difference between saying to your child, “That was a bad thing to do” and “You are a bad child.” One focuses on the action, the other condemns the person.

So we can identify when people hurt us, when they sin against us. Jesus simply keeps us from making the jump to condemn them as being worse than us.

We can confront issues with God’s standards found in His Truth. We cannot judge the heart. We are incapable of seeing someone’s heart. We are not equipped to make judgement calls about someone’s motivations. Only God can do that.

Jesus gives us a couple reasons not to judge…

Matthew 7:1b-2 - …For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.

Why refrain from judging? Because you will be judged in the same way. The way we judge others has a way of coming back on us.

-By Others

Understand that when you treat other people in this way, you won’t have friends for long. They are going to come right back at you with the same critical spirit. Or they will vanish from your life. No one likes to be around someone who is constantly throwing others under the bus. It’s exhausting to be around someone who doesn’t like anyone else, or who is constantly trying to prove their own worth by stripping people of theirs.

-By God

If you dig deeply into the language that Jesus uses here, this is what he is talking about. That if we judge others, God will use that same standard against us. If we go beyond what Scripture says and add layers of judgement, we are asking God to judge us by those same standards. Never a good thing.

Luke 6:37-38 - “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn others, or it will all come back against you. Forgive others, and you will be forgiven. Give, and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full—pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap. The amount you give will determine the amount you get back.”

This is not a verse on financial giving. It is a verse on emotional giving. What you give is what you will get…and then some.

After Jesus lays out that reason as to why we shouldn’t judge others, he gives us a great illustration from his days in the carpenter’s shop as a young man.

Matthew 7:3-5 - “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.

So why shouldn’t we judge others? We aren’t to judge…not just because it will come back on us, but because we are not qualified. We have logs in our eyes. We have sin in our lives too. We are in the same boat as the one we are judging.

Often, our desire to judge is not born out of a concern for someone’s sin…from a deep concern for their holiness. No, too often it is born out of a desire to make ourselves look and feel better by pointing out the speck in someone’s eye. Why? Because when we do that, we convince ourselves that the log in our eyes isn’t that big of a deal.

Essentially Jesus is telling us that if we are going to judge anyone, we should judge ourselves. Before we begin to look at someone else’s sin, we need to take a look at our own.

I think there are two extremes that we take when we start judging ourselves, taking a closer look at our own sin…

-hyper-critical

We are so over the top in looking at our own sin that that becomes all that we look at. We forget the love and sacrifice of Jesus for us. And instead of understanding Jesus’ love and acceptance of us in the gospel, we look too much as our sin and ignore our Savior. This leads to a defeatist attitude as we occupy our time in a perpetual soul autopsy.

When we grow hyper-critical of ourselves, we tend to do two things with that…

-we project that hypercriticism on others. And we start digging into their souls as well. We become impossible to please and become a worse judge of others than ever before.

-we dismiss other’s sins. When we focus too much on our own sin, we tend to think we should justify sin in others. “Who am I to point that out in their life? I’m a sinner too. It would be a breach of integrity to point that sin out in them when I am a sinner too.”

Understandable, but here are a couple problems with that. First off…who are you to point that out? No one. But your Savior certainly is someone. The one who paid the price, who died because of sin, he certainly has something to say about sin in people’s lives.

Secondly…you will never not be a sinner. You are a sinner now; you will be tomorrow and every day after that. So, if you use that excuse, you will always excuse sin in people’s lives. You’re a sinner…but know this…you aren’t the standard by which you are judging others. This isn’t based on your opinions about their actions. This is based on God’s truth.

Again, I get this a lot. I get asked all the time my opinion on some issue or some action in someone’s life. Here is my answer - my opinion doesn’t matter. I have no authority. But God does. And here is what he has to say about this. And now you’ve got to deal with that. Am I a sinner too? You bet. And so are you. I’ve got my sin, you’ve got yours. Let’s go to God together and deal with these things together.

So one extreme when we judge ourselves is to be hyper-critical, over the top. The other extreme… -hypo-critical

‘hypo’ means under, or less than.

-hypodermic needle - under the skin

-hypothermia - low temperature

To be hypo-critical is to look too lightly at our sin. To glance off of it as if it is not there. To, as Jesus would put it, focus on the speck in someone else’s eye and ignore the log in my own.

Great biblical example of this - King David sees a beautiful woman one day take a bath on the roof of her house. Finds out that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his greatest and closest military generals. Well, Uriah is out at war…so David has Bathsheba brought to his house, commits adultery and sends her home. David, this great godly king, a man after God’s own heart, who has hundreds of women at his beck and call…goes after her. She ends up pregnant, and David goes into stealth mode. How can we hide this?

He brings Uriah home from war and gets a report then tells him to go home to be with his wife. But Uriah’s men are out fighting and Uriah has too much honor to be with his wife while his men are in harm’s way. He is who David should have been. Since David cannot cover up his sin of adultery that way, he send Uriah back to the war with order for him to be put on the front lines, but then the troops are to be pulled back, leaving him exposed. David orchestrated his murder to cover up his sin. God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David.

2 Samuel 12:1-9 - So the Lord sent Nathan the prophet to tell David this story: “There were two men in a certain town. One was rich, and one was poor. The rich man owned a great many sheep and cattle. The poor man owned nothing but one little lamb he had bought. He raised that little lamb, and it grew up with his children. It ate from the man’s own plate and drank from his cup. He cuddled it in his arms like a baby daughter. One day a guest arrived at the home of the rich man. But instead of killing an animal from his own flock or herd, he took the poor man’s lamb and killed it and prepared it for his guest.” David was furious. “As surely as the Lord lives,” he vowed, “any man who would do such a thing deserves to die! He must repay four lambs to the poor man for the one he stole and for having no pity.” Then Nathan said to David, “You are that man! The Lord, the God of Israel, says: I anointed you king of Israel and saved you from the power of Saul. I gave you your master’s house and his wives and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And if that had not been enough, I would have given you much, much more. Why, then, have you despised the word of the Lord and done this horrible deed? For you have murdered Uriah the Hittite with the sword of the Ammonites and stolen his wife.

David is deeply concerned over this mythical man’s sins. How could he? That man deserves to die! You’re right David, he sure does. You are that man. David could clearly see the sin in someone else’s life but completely ignored his own.

Jesus revisits this same idea in…

Luke 18:9-14 - Then Jesus told this story to some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else: “Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: ‘I thank you, God, that I am not a sinner like everyone else. For I don’t cheat, I don’t sin, and I don’t commit adultery. I’m certainly not like that tax collector! I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’ I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else. You see, here is the problem with being hypo-critical…it makes you hypocritical. You are concerned for everyone else’s sin but your own.

Matthew 7:3-5 - “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.

Notice this incredibly important detail…Jesus did not tell us to ignore the speck. We are not to dismiss the speck. Jesus tells us to remove the log from our own eye, then we can see clearly to help those around us. Jesus does not tell us to ignore sin…our own or anyone else’s. We are to confront it and deal with it…in us first, then in others. We point out sin, just not hypocritically so.

There are essentially two ways to deal with sin in someone else’s life. First is the critic. The other, we will call the Counselor, the one who comes alongside to help.

Critic - Condemns

Counselor - Restores (see clearly enough to help remove speck)

Critic - Attacks the person

Counselor - broken over their sin

Critic - all about their personal standards

Counselor - all about God’s standards

Critic - self-righteous

Counselor - humble (first beatitude is understanding own spiritual poverty)

So Jesus is very clear…do not judge people. It will come back on you if you do. You are not equipped to judge, you can’t see the heart, you can’t understand motivations. If you are going to judge, start with yourself. Remove the log…then with clarity, go help your friend who need to get that speck out of their eye.

Conclusion

Matthew 7:6 - “Don’t waste what is holy on people who are unholy. Don’t throw your pearls to pigs! They will trample the pearls, then turn and attack you.

This verse just seems out of place doesn’t it? Jesus just makes this clear point on not judging but then seems to say, now judge people. The general thought by many is that Jesus is saying not to judge, show mercy, offer forgiveness, but understand reality…there are some who don’t deserve that. So, don’t waste holy things on unholy people; don’t give valuable things to pigs who don’t appreciate it.

So, Jesus says not to judge, but now judge? You determine who is unholy and you label who the pigs are. You decide if someone is worth your mercy. I don’t buy it. I think Jesus is quoting a popular proverb of his day. An accepted bumper sticker slogan that summed up the attitude of the day…give people what they deserve. If they deserve holy things, then give them that. If they are pigs, treat them as such.

And by bringing up that proverb, Jesus is reminding us why we shouldn’t judge. Why we don’t give and help based on who deserves it. Because, while we may live in a world dictated by rules that say people get what they deserve, God doesn’t treat us like we deserve to be treated. And, wouldn’t you know it, that is exactly what Jesus teaches next.

The next section is on prayer and Jesus says that God treats us this way…

Matthew 7:11 - So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.

Notice he did not say that God gives good gifts to those who deserve it, just to those who ask. God does not treat you like you deserve to be treated. The one who could judge, offers forgiveness. The one who could condemn, comes alongside and restores. And as his kingdom people, we are to do the same.

INVITATION

COMMUNION