Sermon Tone Analysis

As always, it is an honor to be her at the church with the great responsibility to present the Word of God to our congregation.

I hope that everyone had a great New Years celebration.

My wife and I spent some time thanking God for everything that he has done for us this year.

This is a time in which people are making New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals to make improvements in their lives.

Now, let me say that there is nothing magical about the turn of the year, but it is as good of a time as any to set goals so long as they are set for the right reason.

That reason being, glorifying God!

This morning and the next few weeks, we are going to be returning to series we started way back in October 2020.

It’s entitled the Greatest Sermon Ever Given and that is not a boast about myself.

It is given that title because in this series we are walking through Jesus' own Sermon on the Mount.

Charles Spurgeon may have been the prince of preachers, but the text we are walking through is a sermon from the King of Kings!

Jesus uses this discourse to explain the true standard of righteousness.

The proper response to the Sermon on the mount is mourning over your sinful condition and understanding that Christ did what we could not.

In regards to our New Year’s Resolutions, those are fine and can even be good, so long as they are set with the understanding that God is God and everything that we are called to seek righteousness for His glory.

This means that all of our goals should be underscored with worship!

In the very beginning of this message Jesus said

This means we are called to do good things!

We should want to give God glory through better stewardship of our finances!

That means it is good to seek to get out of debt.

It’s good to reduce waste.

We should want to give God glory through better stewardship of our bodies!

That means it is good to have a healthy diet.

It can even be good to pump iron!

So long as you are pumping iron for the glory of God and not your own.

A verse I love that I have been repeating over and over again lately is Colossians 3:17

So this New Year, set Goals.

But set them in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him! Remember that Jesus taught us to pray in an earlier portion from His sermon we are going to look at today, He said to pray, Lord not my will, but yours be done!

A friend of mine wrote, “My life is a stewardship from God to be used for bringing Him glory through bearing good works according to His gifting resulting in my reward.”

The ultimate point of our lives and our goals must be stewarding our lives for God’s glory!

But we’re not going to focus on goal setting for the bulk of our message this morning.

Today we are going to look at Righteousness and judgment.

Now this should be an interesting topic for us.

It is definitely pertinent in our time.

How often do you hear someone say, “Don’t judge me!”

Or proclaim that this is a “judgment free zone”.

And on the flip side, Christians are viewed as judge-y people.

According the Barna group, surveying young people in 2007, 87% of non-Christians viewed Christianity as judgmental.

85% of them said Christianity was hypocritical.

You might say that’s because non-Christians just don’t understand, but even 52% of self identified church goers said that Christianity as judgmental and 47% said Christianity is hypocritical!

Now I don’t know how or if those numbers have changed since then, but only 15 years ago, but those stats show us that half the young people in the church viewed Christianity as judgmental and hypocritical!

This is a problem!

As we will see today, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ blatantly speaks against people being judgmental hypocrites!

If the perception of the church holds any truth, church, we got some work to do.

If you would, turn in your Bibles to Matthew 7.

As we begin looking at this final third of the greatest sermon ever given, we should be reminded of the setting.

Jesus had just begun His ministry and crowds of people were forming around Him everywhere He went.

So Jesus goes up on the mountain and begins to teach.

It is a very practical message that show the true requirements of righteousness and inadvertently speaks against the religious elite of the day.

That is the Pharisees.

Their religious traditions had overshadowed real worship of the One True God.

Their tradition actually replaced the authority of Scripture in the minds of many Jews.

Later on in the book of Matthew we see the Pharisees attacking Jesus for breaking tradition:

After some explanation Jesus says:

The Pharisees wanted to judge everyone based upon their own, self-contrived traditions and make that the ultimate standard of righteousness.

One commentary states that they Pharisees had become “oppressively judgmental.”

This is the kind of attitude that will be called out by Jesus in our text today.

Today we’re going to be given four truths from this Scripture.

These are truths we should keep in our minds any time we are thinking about castigating anyone.

While I am sure there are false accusations and misunderstandings from those outside the faith, I would also suggest that there are many modern-day pharisees condemning based on personal preference and tradition rather than truly seeking to honor God and help others in their walks with the Lord.

Stay with me this morning!

I am not suggesting we relinquish all moral standards and blend in to culture for the sake of being accepted by culture.

Rather I am suggesting that we all stop serving our own interests and truly seek to honor the Lord in all that we do.

Let’s walk through this together:

Judge not, that you be not judged.

This is such a simple statement with profound meaning behind it.

If you’re taking notes, write this down:

You are not the Judge … God is!

You are not the judge!

When Jesus says Judge not, that you be not judged He is reminding the hearer that they are not the final authority!

There is court that is higher!

Everyone will be judged before God!

When someone renders unrighteous and unmerciful judgment upon another person they are assuming a role that they do not have.

When you decide that you know the intentions of someone else’s heart and thus you can lay down the proverbial hammer upon them, you are taking the place of God!

Here James is not saying that we should never confront sin in a brother or sister’s life, rather, he is denouncing careless, self-serving accusations that seek to elevate the accuser and denigrate the accused!

That’s not a righteous rebuke, that’s sinful slander!

Slander is sin!

Slander is against God’s Law.

So when you are talking poorly about someone else you are saying you are above the Law!

Like, “Sure God says we shouldn’t talk bad about people, but I’M not who he’s talking about.

This is fine.”

James shows us that when you are acting in such a manner you are no longer a doer of the law but a judge!

Let me tell you all folks, humans make terrible judges!

Especially when it comes to spiritual issues!

C.S. Lewis wrote a book entitled the Great Divorce.

It is a story that is an allegorical apologetic for why those who reject Christ wouldn’t want to be in heaven anyways.

It’s a fascinating book.

It’s not intended to give us an accurate picture of the afterlife but you should definitely give it a read if you have the opportunity.

But in the book, some people are allowed to visit heaven.

One by one they all decide they don’t want to be there so they go back to the other place where they weren’t happy either.

One of the characters called “The Big Ghost” is so upset that a man he knew on earth as Jack was allowed into heaven that he decided that he would just go back to hell.

Basically, “If they let people like that in there, then it aint the place for me.”

He was so caught up in his own relative righteousness that he couldn’t fathom how someone could be saved by faith in Jesus.

In essence that man thought himself qualified to be the ultimate judge.

But we are not equipped to be the judge.

Look here at what James said: “There is only one lawgiver and judge.

He who is able to save and to destroy.

Who is that?

God!

We read all the way back in Genesis that “In the beginning God created the heavens and earth.”

All the way at the end we see God administering the final judgment.

God is the one who gave Moses the Law.