To judge or not to judge - Dec.2-6

Who likes being judged? Nobody, that’s who. We all want to live our lives without anyone ever telling us that something we do or the way we live is wrong. The problem with that is that we do wrong things, we live in wrong ways, and at the very least we will all face judgment for that at the end of our days. So what do we do in the meantime? Should we be judged by others? Should we not be judged by others? Of course if we leave this decision up to our feelings we’ll likely conclude that, “No, of course we shouldn’t judge.” Today’s society feels the same way, to be called “judgmental” can be a scathing insult, but let’s see what scripture has to say about this.

Hypocrite! First take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye. - Matthew 7:5

We love to focus on the first part of this verse, especially when it’s us who are being judged. Non-christians even love to quote this one (or Matt 7:1) to Christians that are bringing up issues of sin in the world. There is a second part to it though, “then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.” Wait, why did Jesus throw that in there? That sounds like we are supposed to help to take the splinter out of our brother’s eye. Aren’t we not supposed to judge? Clearly we’re missing something here, because if we really weren’t supposed to judge, he would have stopped at taking the beam of wood out of our own eye.

He didn’t though, and so let’s figure out what this means. It is immediately clear that we are not to be a hypocrite. So before opening our mouths we really do need to look at ourselves first and recognize that we are sinful and we need a savior just as much as anyone else. We need to repent of our sin and ask the Holy Spirit to help us kill that sin in our lives. When we are overcoming that sin in our lives though, we should not just stop there. It would actually be very selfish and unloving of us to see our neighbor or family member sinning and to say nothing about it. We know that sin leads to death, and so if we love them we must say something, we must judge.

So what would this look like? Well let’s use the example of the sin of drunkenness. If you are regularly being drunk every weekend, you are the person with a beam of wood in your eye, you have no business confronting the person who is pushing it too far with drinking at a wedding once a year. However, if you have overcome drunkenness by God’s saving grace, and you see someone going down that path, especially a brother or sister in Christ, you must say something! How do we do this? It’s hard, I myself struggle greatly with it, yet we are told in Ephesians that we should speak the truth in love, and we see in 1 Corinthians that love rejoices with the truth.

So let’s start with love, let’s love our neighbors enough to not stand by idly as sin drags them down, let’s love our Savior and his message of repentance and salvation from sin. Let no one say of us that evil prospered while good men and women did nothing. Have a great week!