Last week, I was out of town, and Pastor Dave did a great job walking everyone through the second part of Matthew 6. This week we are getting into the final third of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus opens this next section talking about judgment, and specifically not judging others. Or does He? What Jesus has to say about judgment here is more nuanced than it seems, often misunderstood, and absolutely vital for us to get right. Let’s dive in.

Worry About Yourself First

Have you ever been judged before? I don’t mean in a court of law. I mean you did something somebody else didn’t think you should have done and they made sure you knew it. Now, as for how they communicated this disapproval, the options are manifold. Maybe they just told you to your face that you were wrong. The direct approach usually does get the job done. Perhaps they didn’t use their words, but their face said plenty. I’ve been told I can sometimes use my outside voice without ever opening my mouth. Anybody else struggle with an overly expressive face? They could have been more indirect with their judgment as well, expressing their distaste for your chosen path in how they treated you thereafter. However they made their thoughts plain to you, if you were confident in your chosen course of action, you probably processed a single thought in your mind: I sure wish they would quit judging me. 

We live in a culture that hates judgmentalism. If you were to express even the slightest disapproval of someone else’s choices, there’s a good chance they are going to respond by telling you to stop judging them. “Who are you to judge me?” we often have thrown in our faces in that kind of a situation. Even if you weren’t really judging them at all, but they were feeling a bit guilty for their own choices, they’ll probably still respond like that because it’s a convenient deflection away from dealing with their own guilt. 

And the church in particular is known for being judgmental. I should hope so too. We’ve worked really hard to cultivate that reputation over the last few generations. I’d hate to think our efforts were misplaced. I kid, of course…but only a little. While many followers of Jesus are not in the slightest bit judgmental of the people around them, many more most definitely are. They use being judgmental as either a cover for their own hypocritical misdeeds, or else as a way to avoid the harder job of loving someone in the midst of their brokenness and walking with them out of it. It’s so much easier to simply shout at someone, “You’re wrong!” than it is to try to understand why they are making the choices they’re making and work with them to make different ones if they are open to that. 

Yet for all that our culture absolutely hates the idea of being judgmental of others, that really hasn’t stopped any of us from practicing it. Even people who profess to be the most non-judgmental people in the world will very quickly condemn someone like, say, a Christian who is perceived as being judgmental toward them. That is, they will judge us…for being judgmental. I hope the irony of that isn’t lost on you. 

Well, the guys who contributed to the Scriptures do have some things to say about casting judgment on others, and the passage we are going to dive into this morning as we continue our walk through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the sixth part of our summer teaching series, A Kingdom Vision, is one of the more significant and well-known of the bunch. But a lot of what we find in the Scriptures isn’t typically understood very well—including the passage we are going to look at this morning. As much as we want for things to be nice and black and white, there’s a bit more nuance to the whole thing than you might expect even when the words themselves seem to be about as black and white as we could ask for. So, if you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me in Matthew 7 as we take a look at what Jesus had to say about judgment. 

Before we get all the way into the text, though, let’s take just a second to define our terms. When we talk about judgment, what do we actually mean? For instance, there are some judgments that we are not only always going to make, but which are good for us to make. I judge that playing in traffic is not a good idea, and I’m going to exert that judgment on any kid—or anybody else for that matter—I see trying to do it. I don’t care if you think playing in traffic is fun and safe, you’re wrong, and I’m going to be exceedingly judgmental of your choice in that case. It seems hard to believe that’s what Jesus had in mind here. 

I would agree that seems highly unlikely in terms of being Jesus’ point of focus here. I think there are two different broad categories of judgment we should have in mind when we approach the subject generally. The first involves making assessments of the absolute value of another person including whether or not they can gain access to God’s kingdom. I’ll just go ahead and tell you, this isn’t what Jesus is talking about in this passage. This is a form of judgment we are indeed not to dabble in. For starters, God has already pronounced every person who has, does, or will ever exist as being possessed of inestimably great value. If we think we can declare otherwise and act accordingly, we are in the wrong. Period. Second, and on the second part of that definition, it’s God’s kingdom. He gets the final say on who’s in and who’s out. He gave the church—not individuals, but the church acting as a unified body—a lot of authority in terms of speaking to the question, but in the end, it’s His kingdom first. He has the final vote. In short, making this first kind of judgment is God’s prerogative and His alone. 

The second broad category is making an assessment of whether or not a person’s behavior is measuring up to a certain standard. This is where things get tricky pretty quickly, and it is also what we typically have in mind when we talk about not judging others. There are several questions we need to answer before we dive into considering whether or not to exercise this kind of judgment. Who is it that we are assessing? A stranger or someone with whom we are familiar? What is our position relative to them? One of some sort of authority or neutral? What is the standard we are using to do the assessing? One that is more objective or subjective? Where did we get this standard? Why are we using that particular standard? Is the behavior in question something the standard addresses directly, or are we drawing inferences from a specific standard to their actual behavior? Until we have clear answers to these and other questions like them, we don’t know how to proceed here whether with the judging itself or with our assessment of the one doing it (which is itself a form of judgment). Painting with black and white here with statements like, “It’s not my job to judge anyone else,” or, “You don’t get to judge me,” isn’t wise because those kinds of statements don’t have the blanket support of the Scriptures. In making them you may not be right either about judging others or being judged by them. 

Are you with me still? That was a lot, I know, but if we don’t bring clear thinking to an issue as tricky as this one is, we’re not going to be able to arrive at clear conclusions. Alright, let’s take all of that and we’re going to put it over here on the backburner. And as the aromas of that pot are filling our kitchen here, let’s take a look at what Jesus actually says in the next part of the Sermon on the Mount. This is Matthew 7:1. 

“Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged.” Now, let’s be honest: that seems pretty hard to construe in any other way than that Jesus doesn’t want us to be judging other people. How does any of what we just talked about factor into that? Context is king, my friends. If context didn’t matter, then, yes, we could take just this one verse, make it a banner, make it a bumper sticker, and no one could fault us for it. But context does matter. A lot. And in this case, the context not only of what Jesus says in the next few verses here, but the context of the rest of the New Testament weighs in and says, “Not so fast there. Some judgments we shouldn’t make. No question. But some judgments not only should we make, but we are in fact commanded to make them.” So, even though, yes, the words here seem very plain, we have to let the context inform our understanding of them and help us see that there is a fair bit more nuance here than meets the eye. 

And let’s pause ever so briefly to offer a quick word to the people who might object to that. Sometimes when you talk about the context of a difficult passage with someone who is insisting on a particular understanding that the context simply does not support, but which a simple reading seems to give credence to, they will fault you for it and suggest that you are using “context” as a way to hide from something difficult. While I understand that line of argument, it is a matter of basic classical literary interpretation that a particular passage cannot mean something the context doesn’t allow it to mean. This shouldn’t be a hard to justify argument either. We have all said things at one time or another that could be taken out of context, twisted to mean something we obviously did not mean in context, and used against us in devastating fashion. I think we can all agree that if somebody did that to us, they would be in the wrong. The same reasoning applies to our approach to the Scriptures. 

Let’s get back on track. “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged.” What is Jesus talking about here? Well, let’s look at the context. Jesus has been talking about personal righteousness before God. Before that, He was talking about the high standards of God’s righteousness. You can perhaps see, then, why He jumped to judgment here. When we start to feel like we’re doing pretty okay before God, that’s often when we start looking down on those around us who aren’t doing so well. Or, we go ahead and look down on them even when we don’t feel like we’re fully there because that can distract (both them and us) from our insufficiencies in that department. So, He lands here and says, “Hey, don’t do that.” 

But where it looks like Jesus is drawing a hard and fast line out of the gate, He immediately begins to roll things back here in v. 2. “For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use.” There’s still a theme of not judging running through this, but it’s a bit softer than the apparent black and white of v. 1. It’s not so much that we shouldn’t judge at all, but rather that we should use a gracious standard when we judge—the kind of standard we would want to have used for us. If you want someone to give you the benefit of the doubt, give it to them. If you constantly hold people to rigorously high standards whether they’ve signed on to them or not, and don’t show the slightest bit of grace in your condemnations when they deviate from those standards, you’d better not let even a toe get out of line because those same people are going to be ready to pounce. 

But here’s the thing, when we are getting all focused on other people like this, we’re setting ourselves up for trouble. When our focus is primarily on the people around us, we are going to be less content with our own lives, we are going to be judgmental in our attitudes toward them, and we are going to overlook a host of things that we need to get straightened out in our own lives and which are keeping us from experiencing the fullness available to us in our own relationship with God. This is why Jesus shifts gears from focusing on us in our judgment of others to inviting us to do a bit of self-reflection first. 

“Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye? 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.” 

Can you imagine the situation Jesus is describing here? I mean, His language is pretty graphic to make the whole thing memorable, but can you see the point? When we are going to someone else and nitpicking in their life, how often are we doing that while ignoring or as a distraction from some fairly significant issue in our own lives? If that’s the case, do you know what that makes us? Hypocrites. When you are worried about the minutiae of someone else’s life but won’t take the steps to get your own house in order, you are focused on the wrong things. You need to quit that. You have taken your eyes off of your righteousness, and have instead focused on somebody else’s. Now, their righteousness may not be where it needs to be, but if you’ve got some glaring holes in your own, you need to get those addressed first. 

Even in saying that, though, do you notice what Jesus is doing here? Listen again to what he said at the end of v. 5. Remember that this whole part of our conversation started with Jesus’ apparently clear declaration that we shouldn’t be judging anybody else which we clarified to mean that we shouldn’t be making any kind of assessments of the behavior of the people around us. With that in mind, listen to this again: “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.” Do you hear it? While, yes, Jesus says that we need to get our own spiritual house in order before we start commenting on the spiritual houses of the people around us, at some point it is okay for us to make some comments. If you are taking the splinter out of your brother or sister’s eye, you are necessarily acknowledging to them that they have a splinter in their eye with which they are going to need your help in removing. That is, you are making a judgment about them. “Friend, there’s this thing in your life that shouldn’t be there. Can I help you get it out?” You are assessing their lives against a particular standard and have found them wanting. That’s judgment. 

We should clarify what Jesus is saying here again, though, because it would be easy for someone to take this at first blush, acknowledge that v. 1 couldn’t have been as black and white as it seems, and nonetheless make an argument that there won’t ever be a set of circumstances in which we can judge another person. They’ll say that we can’t judge others until we have dealt with all of our own issues first. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had internal issues that need to be dealt with. On this side of eternity I’m probably always going to have internal issues that need to be dealt with. In other words, I’m always going to have at least a speck in my own eye if not a log. So, does this mean we are back to not ever being able to judge someone else? 

No, the point here is not that we can only assess whether we think others are measuring up to the standards of God’s kingdom if we are doing so perfectly ourselves. Rather, we can’t call them to a standard we are not even trying to meet in our own lives. Sometimes we are in the position that calling a fellow believer to live up to the standard of God’s kingdom is not only right but necessary for us to do so they don’t make a turn down a dangerous path. If I see my kid running out into traffic, I may have all sorts of personal issues that I need to deal with, but I’m going to set all of that to the side, judge my kid for his decision, and move to halt his forward progress in this incorrect direction. Hiding behind a misunderstanding of what Jesus says here and taking up the position that we’ve all got our own issues, and so it’s not okay for anyone to hold anyone else accountable for living up the standards of God’s kingdom is both unloving and cowardly. 

But we can’t hold people up to standards they haven’t accepted for themselves. God, sure. That’s His job. He’s in charge of everybody. But not us. That’s what Jesus is getting at here in the last verse we are going to look at this morning. It’s an odd little verse that Jesuse actually repeats in a different context to mean something slightly different later in Matthew’s Gospel. Check this out: “Don’t give what is holy to dogs or toss your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, turn, and tear you to pieces.” In other words, passing judgment on people who aren’t interested in the standard you are using is a waste of time. Calling someone who hasn’t signed up for God’s kingdom to measure up to the standards of God’s kingdom is not only not going to accomplish anything positive, it may do net harm. 

It’ll harm you in the sense that you’ll be crossing this line into being judgmental that you really shouldn’t cross because of the damage that does to our own spirits. And it’ll harm the other person both in the sense that they’ll likely resent you, meaning your own relationship with them is now fractured at best, and in the sense that they’ll likely resent the standard you are using to judge them, meaning their perception of Christianity is going to tank, making it even harder than before to reach them with the Gospel. Our job is not to hold those outside of God’s kingdom up to the standards of God’s kingdom. That’s His job. But we can lovingly call those who are a part of it—and in particular those who are a part of our own church family—to live up to the standards they have professed to have adopted for their lives. Do you see the difference? 

Ultimately, I think what Jesus is pointing us toward here is the importance of getting our own righteousness before God set before we go worrying about anybody else’s. This holds no matter who the anybody else happens to be. For those outside the church, the only worrying about their righteousness we need to do at all is to love them with the love of Christ so they have the chance to experience the righteousness of God through us in hopes that this prompts a curiosity in them that moves them in His direction. For those inside the church, our concern can be a little bit higher, but still, we need to check for our own beams before setting our sights on their splinters, and we have to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about which standard we are using to call them to account when we perceive a lack. It’s frightfully easy to do a bait and switch from God’s to ours. So, in practice, then, we need to worry about our own righteousness first. Worry about your own righteousness first. 

You make sure that you are good with God before getting all caught up in the affairs of the people around you. That doesn’t mean you need to reach the apex of perfection before you can have a hard conversation with a brother or sister when you’ve witnessed firsthand their engaging in behavior that dishonors Christ and diminishes the reputation of His church. You just need to be sure you are firstly concerned with your own righteousness. Worry about your own righteousness first. Indeed, if everybody does this, we won’t ever have to concern ourselves with worrying about anybody else because we’ll all be keeping ourselves in good shape. All we have to do then is just love one another. Doesn’t that sound better than being in a church in which everybody is judging one another all the time? Worry about your own righteousness first. 

It is absolutely vital that we are intentional about not allowing a judgmental culture to bubble up in which people are constantly made to feel guilty for falling short of God’s righteousness in Christ. That is not life-giving. That kind of thing will suck the life out of any church. And, I’ll just be honest with you: we do pretty well with that as a church. If you’re a regular, you already know that, but if you’re still just connecting, know well that this church doesn’t fit that particular negative stereotype. There are a whole lot of people here who take Jesus’ counsel here to heart. Worry about your own righteousness first. 

At the same time, where someone has professed to have signed up for the standards of God’s kingdom and we can see them failing to measure up to those standards, it is okay for someone close to them to lovingly check on them to see why there is a discrepancy between their confession and their current practice. This is where one friend says to another, “Hey friend, I’ve noticed some things in your life lately that feel out of sync with the Gospel. Are you okay? Is there anything going on that we need to talk about and work through together? I just want you to know that I love you and would love to walk through this with you.” In most cases, that’s probably going to be more than enough to get someone back on track. There’s a whole process Jesus gives us to follow from there to call the person back to the path of life, but that’s a conversation for another time. So, worry about your own righteousness first, but love others too. 

This love is best expressed through this loving accountability where we are gently helping one another rise up and meet the standards of God’s righteousness with the abiding help and presence of the Holy Spirit working in, among, and through us. We let the Holy Spirit be the one to convict—that’s His job, not ours—but what we can do is to create a culture where conviction doesn’t lead to shame and guilt, but grace, forgiveness, and restoration. We worry about our own righteousness first, and use that righteousness in Christ to love the brothers and sisters around us more in His direction all the time. When we are all doing this for each other, the whole church is made stronger and better equipped for the great task ahead of us. 

Sin will sink the ship of the Spirit, and judging one another can be a form sin takes to disguise itself so it can keep unleashing Hell among us. But when we resist this trap, worry about our own righteousness first, and love the people around us in light of this, the work of the Spirit in our midst will be magnified and unleashed even more to the glory of God and the transformation of our world. Nothing short of that is our goal.