Judge Not

Is it possible to share the Gospel without being the self-righteous, judgmental type? I believe it is, and here’s why…

In the Bible, Jesus warns his listeners not to judge others the way the self-righteous Pharisees had been judging Him, who had been just waiting for a sound bite from him that would allow them to dismiss him and cancel him out of existence.

Many claim that when Jesus said “Do not judge”, it meant we should never judge anyone else. But here’s what he said in context: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” (Matt.7)

Jesus wasn’t telling us not to judge. To stop judging would mean we have to stop thinking. Instead he went on to warn what would happen if we are judgmental like the Pharisees – “for in the same way you judge others, you will be judged”.

Rather than teach us NOT to judge, Jesus taught us HOW to judge. We are to be careful to judge ourselves first – “first take the plank out of your own eye” he went on to say.

After healthy self-examination, Jesus then taught that “then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” The kind of judging we can do for others is judgement or discernment that will help them, just like physically helping improve their sight or removing a splinter. We can use our natural ability and tendency to judge people and the world around us for their well-being.

One way in which to help others by judging is to help them guard against false teachers and false teaching. Later in Matthew 7 Jesus taught how to judge false teachers: “every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit” and “by their fruit you will recognize them”.

To follow Jesus, then, means that we as Christians will use our God-given ability to judge and discern truth first (and regularly) upon ourselves, and then to help others with their problems and to help them recognize false teaching. This is what I try to do in my Gospel outreach conversations, such as a friendly and respectful conversation I had on a street corner with a young man named Mike.

Mike believed himself to be a good person in God’s eyes, so I asked some questions to help him compare himself to God’s standard – God’s moral laws such as the Ten Commandments – rather than just human standards like just being a friendly and positive person. In doing this I was trying to help him judge himself – to remove the “plank” out of his own eye – so that he could see more clearly and then to be able to recognize false teachings he has come to accept.

I tried to help him see the inconsistency in his beliefs when I asked if he thought he was better than other people. “Oh no” he said, so I pointed out this would put him on the same level as, say, Hitler! If we truly believe in good and bad moral behaviors, we need to see ourselves as somewhere on the moral spectrum, and this means some people will be better and some worse than ourselves morally. We must naturally do this when we judge ourselves and others by human standards.

But when it comes to our relationship with God this human standard of judgment is a sign of the false teaching that makes all most religions “works-based” – that is, dependent on our own human efforts to earn some sort of heavenly reward. In contrast, God’s standard of judgment is His moral perfection, which puts us all in the same moral category – guilty sinners who can't save ourselves by our own efforts.

Only by God’s standards can we avoid the judgmental, self righteous attitudes of the Pharisees that Jesus condemned, and include ourselves in the same sinful category as the next guy, able to judge ourselves and help that next guy to do the same, and to help them see that we are all equally in need of the Savior.