Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Judge yourself
Matthew 7:5
Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
There is a natural tendency to criticize others. We look at people and make many judgements about them all of the time. We judge others based on their dress and appearance, we judge others based on their speech, and we judge others based on their conduct and behaviour. Most of our judgements are based on the outward observable criteria, often with little or no understanding of their circumstances.
There is a thin line here. There are many cases where the background circumstances cannot be used to justify the behaviour, but we must recognise that the background circumstances could at least give us an understanding of the behaviour. Understanding is what could really help us to help the person.
The biggest challenge with the judgements we make is that they tend to be made against a standard that often we don’t meet ourselves. We do this all the time in everyday life. Those of us who are parents, for example, are on our children for lying, but before we got home to them we told a series of little lies along the way. We probably lied to a supervisor, or a co-worker, or a customer. You could multiply these examples by yourself.
The older generation passes judgement on the younger generation forgetting the failings and folly of their own youth. The successful make judgements of the struggling forgetting where they themselves came from. The rich make judgements about the poor, ignoring the factors that caused the differences. The sophisticated make judgements about the uncultured not considering their own privileges and exposure. The poor make judgements about the rich often without knowing the details of their particular success story. And we could go on and on.
We hold ourselves up, as the saying goes, as paragons of virtue when in fact we are guilty of many of the same failings of those around us. Many times, we are able to conceal our own failings. What we did was done in secret and has not yet been discovered, or what we did is being kept secret by others because to expose us is to expose themselves.
We are very often self-righteous in the way we look at others because they are not like us. When we are successful we tend to be so self-confident and self-sufficient that we forget that we need others to survive and thrive. When we have achieved position and authority we tend to fall into self-admiration long before others could admire us; we speak of ourselves in the third person as if we are not there. And we could get to a place where we are so filled with self-love that we have no room to love others, not even our family and those who helped us along the way.
A.W. Tozer, in his 1948 Christian Classic, The Pursuit of God, called these the self-sins. Tozer wrote “To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them.”
Jesus, during the sermon on the mount, Matthew 7:1-5, referred to these self-sins as a “plank in your own eye.” For Jesus, the plank in our own eyes, our self-sins, affects our vision and judgement in such a way that we lose the moral high ground. We are no longer able to make judgements about others, rather we ourselves should be under judgement.
Jesus was talking to His followers at the time, not heathen strangers. It is sad and unfortunate that the self-sins are so prevalent among us in the church too. To reference Tozer again, in the passage we quoted earlier, he continued, “The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders …”
The Apostle Paul, addressing the conduct of the Lord’s Supper at Corinth, and by extension in our churches today, challenged us to be right before God before we partake. He challenged us to carefully examine ourselves to avoid a variety of negative consequences. Paul pushes hard, writing that, “if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged.” 1 Corinthians 11:31
A note about the self-sins. While self-sins cause us to make judgements about others that we shouldn’t really be making, self-sins also affect our relationship with God. We forget that it is God who creates the objective conditions for our success.
Moses warned the children of Israel, before they entered the promised land, that it is God who was making the way ahead of them. He warned them that they could get to a place where they might say in their own hearts, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gained me this wealth.’ Instead, he told them, “remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth,” Deuteronomy 8:17,18.
Jesus said that we should stay away from Judging others in the first palace, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” But there is another warning that He gives recognising that as we judge others the reaction is going to be that we will come under judgement ourselves and our self-sins would be exposed. “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Matthew 7:1,2.
Think on these things:
- Are you critical and judgemental of others?
- Do you commit any of the self-sins?
- Can you think of any area in which you have judged others, that you could be embarrassed if your secrets were to be exposed?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would search ourselves, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to identify our self-sins and repent of them.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex