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| Don’t Judge… Help series |


* Don’t Judge.
* Don’t Judge… Help!
* Judgement That’s Loving
* What Does Judging/Helping Look Like?







How do we reconcile love with judgment? How do we balance mercy and judgment? Are we even supposed to make judgments? We’ve been in a series exploring Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 7 to “Judge not, that you be not judged.” In exploring this passage, Jesus illustrates this command by telling us to remove the log from our own eye so that we can see clearly to help our brother with the speck in his. However, in seeing this speck in our brother aren’t we making a judgment?



More to the point, how do we reconcile Jesus instruction to “not judge” with other verses in the Bible which instruct us to make judgements like 1 Corinthians 5:12: “Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?”, or John 7:24: “Judge with right judgement.” I’m excited to explore this together today as we find the reconciliation for these things in nothing less than God’s character demonstrated through Jesus’ life.



Did Jesus Judge?



So, did Jesus judge? In John 8:15, Jesus says “I judge no one”. But there are several examples where it seems that Jesus did express a judgement:



Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.Matthew 23:15



But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”Matthew 16:23



How do we reconcile this? Moreover, what was the nature of Jesus’ judgements and what does that teach us about what judgement is supposed to look like?



Not Our Judgement



Right after Jesus said, “I judge no one”, he went on to say: “Back to Episodes