Open—Allan McCavour
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Our brother Umm yesterday in the address of the young people mentioned Umm, the phrase that we all know. Judge not.
I think it's one, I think it's said to be one of the most quoted verses in the Bible and I think it can safely be said to be one of the most misquoted verses in the Bible. And maybe this afternoon we can just take a look at that Matthew Chapter 7.
Verse 1. Judge not.
That you did not be judged.
For with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, with what measure ye meet ye shall be measured to you again.
There's a couple of different ways that this versus misapplied or misused or misinterpreted. The first one is, umm, more often used by the world.
And it simply goes along the lines of.
We cannot say what's right or wrong. What's right for you and I and not be right for me. What's wrong for you might not be wrong for that guy over there, Judge. Not now. Without even going back to the Bible, this is absurd on its face. It's a contradiction in and of itself. It's saying it's wrong to say something's wrong. That doesn't even make sense.
And usually what people mean when they say that is don't tell me what's wrong. I will be the judge of what's right or wrong, and you be the judge for what's right or wrong. But even then they say that, but they don't act that out.
Usually what they mean is I'll be the judge of what it's right, right or wrong, and you can be the judge of what is right or wrong as long as you agree with me.
Umm.
And I mean this, the Bible.
From the beginning to the end is full.
Of instruction of examples of teachings, whether it's in UMM.
Straight didactic turns, whether it's just clear instructions do this, don't do that, whether it's through examples, Look at these, the, uh, the faithful in the Old Testament, what did they do? What did they do right? What did they do wrong? What are the clues to the Lord's, to God's nature found throughout here through the prophets, through the example in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, We have in the Holy Bible the most clear teaching, the divine revelation of God, of what is.
Wrong. And it is part of our job as followers of Christ to teach that to not just to each other, but to the world.
And we can't simply say well.
They're not a believer. We can't expect them to follow right and wrong. And that's true in one sense. But how can we call anyone to repentance if we can't bring them to conscience of sin?
If there's no sin, there's no repentance.
And in part, we see enrollments. That's what the law is for. We need to teach right and wrong. We need to be the light on the hill that says.
Repent because I'm a Sinner too, but repent because the Lord is that perfect light.
So that's one of the ways that people misuse these bursts. They say there's no absolute right and wrong.
As we read here, though, the second thing is, what is this really speaking to? This is speaking to hypocrisy. It's a saying well.
I'm engaged in moral evil, but don't you be engaged in moral evil And so one of the ways that people misapply this is this is more more often found among believers, but not exclusively is well, I'm a Sinner and you're a Sinner. So who are we to really judge each other And if the versus software. I stopped reading. You could maybe forgive someone for believing that. Let's keep reading here verse 3.
And why beholdest thou the Moat that is in my brother's eye? But consider us not the beam that is in 909.
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and behold, the beam is in thine eye own eye. Thy hypocrite first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the Moat out of thy brothers eye. So do we just throw up our hands and say, well, we're all sinners? Who are we to say right and wrong? No, we're to judge ourselves, we're to condemn our own hypocrisy. We're to leave that sin, we're to repent.
And before we do anything else.
And we're get, we're kind of we're given a bit of instruction on this. It says first get rid of the beam. Now beam could be translated as log something really big versus the spec in someone elses eye, right?
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And why are we to get rid of this? It's that in verse five that thou shalt see clearly.
I see a lot of people with glasses on here. I've had glasses most of my life. I'm going to have to start wearing them again soon.
And we all know, and if you don't have glasses, maybe you can kind of see this in the windshield of a car, but you kind of slowly get a build up of grime and dirt on there. You don't really notice it, right? You're just looking through. Everything looks normal until one day you pull your glasses off and you wipe them out. Oh, right. Wow.
Didn't everything look normal until you cleaned them and all of a sudden you're like wow, everything I looked at was filthy dirty but I didn't notice it. In the same way. When we look at others, we might see the back in their eye, but maybe we're seeing that through the lens of our own filthy glasses.
And it could be seeing judging actions throughout our own, umm, sin. So if we struggle with pride, we somewhat see someone walking with their head up. We say, oh, what a proud man. He thinks he's better than me. Is he? Does he really? Or is it my own interpretation through my own sin, the the log that's in my eyes?
Umm, we're supposed to see clearly. We need to judge in godly wisdom. We need to see.
What that other person is doing is it is it, are we interpreting it through our own or is it something that we can objectively see? They are they do have a speck in their eye.
OK, so we've gotten rid of the log out of our own eye. We've gotten rid of our hypoxia. We've repented of our own sin. We see clearly, We see this back in our eye. Are we now free to just get in there and start judging? Well, no.
Look at verse.
Five. At the end it says, Then thou shalt see clearly to what? To cast out the motive, Thy brother's eye? What is your motivation?
In in looking and seeing the spec of your eye in someone else's eye, what's your motivation there? Is it self righteousness? Is it righteousness on behalf of someone else maybe or the Lord or in our own minds there's lots of reasons. Or is it in love and sorrow to help that person?
That's caught in that snare of sin.
Is it to make yourself better or to heal them?
And that could be a hard thing to judge because sometimes those things are really mixed up together, especially when our emotions get involved in family and friends and all that sort of thing. But we really need to be before the Lord.
In what is our motivation if we say, oh, that's wrong, It's not that it's not wrong. It's not that we should wink at evil and anything like that, but we need to be before the Lord when we judge to say, am I doing it for me or for them?
And finally on the last thing I'd like to say about this is.
Three verse that we all know in the same chapter, verse 12. Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye Even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets, when we look on the behavior of others.
We should be.
Doing this in love, there's there's always different ways to interpret it. On the Carry Blvd. here in Montreal, there's an exit on the left hand side which is unusual and causes a lot of traffic accidents. And that lane that exits always backs up.
And back when I lived here, there would be lots of times when I'm driving and in a big hurry and I get on the highway and I get up to this exit and I see those cars are all lined up, and I really need to get where I'm going. I accelerate along the line of cars waiting. Oh, there's a gap. Let me zoom in there. Get in there. The guy behind me.
What a jerk. You know, listen, what's really gonna make a difference? Three, You know, three more seconds. He's gonna have to wait because I pulled in there. I'm gonna hurry. Let's go. And then another day. I'm coming along.
And I'm not in such a big hurry. And I just pull in. I'm waiting. And this guy comes zooming along and pulls it in front of me. He'd be, what a jerk, right? And I was like, well, you know, I had, I was waiting. Why couldn't you wait too? We judge ourselves by our our intentions, but our others by their actions. And this is something we should have a conscience about if someone in the assembly does something that offends you.
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We need to look at is there more than one? We know our own intentions, but we don't know there. The Lord knows the heart. We judge others by their actions. Is there more than one way to interpret that? If someone makes a joke, is it because they wanted to offend us or because they were trying to make a joke? And maybe they're not very good at making jokes. If someone sits in your seat or wears a hat you don't like or I don't mean to make fun of these kind of smaller things, but often these are the things that drive.
Problems that become much bigger things. We need to be generous in our.
Attribution of motives to each other. If there's two ways to look at it, and one of them is offensive and one of them is not, let's pick the one that's not.
You know, we can get to the point where we have a trouble with the brother and we know what to do. We need to go speak to them and that stuff, but.
How much more loving is it to not even get to the point where we're offended? And again, I'm not talking about winking at evil or anything like that, but there are these all these interactions that are not objectively sinful if someone doesn't say hi to you or someone.
Was mean to your kid or you know, there's all these things that just through the day-to-day life that we rub up against each other. We need to have grace and love and what drives us to have this grace and love? What motivates us.
Well, we think of that example of the.
The Lord gave of the of the steward who has forgiven his $1,000,000 debt and goes to the ones that owe him money and says pay me back or I'll throw you in jail.
We we had the remembrance of the Lord. How much were we forgiven? How much grace was He given? And He knew our hearts. How much more should we be for giving to those when we don't even know their hearts?
So let me just encourage us all to be gentle and loving.
When it comes to these smaller things, and yet when it comes to the truth of what's right and wrong that so clearly LED out in this Bible to the world and to each other, let us be those lights on a hill that speak clearly.