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.  Matthew 7:1-2

You know the phrase. You hear it from friends or acquaintances in the work place…maybe even at church. It usually is uttered by someone whose life is an ongoing train wreck of bad decisions and consequences. He or she has just made another one and is telling you not to speak into their life unless it is a word of total approval. If it is someone at church, they like to quote scripture as a rebuke to you even thinking of disapproving of their decisions.

The verse above comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  Of course, we call it by that name, he didn’t.  That verse and other’s like it have been misused on many occasions to protest any admonition or rebuke levied against an individual’s sin or misbehavior.  The current cultural gist of the phrase means that I don’t think anyone should hold me accountable for any of my bad, hurtful, destructive, or just plain stupid behaviors.  

If “judging,” in the sense that Jesus used it, meant calling another person to repentance or a course correction, then Jesus himself sinned on numerous occasions as well as most of the other writers of the New Testament.  Jesus pointed out the sins of the Pharisees on numerous occasions. He also encouraged the “adulterous woman” of John 8 to “go and leave your life of sin. ” He warned the paralytic he healed at the pool of Bethesda to stop sinning or something worse would happen to him. In addition, the writers of the New Testament often pointed out sins in the churches to whom they were writing as they called them to repentance and, on occasion, even called out people by name. From time to time they even ordered church discipline to be administered to those who persisted in sin.

So, if the “judging” Jesus warned about is not a prohibition against pointing out the sins of others, what is it ?  It’s an important question and one that needs to be seriously considered in the area of spiritual freedom and spiritual warfare.  

As in most spiritual issues, the key seems to be the condition of the heart and our motives for “judging,” that makes the act either a sin or a righteous act on our part. In the context of the Sermon on the Mount, I believe the “judging” is a matter of condemnation of another person from a sense of self-righteousness or moral superiority.  It is one thing to point out a behavior that is misaligned with God’s will out of concern for the sinner and quite another thing to condemn the person while holding ourselves up as models of virtue.

The key is that righteous “judgment” is out of concern for a person’s salvation and the spiritual health of the body of Christ.  There is no self-righteous component in which church leaders are feeling morally superior to the person caught in sin.  Love is motivating the discipline in the same way that love motivates a parent to discipline a rebellious child. The goal of proper judgment is always redemption motivated by love.

The judgment that Jesus warns us about is a personal judgment based on a feeling of superiority or a desire to wound or demean another person. We tend to leap past the behavior and label another person as if we know his thoughts, his  heart, his motives, and his history.  Instead of saying that a young woman is involved in sexual immorality, we simply label her as a slut…verbally or in our own minds. At that point, we have made her “less than” us, although we undoubtedly have another variety of sin in our own life that we justify or don’t recognize.  That judgment exalts us and diminishes the other person.  We don’t feel concern, but rather contempt. We don’t love, but reject.  We judge the person’s worth and value, rather than letting God be the judge. Here is the danger.  When we judge with that heart, we align ourselves with Satan who is the chief accuser of the brethren.

2020 has been a miserable year. People are stressed, discouraged and afraid. In the wake of that, people make bad decisions and calls for marriage counseling have increased. For me, the most difficult thing in marriage counseling is to deal with judgment.  Once a spouse has judged his or her partner as selfish, hateful, perverse, manipulative, etc., it is difficult for that person to see their spouse in any other light.  Even when that spouse is trying to change, the one who has made a judgment will not see the change or credit the effort.  Eventually, the “judged” spouse will give up trying to be different because they sense that whatever they do will never be enough. The spouse who has made the judgment will always feel superior to the other and their disdain or disrespect will poison the relationship.  Believe me, Satan will work hard to justify and maintain that judgment in the mind of the spouse who has made it. You can see how damaging this kind of judgment can be.

Secondly, Jesus says that “with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged.”  When we judge others with a heart of moral superiority we have entered into the realm of pride and arrogance, which opens us up to the enemy.  That kind of judgment is a form of “unforgiveness” in which we have condemned another and refuse to let go of our condemning attitude. We have defined another person without mercy or forgiveness.  When we judge another, in this context, we sin and the unrepented sin is an open door to the enemy.  Not only that, but once we have cast another person in a certain light through judgment, we typically dismiss or “filter out” all evidence to the contrary. If you think about it, that seems to be the basis for racism and bigotry.

This kind of judgment, because it is sin, gives the devil a legal right to afflict us.  That is how our judgment comes back on us.  Remember…with what judgment we judge, we shall be judged. If we judge someone to be a perverse person, Satan can deal with us as a perverse person. If we judge someone to be selfish, the enemy can deal with us as a selfish person. In finding freedom, people not only need to repent of active sin and unforgiveness, but of judgments as well. In the same way that we repent of sin and renounce it, we must also repent of judgments and renounce them before we can dismiss every demon. Again, this is not a denial of sin, but a change of heart toward the sinner and any sensei of our own superiority.

Once again, identifying behavior as sinful, based on the word of God, is not the same as labeling a person and thinking less of them because of our personal agendas.  The kind of judgment the apostle Paul calls us to honors the word of God and humbly seeks restoration of a person caught in sin. The judgment Jesus warns us against, actually diminishes the chance for restoration because we feel no obligation to try to redeem that person we have labeled and often seek to have others join us in our judgment against him or her through gossip and inuendos.  

So, as we examine ourselves to see if we are in alignment with the Father’s will, we may want to scan our own hearts and history to see if judgment is opening a door for the enemy or is keeping us from reconciling a relationship.  If we are ministering freedom, to others, judgment is an area that needs to be explored.  If we have placed a judgment on ourselves, we also need to repent of that judgment and renounce it.