Speaker 3: One of the most often things that I heard at the last
church in the youth ministry is that True North was judgy.
We had Christian clubs on different campuses and all the campuses that
knew about us would say, oh you're from the Compass Bible Church,
you're one of those judgy Christians.
We don't like going to your clubs because you guys always make people
feel bad about the things that you say or things that you believe.
I saw this trend on TikTok, which is we, hold on, it goes like this.
We listen and we don't judge.
Yeah, that's how it works.
Exactly.
So we're going to do this at some point as a group, we're going to do
the, we listen and we don't judge.
But I find it amusing because one of the things that people love to
encourage is, Hey, don't judge me.
Don't judge me.
In fact, there was a song back in the nineties, maybe the early 2000s.
No, it's definitely in the nineties.
Or this guy sang this song that said, only God can judge me.
Lots of people are concerned about judging and you should be.
You don't want people judging you wrongly.
You don't want people thinking the wrong things about you,
but judging is a way of life.
This is how we get through life period.
You should judge.
The question is, how should you judge?
What should you be judging and what way should you be judging?
And that's what this sermon is going to be about.
And in fact, I can boil all of this down for you in just one and one sentence.
In fact, let's put it like this.
Take notes, this is going to be your way of phrasing this whole conversation.
I want you to learn to judge, and the way that you're going to judge
well is by judging yourself first.
So I put it like this, judge others rightly by judging yourself firstly.
I don't think firstly is technically grammatically correct, it doesn't sound
good, but you get the idea, right?
Judge yourself, or judge others rightly by judging yourself firstly.
That's kind of Jesus point as we make our way into The Gospel of Matthew once more.
In fact, we're getting close to the end of the Sermon on the Mount.
And so we're getting down to the final verses here, and Jesus is
concerned that the way you approach people is not the wrong way.
He wants you to love them.
He wants you to care about people.
He wants it to be salt and light.
He cares that you make a difference in the world around you.
He cares that you value what's valuable, that you acquire spiritual
resources and spiritual rewards.
But here, Jesus is going to give you some really important information about how
to interact with the world around you.
In fact, one of the most important questions you can ask is how do
I interact with people and judge appropriately without alienating them?
How do I love people well?
In fact, it's going to take a lot of effort on your part if you're going to be
a good friend to the people that you love.
For instance, one student I had always the kind of student that just never
came to youth ministry, put together.
He always had something going on.
And so one day he came and, this is embarrassing.
You're never going to find out who it is anyway.
So it's perfectly safe.
He came to youth ministry and he reeked, just had the armpit thing going on.
So I walked by him and it's like one of those things where he's passing me.
I'm passing in the, Whoa, I, the cloud of bodily odor went with him.
And I thought, okay, What's my play here?
How do I help this kid?
Cause he, he smells really badly.
I'm sure everybody notices it.
And he's a young man.
He cares about girls and what they think about him.
And so I said, Hey man, I put my arm around him.
I said, come with me.
And I walked him over to, this is in one 20 West.
If Compass Bible Church of Liso Viejo, it's this big square building
like this kind of, but there's a closet right next to the entrance.
So I took him to the closet and I said, Hey man, I just got
to tell you, you really smell.
You just, you're really bad today.
You need to do something about it.
Do you have any deodorant on your person or in your bag or in your socks?
Anywhere at all?
Do you have deodorant?
And his answer of course was no.
What's deodorant?
If he was a junior higher, I might give him that, but he was in high school.
He should have known better.
So I graciously loaned, this is gross.
This is man code.
You typically don't want to share these kinds of things.
But I loaned him my deodorant.
I always carry some in my bag for just such an occasion,
either if I stink or he stinks.
And I gave it to him, and I said, man, don't let this happen again.
Let this be a lesson.
Go and sin no more.
And he walked away.
I don't know if his life was ever changed, but it took someone confronting
another person to really impact him.
And I trust that he remembers this.
If I were to ask him about it, I'm sure he would remember the time that
Pastor Rod told him that he smelled.
I had to judge him to do that, though, didn't I?
I had to smell his person and realize he does not smell good.
I ought to do something about that.
Jesus wants you to know how to judge people.
And in fact, he wants you to know how to judge friends, how to judge brothers.
The context of this is that he wants you to know how to judge
people that you care about.
And the answer is not, don't judge me at all.
The answer is not, judge not lest you be judged.
People use this all the time, but they use it wrongly.
Jesus doesn't want you to not judge, period.
He wants you to judge the right way.
So with that said, follow along with me.
Matthew chapter seven.
Let's take a look at what Jesus says and let's first of all, read the
verse that everybody gets wrong.
In fact, one verse that people like to throw out Christians all
the time is, Hey, don't judge me.
Doesn't your Bible say, doesn't Jesus say, judge not well,
let's read this in context.
Matthew chapter seven, starting at verse one.
Here's what Jesus says.
Judge not that you be not judged.
Now if we were just reading that verse alone, we would understand how
people get this wrong all the time.
But he says more.
He says, for with the judgment you pronounce, that is the judgment that
you use against others, you will be judged by that same standard.
And with the measure you use with people, that same measurement
will be used against you.
Really simple what Jesus is saying here.
He wants you to know that you should not never judge, even though it sounds like
that, but that you should judge correctly.
He wants you to not be a hypocritical, self righteous, unfair, harsh judge.
He wants you to look at people and afford them the same kind of benefit of
a doubt that you would give yourself.
He's saying don't judge hypocritically.
This is a kind of a superiority complex.
You might be tempted to feel this kind of judgment when you hear
about the other churches in town.
Oh, you go to that church?
Oh, they don't really teach the Bible.
All they're doing is just doing this other stuff over here, this entertainment show.
Our church, we will really teach the Bible.
You guys, good luck to you.
Superiority complex.
This posture that Jesus is warning us against keeps us from the kind of
righteousness that God wants to create within us, and it's not a proud arrogance.
It's not a In fact, let's put it like this, point number one, when Jesus tells
you to judge somebody, he's going to say you need to judge others fairly.
He doesn't want you to judge somebody based on your own presupposition.
Sometimes today people are judged because of what they look like
or their race or their creed.
They're a certain religious type of person.
You can quickly make assessments about somebody and sometimes they're
somewhat right, but often we're wrong.
Jesus doesn't want us to judge harshly.
Imagine a football player playing in a key game and in somehow or another the
people start accusing this guy of cheating and so now everyone in the school says
oh the quarterback cheated deflate gate he was deflating the footballs and they
start calling people against him and they ask him not to play anymore he steps down
only to find out in the video footage he was never cheating after all but the
damage had been done people are already saying things about him they're already
ruining his reputation A lot of this can happen when you're talking to somebody.
Let's say you're having a tussle between you and your friend.
Oh Sean looked at me the wrong way today.
I don't like that.
We're not friends anymore.
I think Sean's doing drugs.
That's what I think.
You start telling people, Sean's doing drugs and oh, Sean's doing drugs.
I don't think he's doing drugs, it's just, he's here.
You talk to Sean and you realize, oh, he's not doing drugs and
he wasn't looking at me funny.
It was really just a misunderstanding.
He was getting ready to sneeze and I misunderstood that face as being mad.
Oh, that's what happened.
What happened?
All the people that you talked to and said, Sean's doing drugs.
That's why he's mad at me.
Now, they're infected with your cynicism about that person
because you judged unfairly.
You need to realize that Jesus doesn't want you to judge unfairly.
He doesn't want you to judge wrongly.
In fact, let's do it this way.
Judging others fairly looks like this.
First, it looks like assuming the best about somebody.
Judging others fairly means assuming the best.
You might know 1 Corinthians chapter 13.
This is often called the love chapter, and in this chapter, verse 7 is one
of, one of everybody's favorites, because here's what it says.
If you're a truly loving person, love bears all things.
That means you endure.
You put up with a lot of relational junk because you love the person.
It doesn't mean that you never address it.
We'll get to that in a second.
Love bears all things.
Love believes all things.
That's where I'm pointing here.
Believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
This is the posture that says, even though I could assume the worst about
you, I'm going to assume the best.
In fact, this is something a pastor has to do when I look at you and it
looks like you're not paying attention.
Often you're not paying attention.
You're one thing or another.
You're distracted by something else, partly because you're trained
by our technology to do that.
Hat tip to Revival Winter Edition.
But often I just think, okay, maybe they're thinking.
Maybe they're writing down notes.
Maybe they're trying to figure things out.
Maybe they're working it out on their paper.
You looking at anyone else in the world, it's easy for you to judge
them, for one reason or another.
Think about the kind of people that you're quick to judge.
I don't know about you but I notice different people groups.
In fact, in my neighborhood, there's a lot of different people groups.
And one subset of people group that I see all the time is Indians.
I don't know a lot about Indians.
I'm getting to know my Indian neighbors sometimes they're called Southeast Asians.
I I make assumptions about what is true about them, because I
don't know a whole lot of them.
And maybe you do the same thing, or maybe you do that with black people, and
maybe you do that with Mexican people.
Maybe you do that with all sorts of people, and you make assumptions
because you don't know a lot about them.
The idea here is that love believes the best about people.
Doesn't always mean you're going to be right, that's for sure.
But Jesus wants us to start with the posture scene.
I want to choose to believe the best about the people that God
puts in my life, whoever they are, especially if they're Christians.
Okay, assume the best.
Judging others fairly will also mean this.
Oops, there we go.
Considering multiple sides.
Someone offends you.
They say something to you that you don't like.
Again, someone makes a, someone gives you a look and you think that look is
disappointment, disapproval, your dad looks at you with a certain look, your
mom says something to you in a certain tone of voice, and you start making
assumptions about what that means.
Here's how scripture tells us to think about those kinds of situations.
It says this, proverbs 18 17 says the one who states his case first seems right
until the other comes and examines him.
You might have heard people say it this way, there are two sides to every story.
And get this is really cool.
This week I got glasses and these glasses actually magnify.
Oh wow, what a difference.
Okay, these glasses actually magnify.
I can see your faces much more clearly.
Two.
Yes, One of the things that I noticed when I put them on.
Is that I realized that my vision was not everyone else's vision.
That's not rocket science.
I know that you know that, but here's what was amazing to me.
I was looking at the world and thinking, this is what everybody
sees until I realized, Oh no, this is what everybody sees.
If you have 20, 20 vision, things clearly and sharply, even in the dark.
I got used to seeing things a certain way, but what it took me having to
do was putting on a different set of glasses to see the world differently,
to put on different lenses for you.
One of the challenges.
is that you're going to see things from your own perspective.
That's your easiest access point.
But God says, look, if you want to, if you want to judge others fairly,
you really have to give them the benefit of doubt and also consider
the issue from multiple angles.
Maybe there was something else going on in that person's life.
Maybe Sean was just preparing this knees and he wasn't looking at you funny.
Maybe your mom was thinking about something else when she talked
to you the way that she did.
Maybe your teacher isn't picking on you.
Maybe they're just having a bad Tuesday or Wednesday.
Maybe things aren't the way that you think that they are.
And often, they're not.
You're working with this much knowledge.
Okay, this is how much knowledge you have.
Now, out of curiosity, how much knowledge is there in the world?
How would you quantify that?
If this is you, what's the world's knowledge?
Beyond the world, like beyond the room, beyond the school, the
knowledge available to us is infinite.
Your knowledge is this much.
So what you should do with your imagination when you're trying to judge
the world around you is to say, okay, I'm going to assume the best and I'm
going to think about multiple angles and think about the multiple sides here.
That's how you judge someone fairly.
Consider multiple sides.
Don't rush to conclusions.
Give people the benefit of the doubt.
That's where Jesus starts.
He continues on and he builds his point here.
Remember, if we're going to judge others rightly, we have
to judge ourselves firstly.
Here's how Jesus develops his point, Matthew chapter seven, starting at
verse two into verse three, I think.
No, actually I'm going to start at verse three.
I have verse two there, but let's go to verse three.
He says, why do you see the speck?
That is like a speck of sawdust.
Why do you see the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye?
And when he says brother, he's not talking about your biological brother.
He's talking about your Christian brother.
Why do you see the speck, the itty bitty speck in your brother's eye, but do not
notice the log, this big wooden beam that they would use as pillars in their houses.
Why do you not notice this big plank in your own eye?
Or how can you say to your brother, let me take the little itty bitty speck
out of your eye when there is a log, a plank, a pillar in your own eye.
And notice how Jesus talks to this person.
He says, you hypocrite.
First, take the log out of your own eye.
Take that big pillar out of your eye, and then you'll be able to
see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
Notice here, he doesn't say don't ever judge.
He's saying when you judge, make sure that you judge yourself first.
Point number two, when you're trying to judge and judge right, Jesus says,
judge your own sin before judging theirs.
Make sure that when you attempt to help somebody with some area
of sin in their lives, that you first and foremost deal with yours.
Okay.
That's good.
We're almost there.
Oh, I told you there was a lot to learn.
All right.
I'm going to try this.
I've been studying this for a long time.
I'm going to try it for the first time.
And I'm going to wear it.
And I expect it's going to be the most amazing.
And I'm going to do it, and I'm going to do it.
somewhere around the time that Jacob was born.
I got LASIK.
LASIK is when they take a laser and put it in your eye and correct your vision.
I don't know how it works, but I just know the basics as what they do.
They correct your vision by putting a laser in your eye.
They say it lasts about 10 years, and I'm a little beyond that now, so
here we go again, putting on glasses.
Now that I can see, I can point to you guys and say, look at that.
I can see, so I can tell you to see.
I can tell you, oh look at that star over there, because I can see it more clearly.
If I just had my normal vision, it would be a lot fuzzier, and I'd be
able to say, I think it's over there, and next to that thing over there.
It'd be much harder for me to help you see if I can't see.
That's what Jesus is saying here.
You're not gonna be able to see people's sin as easily if you're
clouded with your own sin in your life.
If you're living with sin in such a way that sin is clouding
your spiritual perception, you're not gonna be helpful to people.
In fact, let me put it like this.
You should judge.
There's a helpfulness to judging rightly.
One of the best things about having a good friend is that a good friend
can tell you when you smell like BO.
A good friend can tell you when you got a booger hanging out.
A good friend can tell you when you got something on your face.
Have you ever had some food on your face, and you don't find out for like minutes,
and you wonder, why did anybody tell me?
You go to the bathroom, food on your face, and you're wondering
why no one said anything to you.
A good friend's gonna point those things out.
A good friend cares about you enough to say, hey man, your fly is down.
I've done that to countless people and I love when people say hey man But I
should let you know in a private way not like where everyone can hear you.
I think it's that's a bro move Jesus wants you to judge appropriately The
way that you judge appropriately is by being willing to first and foremost
look at yourself This allows you to see others more clearly One of the
things you ought to notice here.
There you go.
There's my two points I didn't mean to do that.
There you go One of things you ought to notice that judging yourself helps you see
the blinding effects of Sin has a way of clouding your vision When you're living in
a life of sin, when you're doing something that violates God's law, that sin hardens
your heart and clouds your vision.
It makes it hard for you to see what's valuable.
Remember, I think two weeks ago in my sermon, I said, value what's valuable.
Jesus wants you to value spiritual rewards.
You should aspire for those.
If you're living in a life of sin, what's really valuable
doesn't look valuable to you.
You start saying I really value these other things.
I value frittering away my time with things that are less important.
If you have a hard time seeing what the Bible says is important, it might
be because you have sin that you love.
When you love sin, it's hard to love God.
You can't have sin in your heart, loving that and love God at the same time.
One, one thing is going to have to win.
You get to choose that.
And therefore, if you want to help judge others rightly, you need to be able
to look at yourself in the mirror, And realize that sin blinds your attention.
Again, when you have a good friend, they're willing to call sin out.
When you have a good friend, they're willing to say, hey
man you're really critical.
Or, hey sis, you're really vain.
It looks like you're really into your looks right now.
Or some other thing like that.
It doesn't have to be those two things.
But obviously, a friend that cares about you is a friend
that's going to call you out.
And so you want to be able to cultivate good judging skills.
And you're not going to do that if you're loving sin.
If you want to judge rightly, you have to look at yourself first and
say, am I harboring sin in my heart?
Secondly, judging yourself makes it possible for you to judge others.
Just because you're judging your own sin doesn't mean you're
guaranteed to judge others well.
It makes it possible, but you still have to know that you're going to
have to be careful and humble about the way that you approach people.
In fact, one of the things that you should be aware of is that Judging others is
something that you should do very slowly.
Jesus doesn't want you to do this all the time.
You're not the, you're not the Holy Spirit.
You're not the sanctification police.
But if you do love people, you will do this.
You will do this.
One of the things that make you able to see is your own
repentance and your own faith.
If you don't do that, you're the blind leading the blind, and that's not going
to be helpful for you or for them.
If you're going to help someone, By judging them well, you need
to have three ingredients.
Humility, clarity, and purity.
That's going to allow you to love people well.
And I want you to do this.
I don't want us to be known as judgy.
I don't want you guys to be known as judgy Christians.
But I do want you to judge.
And I want you to be clear and discerning in the right way.
For instance, when you get approached by a Mormon, or a Jehovah's
Witness, but I love Mormons.
Mormons are so nice.
They're some of the nicest people I know.
I would love to have them as neighbors.
I would love to have many more Mormon friends, because
they're just so nice to know.
They're great people.
I want you to imagine that your best friend is a Mormon, and they start
telling you the gospel of Mormonism.
Joseph Smith restored the gospel.
He gave us this New Testament that Jesus came to the Americas.
This is the Book of Mormon.
I want you to read it, and when you read the Book of Mormon, you're going to feel
the burning bosom in your heart, and you're going to know that Joseph Smith
is a prophet of God, And the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints
is His restored church on this planet.
Your love for that person will make it really hard for you to say, I
don't know if I should do this.
It's gonna tell you now.
Your love for people is gonna cause you to want to think what they believe
and say, Okay, maybe that's not so bad.
But, If you're judging yourself rightly and you're letting the Word of God
do its work on you, you'll be able to judge better, clearly, discern,
judging what's right and wrong.
You need a pure heart for this.
You need to be reliant on God's Word so that you can see what's truly there.
And Mormonism, as much as I love them, as much as I love Mormon people, I
know that their doctrine is damnable.
And that's an appropriate use of the term.
I'm not cussing up here.
It is an appropriate use of saying, Mormon doctrine is damnable,
and I could tell them that with love, and I've done that before.
We've done that on mission trips in our prior church, but that requires judging.
I want you to judge, not hypocritically, not harshly, not
unfairly, but to judge righteously.
Jesus continues on in this last part.
This is gonna sound really harsh, and we read these last words of
Jesus, but just notice here how he clearly wants you to judge.
Here's what Jesus says, Matthew chapter seven, starting at verse six.
Here's what he says.
Do not give dogs what is holy.
That's harsh, Jesus.
Do not throw your pearls before pigs.
Okay, Jesus, really harsh.
Why?
Lest they trample them underfoot, the pearls, and turn and attack you.
And so he says, dogs and pigs are, they're not good things.
In fact, we'll get to that in a second.
But notice here, he says, don't give to dogs what is holy,
because they will attack you.
Don't give to, don't give pearls to pigs, lest they trample them.
There's a pattern there.
If you see it, A, B, B, A.
Don't give the dogs what is holy because they may attack you don't give
the pigs What is don't give the pigs pearls because they'll trample them.
They don't care what they are Pigs can't appreciate a pearl and in fact pearls
in that day were more valuable than diamonds So we're talking about today.
It would be like saying hey, don't give the wolf your finest clothes They don't
want they know what to do with that If you have a coach handbag, don't give them your
coach handbag if you have a louis vuitton belt don't let them play with your louis
vuitton belt That's what Jesus is saying.
Now clearly Jesus wants you to judge because who are the dogs and the pigs?
You have to figure that out.
Who is he talking about?
When the Bible uses the terms dogs and pigs, these are not good things.
In fact, the only other place where you get both of them together
is 2nd Peter chapter 2 verse 22.
He says this, what the true proverb says has happened to them.
He's talking about false teachers.
He says this, the dog returns to its own vomit.
And the sow, that is the pig, the swine, after washing herself
returns to wallow in the mire.
She gets clean and she goes and plays in the mud.
The dog eats its own vomit.
If you have a dog, you've seen them do this.
That's a real thing.
Pretty gross.
My dog Chica did that several times.
She vomited up.
She was a cockapoo Cocker Spaniel poodle.
For those of you who don't know, she would vomit all over the place.
And I'm like, that's gross, Chica.
And then she'd just be like,
I guess waste not want not.
You're never going to lack for food.
Willing to eat that's gross.
Okay.
Dogs and swine, not good.
Furthermore here's another one about dogs.
In the book of Revelation, dogs are talked about in the same breath as
sorcerers, witchcraft, which of course, if you know your Bible, this is not
something that God looks upon favorably.
It says this, Outside the city gates, outside the blessing of God, are
the dogs, the false teachers, the sorcerers, and the sexually immoral, and
murderers, and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
Clearly, this is not the kind of crew that you want to run with.
Furthermore, here's a, here's one about pigs.
The demons came out of the man that was possessed by demons.
Jesus sends them out into a herd of pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep
bank into the lake, and they drowned.
All that to show you here that dogs and pigs are not looked upon favorably.
Jesus wants you to be able to identify the dogs and the pigs.
Now, what do we do with this harsh language?
What we do with it is recognize that there are a, there's a kind of person who is so
antagonistic and against your Christianity and your gospel that it doesn't make sense
to cast pearls before people that are going to trample it or to give it to dogs.
It is people that are going to attack you for it, persecute you.
I put it like this.
Point number three.
Judge when it's time to stop sharing the gospel.
There is a time, and this is the thing, it's not the first time probably, but
there is a time to say it's no longer wise for me to share the gospel with you.
Judging, Rightly means first of all looking at yourself and saying
I'm probably the issue here.
I want to judge myself first before I judge others.
Then as you think about others you want to judge in such a way that you
give them the benefit of the doubt.
You're not harsh, you're not critical, but then when it comes to how you present
the gospel to people you ought to be wise enough to say there's probably a
time when it's not really helpful for me to share the gospel with people.
And you ought to be sensitive to that.
I think Jesus is saying that right here.
There are times When Jesus does this, and I'll show it to you, but
if people are disrespecting God, and they're dishonoring God, they're
mocking Him, mocking you, mocking your Christianity, that's a time when it's
probably not good to share the gospel.
Here's what Jesus does in front of Herod.
Luke chapter 23 verses 9 and 11, Herod questions Jesus at some length,
but Jesus, get this, just did quiet.
Now, if Jesus were a scrupulous man, he might look at King Herod
and say this is a great opportunity.
I could, I, this is basically the Joe Rogan of the first century.
I can get on his podcast.
I can talk to all of Jerusalem because Herod likes me.
And maybe he'll give me a platform and people will listen to me.
And then I'll be able to get the gospel all over the world.
Jesus says nothing to him.
Why?
Because Jesus knew, just a verse later, Herod with his soldiers treated
Jesus with contempt and mocked Him.
Jesus followed His own teaching and He was not going to cast pearls before swine.
I know this is a derogatory term and you know I'm not expecting
you to call your friends or your frenemies dogs and pigs, but you
understand what Jesus is saying here.
Judge well enough to know there's a time not to say things.
And probably say more generally, there's a time to keep your mouth shut.
And you'd be wise, probably more often than not, to not say what you're thinking.
It goes on here.
When people mock and disrespect God, that's probably a time
to stop sharing the gospel.
But also when they threaten bodily harm.
That's verse 6.
He says, don't give your, don't give the dogs the gospel, don't give the
pigs the gospel, because they'll trample you, they'll attack you.
That's essentially what persecution is.
In Matthew chapter 13, 10 rather, verses 14 through 15.
Here's what Jesus says to his disciples as he sends them
off to share the early gospel.
He says, if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake
off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town.
In other words, don't let it bother you.
Let that roll off your back.
If they're not going to give you a hearing, they don't
want to hear the gospel.
Don't force it.
Don't stay there.
Don't build a mountain and say, I'm going to, I'm going to destroy you.
Don't build a fortress.
Don't acquire an army.
Don't call down fire on the town.
He says, look, shake off the dust from your feet.
Let it go and go on to the next town.
Go to someone who's willing to give you a hearing.
Verse 15 is the clincher because he says this, truly I say to you, it will be more
bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than that town.
Now, Sodom and Gomorrah should ring some bells for you.
This is the land that Abraham had to save Lot from.
Remember, there's angels that go to retrieve Lot and his family, and then
God rains down fire and sulfur upon this city, these cities, this collection
of cities, burns them to pieces.
Part of their sin was that they were sexually promiscuous.
Jesus says they're going to be more safe.
They're going to have a better judgment.
in hell than the person who doesn't respond to the gospel.
Think about that.
Sodom and Gomorrah is going to have a better time in hell than the person
who doesn't respond to the gospel.
You ever think about that?
That's remarkable because you would think Sodom and Gomorrah are really
big sinners and indeed they were, but Jesus is saying the more light you
have, the more judgment you acquire.
The more light you're exposed to, the more the gospel the more judgment
you're racking up if you reject it.
Because it is essentially trampling the blood of Jesus.
It would be like someone, okay, let's just say for yucks, one of my
daughters runs into the street, she gets hit by a car terrible story.
But you go outside and you dance in my daughter's blood, stepping on her blood
and kicking her corpse all over the place.
Now, just out of curiosity.
How do you think I might feel about that?
If you would say furious beyond all reason, you would be right.
How do you think God the Father feels when sinners trample on the
blood of his son who died for them?
I guess if you take the analogy further, trying to build the illustration here,
my daughter isn't only hit by the car and her blood is on the floor, she's out there
because she was trying to save your life.
She pushed you out of the way of the car, she gets hit by the car,
she's run over, she's up dead on the floor, and you dance in her blood.
Talk about offensive, right?
I know this is a gruesome illustration, but this is the point.
Jesus is saying, there's more judgment for those who reject the gospel.
because they're trampling on the blood of his son.
Then for those who lived in the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, all this
to showcase the fact that Jesus is saying there's a time not to engage.
There's a time to let it go.
And there's a time to, when they threaten bodily harm, Hey, don't sweat it.
Probably a time to leave.
Now there's qualifications here, because the apostle Paul sometimes leaned into
it and he allowed that to take place.
There is a time and place to say, I'm willing to suffer bodily
harm for the sake of the gospel.
There's a time and place for that.
But by and large, Jesus is saying here, you don't need to do that.
Don't cast your pearls before pigs.
Don't give the dogs what is holy.
Okay.
Judging others rightly starts with judging yourself.
Firstly, Jesus wants you to learn how to judge, to do it the right way.
Judging is appropriate and wise and good if you apply it the right way.
There's a kind of judgment that Jesus warns you against.
It's a hypocritical judgment.
It is harsh.
It is self serving.
It's a superiority complex.
It looks down at others and says, I'm better than you.
And I'm going to judge you with a different standard
than I judge myself with.
You might see adults do this all the time.
If you've ever sat with an adult in the car and they get angry at
cars around them, it's because they judge themselves to be morally
superior than the cars around them.
And that might be the case.
Now this is just another one of those things that you don't know.
Cars that cut off or are driving too fast or driving too slow, there's a
quick judgment on the part of adults that say, Man, that person is you know, if
they're going too fast, they're a moron.
If they're going too slow, they're a moron.
If they're making decisions that you wouldn't make, they're a moron.
We probably ought to be much more careful about that.
It's good for you to learn how to judge and to judge well.
It's bad for you to judge with hypocrisy, with superiority,
and with loveless criticism.
And really, that's the end of it, folks.
Learning to judge well starts with loving God and loving people.
If you care about people, you will judge appropriately.
If you care about your neighbor, your friends, your parents, you will judge.
You should judge, but be careful with that.
Jesus wants you to learn to judge others rightly by judging yourself firstly.
Let's pray.
God, help us to now put this to work, to apply some of these lessons
into our lives, to think about ways that we could use this even tonight.
Not that we want to become hypercritical, but or overly critical,
but we want to be appropriately critical, so please teach us how to
do that tonight in our small groups.
We ask this all in Jesus name, Amen.