[Morning Sermon] Judge Not, and You Will Not Be Judged (Luke 6:37-38)

The words "judge not" are often thrown in Christians' faces when they try express an unpopular moral opinion. But did Jesus really mean to say that a good Christian never exercises his or her judgment? The short answer to that question is no, and in this sermon we'll learn what Jesus was really talking about and how the challenge for every Christian is to put down the spirit of judgmentalism and pick up the spirit of grace that orders our power of judgment toward the purpose of love.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

I'm fiddling with my pulpit because somebody else fiddled with it first. There we go. It's not my pulpit, it's Jesus' pulpit. So don't fiddle with it. There we go. I thought it was gonna fall. Alright. Judge not, and you will not be judged. Let us pray. If I were to guess, I would say that these words are among the most common Bible verses quoted by unbelievers. I've heard them quoted many, many times, typically after I or some other Christian expresses some kind of moral critique or opinion rooted in the teaching of Scripture that maybe pushes against cultural sentiment. Examples. Homosexuality is sin. Judge not and you will not be judged. Abortion is wrong. Judge not and you will not be judged. Men can't become women. Judge not that you be not judged. Quit judging. That's not your job. But when Jesus said these words, was he really telling his people to suspend all moral judgment? Is that really what Jesus meant when he said, judge not and you will not be judged? Well, that would seem to contradict a lot of the other things he said, wouldn't it? Like when he said in Matthew 7, 6, cast not your pearls before swine. Well, how can we tell who the swine are without exercising some form of judgment? Or when he tells his disciples in Matthew 16, 6, to beware the leaven of the Pharisees, is he not calling us to make some sort of judgment with respect to the Pharisees and their teaching? All over the New Testament, really. Jesus and his apostles counsel believers to make careful judgments about themselves and about the people in and around the church. Paul, he tells the church in Corinth to cast out a man for marrying his father's wife and not to associate with people who call themselves Christians yet engage in all sorts of sinful behavior. First John, the whole of the letter really is written to help us discern between true and false believers. In other words, to train us up to judge rightly between people who would lead us toward Jesus and people who would lead us away from Jesus. Okay, so what does Jesus mean? What does Jesus mean when he tells us not to judge? That's what we're going to look at this morning. And what we'll see is that in these words, Jesus does not call upon us to surrender our powers of moral judgment. Instead, he calls us to submit them to the higher purpose of love. So that when we make a moral judgment, like we should, say we rightly affirm that homosexuality is a sin, that doesn't mean that we wax judgmental toward the people who struggle with that sin. It doesn't mean that we write those people off and consign them to the fires of hell. Exactly the opposite. That's what Jesus is going to show us today. So far as that person or those people's sin affects us, we forgive them. And instead of pushing them away, we pull them closer. Instead of withholding from them, we give to them freely. And as we do that, we reflect the grace and mercy of a heavenly father who is in the business of giving people what they don't deserve. More specifically, we embody the grace and mercy of a heavenly father who gave us what we did not deserve by sending his own son to take upon himself the condemnation due to us all. So with that said, I'll invite you to rise, and we are going to read these often quoted words from Jesus in Luke 6, verses 37 through 38. Judge not, and you will not be judged. Condemn not and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Heavenly Father, help us this morning to understand these words and to apply them to our hearts and minds, so that we might be a people who don't write people off in judgment, but draw them near, and so show the love and the patience and the mercy of our Heavenly Father. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. Alright, so for these past few weeks, we have been working our way through this three-part sermon, typically known as the Sermon on the Plane. And I had originally intended to devote one sermon to each part, but as I was digging in this week, I realized that verses 37 through 38 really merit their own focused attention. And so I want to slow things down and add an extra week just to pay close attention to these two verses. And again, it's important that we do that because these verses have been so misunderstood and so misused by so many people. And for other people, they've been neglected. For some people, this is the muzzle passage that ought to keep Christians from saying anything that our neighbors don't want to hear. But for others of our Christian brothers and sisters on the other side of that spectrum, it's as if these verses aren't even in the Bible. There are some people trying to get in. Sorry, that was super weird. The doors are locked. Could one of our ushers please unlock them? And nobody look when they come in because that'll be super uncomfortable. Let's just keep on keeping on like nothing happened. I'm just seeing them out of my eyes. Anyway, our challenge this morning is to attend closely to what Jesus said in its context, so that we can learn how to judge rightly without becoming judgmental. Alright, the first thing we need to say about this context has to do with the golden rule that we heard expressed in verse 31. It says, as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them. Like we talked about the other week or last week, when we allow the grace that has flown to us through Christ to flow through us to others, we live into our status as sons and daughters of the Most High. We image the Heavenly Father who causes his Son to shine and the rain to fall on saints and sinners alike. Now in today's passage, Jesus takes that golden rule and he applies it specifically to the matter of moral judgment. When we think about others and we think about the rightness or the wrongness of their actions, we should treat them the same way we would wish to be treated. And to understand that and how that works, we really need to look at the whole of these two verses. If we just abstract a phrase here or there, if we just cherry pick one out, like judge not, and we set it up as its own command, we're actually going to miss what Jesus is saying. And what we have here, it's two couplets or two pairs of commands. The first two commands are negative, they tell us not to do something. The second two commands are positive, they tell us what to do instead of that something we don't do. And then in verse 38, we have a guarantee on the golden rule. Treat people the way you'd like to be treated, knowing that even if they don't return the favor, God won't. Don't judge and you won't be judged. Don't condemn and you won't be condemned. Forgive and you'll be forgiven. Give and you will receive. Alright, so let's take a look at the first couplet in verse 37. Judge not and you will not be judged. The Greek word for judgment here is the word krinno. And just like the English word for judge, krinno has a broad range of meaning. It can mean something as simple as making a choice between two options, like when kids pick teams on the playground. It can refer to expressing an opinion about something, positive or negative. Like, I judge Eric Clapton to be a far better guitar player than Jimi Hendrix. And if you disagree with me, I judge you to be deaf. So that's one way we can use the word judge. Judging can refer to mulling over a bunch of factors in order to come to a conclusion or a decision, maybe about different jobs or different houses, places to live, things like that. And finally, judge can refer more narrowly to judicial process. Like when a judge in the courtroom judges a case and passes his judgment. Now, we know that it's that last sense of the word that Jesus has in mind because of the second half of the couplet. Condemn not, and you will not be condemned. See, this is a common literary move in scripture where you have a pair of lines, and the first line expresses a generality, and the second line focuses it in. It drills down. And what Jesus drills down on here when he tells us not to judge is that we ought not to condemn. Now the Greek word for condemnation here is a much more focused word than the one for judgment. The word is katadikado. And it literally means to judge down or to judge against someone. In Acts 25, for example, when Festus laid Paul's case against or before King Agrippa, he said the Jewish leaders had asked for a sentence of condemnation, a katadike, against him. A judging against, a judging down, a very negative, very harsh, very focused sense of the word judge. And that is the kind of thing that Jesus is talking about here. He's not talking about the exercise of basic moral judgment, but the handing down of a conviction as though we were a judge in a courtroom. See, this is precisely what the scribes and the Pharisees have been doing to Jesus throughout the Gospel of Luke. They've been judging him, they've been condemning him, they've been writing him off as a false teacher, and they've even started plotting against him. And it's the same treatment that his disciples can expect to face, not just from the Pharisees, but more generally from anyone who had set themselves up as an enemy, as an opponent of the gospel. The world will despise you, the world will write you off, the world will render its judgment and condemn you as a heretic for violating the spirit of the age. That's what Jesus is getting at here. But when they do that, when the world condemns you, here's what you do: love your enemies, do good to them, bless them, pray for them, treat them the way that you would have them treat you. How? By refusing to judge them the way they judge you. By not weighing them up against your own set of expectations and condemning them and writing them off the same way they condemn you. See, we are not called as followers of Christ, as his disciples, to play the role of judge and jury. Our place is not to condemn people, our place is not to write them off, our place is to love them, even if they're wrong, even if they're wicked, even if they're the most egregious sinners. If we want to put a word on it, if we want to dial down on what Jesus is warning us against here today, it's not judgment so much as it is judgmentalism. See, judgmentalism is the legal reflex of a self-righteous heart. It's a way of trying to gin up our own right standing with God and the world by comparing ourselves with other people. Judgmentalism, it's like a spiritual angiogram. It reveals the deep dysfunction within our hearts. Pride, we think too much of ourselves. Contempt, we think too little of other people. Envy, we secretly wish we could live the way that they're living. Deflection or despair, we we judge them because we're too afraid to judge ourselves. These are all the symptoms of a sad, stony heart that resides in all of us until the Spirit comes to remove that heart and to replace it with the soft, squishy heart of the flesh. A heart that is alive to God, a heart that is awakened to righteousness, and a righteousness that comes not from within, not on the basis of our own works, but from without. See, Jesus came to secure that righteousness for us through his life of perfect obedience and through his sacrificial death on the cross. And so here, the giver of righteousness, Jesus himself, is teaching us how not to be self-righteous in the way we think about other people. Now it's not enough, right? It's not enough for Jesus to merely tell us what we ought not to do. Yes, we should refrain from passing judgment in a condemnatory kind of way. But what should we do instead? He gave us the negative. What's the positive? And we get that in the second half of verse 37 and on to 38. Instead of thinking, speaking, and acting in judgmental ways, we are called positively to forgive and to give. So first, let's talk about forgiveness. Jesus says, forgive and you will be forgiven. And the Greek word here for forgiveness is the word apolu. And if we break it down to its roots, it literally means to release or to untie something, the same way you might untie a cord that's binding a bundle of firewood. So this is another word, and another one of those words with a broad range of meaning that you need the context to really drill down on. And in the context of judgment, it has to do with pardon. That's what it means. To legally unbind or to release a person from liability. Now that's interesting, isn't it? That Jesus would tell us to forgive someone. I mean, he can't mean that we're supposed to forgive them as far as their legal liability before God is concerned, right? We are not the Son of Man. We don't have the authority to forgive people of their sins in that way. And so the context Jesus is pointing us to here must be personal. To forgive someone is not to release them from their liability before the throne of God's judgment. It's to release them from their liability from before us. To forgive is to say, I will no longer hold this against you. In the courtroom of my heart, I will acquit you of the crime that you've committed against me, and I will let you go free. I will not hold your sins against you. I will not publicize them on social media. I will not report them to your boss. I will not bring them up the next time we have an argument. Like God says, He does with our sins in Jeremiah 31. I will forgive your sins and I will remember them no more. I will forgive and I will forget. Now that's a radical thing that Jesus is calling us to. And it's all the more radical when we remember that we're still in the realm of enemy love here. Like I can forgive my wife, I can forgive my friends. But when it's the raving lunatic who cussed me out at length and threatened me this week, forgiveness is a much taller order. Yes, there's a story there. You can ask me later. Love your enemies. Don't judge them. Don't condemn them. Forgive them. And as if that order weren't tall enough. Jesus doesn't allow forgiveness to float free around in abstraction. It's not enough to simply forgive them in our hearts. There's actually a hand component. There is a call here to tangibly and concretely bless the people we've wronged. And we see that in the second pair of commands. Give and it will be given to you. The Greek verb here, standard verb for giving, right? No help there. But with the things that Jesus said in verses 30 and 34 about giving to those who make demands and lending without expectation of rewards, Jesus here is talking about some form of material support. And so just to cut to the chase, Jesus is saying, when you forgive the one who hurt you, don't just do it with your thoughts or with your words. Do it in such a way that if they were to make some sort of request of you, you would honor it. Now, for a pastoral caveat, right? I feel compelled to make explicit what I think would have been abundantly clear to Jesus' audience. If someone is hurting you, if someone is actively sinning against you, forgiving and giving does not mean enabling. If your drug-addicted friend has stolen from you to pay for his latest fix, then you are not obliged to float him the cash for another one. Does that make sense? You can forgive, you can give, you can be generous, but that does not mean that your generosity has to come according to their terms. See, what's happening here, what Jesus is after, is not so much an inflexible rule as it is the posture of our hearts. When we forgive someone, we cannot just do it with words. In a spirit of judgment and anger, we cannot withhold from them the good that we would show to anybody else, or for that matter, the good that we wish anybody else would show to us. Remember the golden rule. The golden rule is like the backbone that holds this whole passage up. Judge not and you will not be judged. Condemn not and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you. Do to them what you wish they would do to you, and it will be done. Now, in just a minute, we'll talk about how it will be done and by whom it will be done. But before we do, we need to take a look at what Jesus says in verse 38, when he transports us for a second into the marketplace to illustrate what he's been talking about. As one scholar describes the scene, what you have here is a farmer selling grain, and he's got something like a measuring bucket or container in front of it. And he fills up the container about three-quarters of the way full, and then he shakes it really good to make sure everything settles to the bottom. And then he fills it to the top, and then he shakes it again to make sure all the grain settles. And then he fills it some more and he presses down the corn and he tamps it as hard as he can. And after that, he dumps it over and heaps it into a cone. And then he he bores a number of holes into the cone and he stuffs those horns with cr with corn step after step, making sure he can fit as much grain as possible into this heap. Why? To make sure that the buyer gets the fullest measure of grain possible. It's not like at the movie theater when you order a soda and you get the cup and it's all ice, right? No, the honest dealer makes sure that the buyer gets everything that they've paid for. So this is a matter of fairness, fairness in equal weights and measures. But it's actually even more. It's more than just fairness, because when the farmer puts the measure of grain into your lap, and the lap was like the fold in the garment in their cloaks that they would carry things around in, when the farmer puts fills the lap, he fills it to overflowing. So this is this is what bringing it back and kind of explaining the illustration, this is what Jesus is saying. When you check your judgmentalism, when you forgive with your heart and you give freely with your hands, you make like the farmer who ensures that his customers get everything they paid for and then some. And if that's how you treat people, then you can be expected to be treated, you can expect to be treated the same way in return. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. But now we can't avoid the question any longer who does the measuring back? Because if we look at Jesus' experience, If we look at our own experience, we can pick up, we can pick out all kinds of moments when we've loved our enemies exactly how Jesus is telling us to, and they have not returned the favor. Jesus himself, when he hung on the cross, Father forgive him, or Father, forgive them. He forgave the way he's telling us to forgive, and they did not take him down. When Stephen looked up to heaven and he saw Jesus there, and he said the same words, Father, forgive them, the Jews did not stop throwing the rocks at his head. And so if that's the promise that Jesus is making, we've got kind of a problem because it's invalidated by Scripture itself and by our experience. But there's something we need to notice here, if we're going to understand just what kind of promise he's making. Verses 37 and 38, when Jesus says, you will not be judged, you will not be condemned, and so on, who's the subject of those verbs? It's a trick question. There actually is no grammatical subject. Those verbs are passive. And when Jesus does that, when he speaks in that way, he focuses our attention not on what people will do, but what God will do. Because God is the implied subject of the verbs. Just a few verses earlier in verse 35, Jesus said, we should love our enemies so that we might reflect the grace and mercy of our Heavenly Father, which is a reward in itself. And here he extends that forward to show that if we refrain from judging and condemning people and we forgive and bless them in said, God will return the favor. He will not judge us. He will not condemn us. He will forgive us. He will give back to us. Now we've got to be careful here, right? We don't want to misunderstand what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not saying that we will be saved on account of our non-judgmental attitude or that we can earn God's forgiveness by way of forgiving other people. No, Jesus is telling his brothers and sisters, or at least his potential brothers and sisters, how they ought to act as members of God's family. If we're judgmental, if we condemn others, if we refuse to forgive, if we withhold from people that we say we've forgiven, then we live in a profound state of contradiction. God has entrusted the judgment of all things into his only Son. And Jesus has entered into the middle of history to take that judgment upon himself so that if we put our trust in him, we can be spared from the wrath that is to come. So if you have put your faith in Christ, you have been declared innocent in the courtroom of God's justice. That's true of you now, and it'll be true of you on the last day when you stand before the throne. You have been forgiven, past tense, and you will be forgiven, future tense, not on the basis of anything that you have done, but on the basis of what God has done for you in Christ. And so, if that's your story, if that's who you are, then the natural reflex of the regenerate heart is for us to forgive as we have been forgiven. What do we pray in the Lord's Prayer? Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. If we don't have that reflex, if we live in a spirit of judgment and condemnation, if we refuse to forgive, if we refuse to give, then we need to take a hard look in the mirror of Scripture and ask ourselves, have I really been forgiven? Have I really laid hold of the mercy and grace that are held out for me in the gospel? A judgmental spirit will not share space with the Holy Spirit in our hearts. But if the Holy Spirit is there, if we are united to Christ, if we are alive in him, then we will realize that we ought not to judge because the Son came not to judge us but to save us. We ought not to condemn because Jesus took our condemnation on himself. We ought to forgive because he has forgiven and will forgive us. We ought to give because if God has given us his son, Romans 8 asks us, how will he not also with him give us all things? And so let me ask you this question as we pull the train into the station this morning. Where do you see judgmentalism in your own life? I remember uh watching a movie with my sister-in-law some years ago, and this was shortly after I'd become a Christian. It was about a bunch of kids in a high school, it wasn't a good movie, but a bunch of kids in a high school, and there was this click of Christian kids, and they were just the worst. They were super mean, super critical, super judgmental, hypocritical, all of that. And I remember being so annoyed by that because that was not true to my experience at all. I'd never met Christians who were like that, at least not yet. And I did get older, and I met some judgmental Christians in my travels, but I think the overtly judgmental Christian is more a caricature than a reality. The majority of believers I've met in this church or in other churches where I've served, where I've led, uh everyone has been quick to love, quick to welcome, quick to forgive, even those who are walking in blatant sin. And I'm not saying that because I'm trying to get us off the hook. Actually, quite the opposite. Because you might be sitting here right now and thinking to yourself, well, I'm not a judgmental person. I don't treat other people the way the scribes and the Pharisees treated Jesus and his disciples. And maybe you're right. Maybe. I don't want to impute this to you. But let me tell you where I see the spirit of judgmentalism in my own life. If I have a friend, uh not a coworker, if I have a friend, or if I have a neighbor or a family member who's living in unrepentant sin, or at the very least, they're making decisions in terms of how they live their life that I very much don't agree with. I'm not the type to wag my finger or to preach it then. I'll have the conversation if God gives me the opportunity, but but otherwise, I'm not your mother, right? You do you, right? But the spirit of judgmentalism operates in me more subtly. I may not belittle them for their choices, but I just won't hang out with them. I'll spend my time with these people instead of those people. I'll build relationships here instead of there. And I may not do it consciously, I may not do it intentionally, but I write them off. And I don't suspect I'm the only one. So I want to encourage you and I want to challenge you. When you go home this afternoon, think through your friend circles, think through the people you regularly spend time with, and ask yourself whether any unbelievers make the list. And if they don't, ask yourself, why? See, the spirit of judgmentalism is sneaky. Sometimes it hides behind the rocks of comfort and complacency. And it takes intention for people like us living in the buckle of the Bible belt to fulfill Jesus' command. We've got to make an effort. And as we do, we have Jesus as the ultimate example who both shows us and tells us what it looks like to move toward our enemies in love. So if you're the type, if you're the type to lean away from sinners, look to Jesus, the perfectly sinless one who leaned all the way in from heaven to earth in the incarnation. If you're the type to judge and to condemn and to write people off, look to Jesus, the one whose immaculate powers of moral judgment did not stop him from associating with the weak and the defiled and the sinner. If you're not so keen on offering people forgiveness when they've done you wrong, look to Jesus, who through all the sweat and all the tears and all the blood on the cross spoke out loud, Father, forgive them. And if you're stingy with the people you don't like, look to Jesus. God's gift to us. As sinners, we deserve nothing but condemnation. Yet we have received everything in Christ. How much more ought we to give freely even to the people who've done us wrong? Let's pray. Father, these are difficult words. And if they weren't in the Bible, we might not be compelled to do them. And yet, Father, you have given Jesus for us. To love us when we were at our most unlovely, to bless us when we cursed him. To pray for us now and forevermore, even when we are getting in our own way. Father, help us to love others with the love of Jesus. Help us to bless our enemies the same way he blessed us. Help us, Lord, not to be judgmental, not to condemn as though we were the judge and the jury, but to forgive and to give and to welcome and to embrace. Not sacrificing our powers of moral judgment. Not forgetting what Jesus did when he was with sinners, loving and calling to repentance. But Father, help us not to write people off. Help us not to live in a spirit of self-righteous judgmentalism. But help us, Lord, to be open and loving and kind. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. I'm going to invite our ruling elders now to prepare the Lord's table for us. This is the time in our service when we observe Jesus' command to eat this bread in remembrance of him and to drink of this wine in remembrance of his shed blood. This is a great gift to us because whenever we have the word telling us to do things that seem so counterintuitive and counter-cultural to us, we have something real that we can take into our hands to remind us that these aren't just good ideas. These aren't just moral platitudes. This isn't just advice that floats somewhere up above the reality of our experience. These are the words of the incarnate Christ. These are the words of the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord. And as a kind of guarantee, as a kind of putting his money where his mouth is, he says, if you want to know whether these things are true and whether the promises I make will come to fulfillment, taste and see. Taste and see that I am good and that I can be trusted. So if you're in Christ, if you have repented of your sin and come to him in faith, if you have been baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, if you have joined yourself to a Bible-believing, Bible-professing, evangelical church where you can know and be known, come to the table. It's Jesus' table, and he invites all his people to come and partake. But if that's not your story, or it's not your story yet, then there is no shame for you in waiting. Scripture says wait. Scripture says get right with Jesus before you come to his table and sit down with him. And we would love to talk to you about what that might mean and what that might look like. I'm going to pray now. We're going to ask the Lord to bless this meal. Everyone will come forward and receive the elements when everybody's been served. We'll partake together. Father, thank you for this meal. Again, in the way in which it strengthens us and helps us to see that you are with us and that the things you call us to are backed up by your grace and your goodness and your reality. Use these means now, Father, to bless and to strengthen our souls and to help us, Lord, so that we can go out into the world this week and live in the countercultural way in which you have called us to live. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.