Sermon Transcript
You ever feel the pressure to be perfect? Nobody ever feels that pressure, do they? Perfection. Maybe it’s at school if you’re a student or at work if you’re employed, or even just in your relationships, do you ever feel the expectation to just keep it all together, have everything in place, all your ducks in a row, even though some of them aren’t ducks, some of them are pigeons, and they’re wandering off to the side.
That expectation, that tension, to be perfect, it can be crushing. And it’s so common in our culture today to just get canceled when you’re not perfect, right? That’s the thing. We live in a cancel culture. One mistake, and you can feel like you’re just pushed to the side of you’re not worthy anymore.
You’re written off. And that can lead to a lot of problems. Can it? It can lead us to judge ourselves harshly. And when we judge ourselves harshly, we tend to judge others more harshly as well.
And so that pressure often leads to brokenness in our own personal world and also in our own personal relationships. And so we have this quest in our society. We want to be authentic. We want to be real. But when we show our real selves, the fear is that we’ll be misunderstood.
And then if we’re misunderstood, we’ll be condemned. And this is a challenge. It’s something that is a cycle of fear that repeats itself over and over and over again. Living in community is hard. It’s beautiful, but it’s also challenging.
We see each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We see each other for who we really are up close. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of judgment, both of ourselves and of others. So how do we navigate that tension? How do we create a community that’s authentic and at the same time do a way with condemnation, with judging others and ourselves harshly?
How do we balance the love and the grace of Jesus with the truth and the discernment of Jesus? That’s what I want to explore today. Jesus offers us a radical alternative to the way of the world in our relationships, a radical alternative to this culture of judgment and fear and cancellation. And in the sermon on the Mount, he teaches us about a kind of wisdom, kind of discernment that transforms not only our relationships, but it transforms us from the heart. Jesus calls us to a different standard, one that frees us from the burden of perfection and invites us into a life of grace and wisdom for ourselves and for others.
Today we’re going to explore in Matthew chapter seven what it means to live in the radical middle, as I like to call it. Not talking politically here. I’m just talking about that tension between truth and grace, between discernment and condemnation. We’re going to look at Matthew chapter seven to discover how we can live this out, how we’re called in our daily lives, not only to build a community where we know one another’s strengths and weaknesses, but where we love one another with the grace of Christ. Let’s look at Matthew seven.
Jesus says in Matthew seven, one, 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. Now, understanding God’s judgment is crucial for Jesus disciples. It carries eternal weight to understand the judgment of God.
Jesus statement here is strong. It’s to the point it cuts to the bone, his teaching in the sermon on the Mount. It helps us understand the context of what Jesus teaches, helps us to know exactly what he means when he’s talking about judging others and not judging others. Because that word judge, that’s translated judge in our bibles, is a very complex greek word, and it can mean everything from just simple discernment of what is right and wrong, all the way to condemnation and judging others harshly, as an unfair judge would do from the bench. It’s a complex word, and Jesus warns us here to resist the human tendency to usurp God’s sole rightful place as judge of our sin.
Jesus says whenever we do this, we become hypocrites. And so, he warns us, only God has the right to judge sin in the life of a person. And so when we condemn others, we’re violating the spirit of God’s law. We’re violating the principle that is foundational to the gospel. That’s reconciliation between us and God.
When we condemn others for their sin, so often we feel justified in our actions toward them, don’t we? I mean, after all, if someone mistreats me, it’s so much easier for me to mistreat them, isn’t it?
If I can somehow justify and feel like God’s judgment of that person lines up with my judgment of that person, surely, after all, God must feel the same way about that jerk that I do, right? I mean, there’s no way that my opinion of that person could possibly be biased or that I could possibly be flawed in my judgment of their character. Surely God thinks the same way that I do. So often it’s easy for us to square our mistreatment of others when they’ve mistreated us. We think about it.
Jesus is teaching us here to weigh our judgment of other people, which is flawed with the perfect and righteous judgment of God on all people. He’s calling us to weigh the value between my discernment of someone’s character and God’s discernment of someone’s character. That’s what Jesus is calling me to here.
Would I want God to judge me with my own judgment? How would I feel about that? How would you feel? How would you feel if at the end of days, God judged you according to the standard? If he used your standard of perfection to measure your perfection instead of his own, would that seem fair?
Would that line up with your idea of how God will judge you in the end? Would you like that? Be honest. Would you call God’s judgment good if he used your judgment to pattern his own? I don’t think most of us would.
Thankfully, God doesn’t judge our sin like we judge others, as the apostle Paul proclaims in romans eleven. Talking about the depth, the riches of God’s wisdom, the knowledge that he has, he says how unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out God’s judgments are not our own. And that’s a good thing, because only he has the right to judge our sin. Jesus illustrates this principle for us, this hypocrisy that we so tend to fall into. With a challenging analogy.
In verses three through five, he says, why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye when all the time there’s a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite. First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. What Jesus is doing here is not forbidding discernment about other people.
He’s not telling us that we can’t have wisdom when it comes to right and wrong. Instead, what he’s telling us is that when we judge other people harshly, what he’s condemning here is when we condemn other people, when we judge others harshly, and we condemn them for their sin, we’re being hypocritical. We’re acting. That’s literally what that word hypocrite means. We’ve talked about that before, but we’re acting as if we have the same vision that God does into the lives of other people.
We’re acting as if we have the perfect knowledge of God in order to judge others.
The hypocrisy here is that we act as if we have the righteous standing of God himself.
We act as if we’re able to perform the spiritual surgery that’s necessary, that only Christ can perform by removing the sin from our lives through the grace and the mercy of God through the cross. And that’s not our place. That’s not our job. We act as if we’re able to do what only God can do. We can help others, but only through discernment and wisdom that God gives us.
We can help others through accountability to God’s standard, but only after addressing our own sin, that sin that so easily entangles us, as Hebrews twelve says. And Jesus condemns our human tendency to judge others by our flawed standards that we often proclaim and we hold over other people, but we ourselves so often do not even hold ourselves to. Many times, our standard of perfection misaligns with God. So Jesus isn’t telling us not to use discernment. He’s not telling us not to determine.
He’s not telling us to avoid determining right from wrong. He’s teaching us to avoid hypocrisy by allowing God to have his rightful place as judge. But sometimes people aren’t ready for that accountability. People aren’t open to the truth that we have to speak. They’re not willing to receive what we have to say.
And in those instances, Jesus seems to be saying that it’s better that we move on and we proclaim that truth. Elsewhere he says in verse six, do not give dogs what is sacred. Do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet and turn and tear you to pieces. It may help to understand that dogs and pigs in Jesus time were considered not only unclean, but dangerous to people.
And some scholars have read this and interpreted it in a way that they think that as christians, we shouldn’t share what we have with those who are outside because they may not be willing to accept it. They may mistreat the gospel. And I think that’s a limited perspective here. There are some people that hold that idea. But I think it makes more sense to broaden our understanding here, to include in this, this conversation of dogs and pigs, even those who we would say are our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, our fellow christians.
It checks out. If you kind of expand this and look elsewhere in the gospel of Matthew. Later in the Gospel of Matthew, for example, Jesus taught his disciples to shake the dust off their feet. If a town of their fellow Israelites didn’t accept their message. In Matthew 18, Jesus teaches his followers that if your brother or sister sins against you, you need to go to them and confront them in that sin.
And if they won’t listen, if they’re not repentant, then you go and you take one or two others as witnesses, and you go and have that same conversation. And then if they still won’t listen, Jesus says to bring that matter before the whole church, before the whole assembly of believers, and have them judge between right and wrong as a whole. And then after that, even then, if that brother or sister in Christ will not listen to the truth, then Jesus says to treat them as you would an outsider, a non believer, a gentile, a tax collector. Jesus says. And so if you expand this to the rest of the Gospel of Matthew, it seems like Jesus is telling us that if we want to avoid these conflicts, that those who don’t want to listen to what we have to say, it’s better if we speak the truth elsewhere.
It checks out if you back this out to Paul’s letters. Paul advises the Romans in Romans 16 to avoid those who cause division in the church. In the church to avoid them, he instructs the Corinthians to hand over an unrepentant sinner who was a Christian, to hand him over to Satan so that the flesh can be destroyed and so that his spirit may be saved. In all of these things, there’s a goal. The goal is still reconciliation to the conviction of the Holy spirit.
And our role in this, our only role that God has given us in speaking the truth to those who don’t want to hear it is to humble ourselves and to wait, to let God convict their hearts. Then and only then, when we’ve humbled ourselves so our own sins don’t have a hold on us, then and only then, can we seek discernment through God’s wisdom to help our brothers and sisters in their own sin. The apostle Paul warns us about this. He says in Galatians six one brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the spirit should restore that person gently. You hear that?
Restore that person gently. Paul doesn’t say, call them out. Paul doesn’t say, call them a jerk. He doesn’t say to be harsh to them. He doesn’t say, condemn them.
He says, restore that person gently. But he also warns us, watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. What we learn is that Jesus disciples, those who follow Christ humbly balance, discernment of sin with the forgiveness and the wisdom of God that he has given them. And so now, with that balance in mind, that balance of discernment and judgment for sin, we may ask, well, how would God treat me in my sin? How can I respond to the sin of my brother or sister in a godly way, in a kingdom living way?
We need wisdom and discernment to navigate that. It’s a difficult path to avoid condemnation, condemning others in our hearts, but also restoring them gently, not forcefully. So where do we receive that wisdom? Where do we receive that discernment? It comes from God.
It comes to us particularly. Jesus says through prayer, he says in verse seven, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives.
The one who seeks, finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Jesus has already taught his disciples how to pray. Some scholars see here a progression of patterns of prayer, and so it’s unlikely that Jesus is teaching them again how to pray. But there are some scholars that see that. And so they see ask, seek, knock as a way that we can go to God in prayer.
What’s more likely is either that Jesus is viewing ask, seek, knock as a sort of stages of personal prayer. And so, in other words, it could be a progression of this pursuit of God’s will in prayer, an increasing fervency as we strive to know God’s will. If you think about it, how do you find something? You ask where it is, you seek it out. And then when you find the location, if it’s behind a closed door, you knock on that door and you entertained.
And so that’s a possibility. Another possibility, I think, probably more likely here, is that ask, seek, knock describes the actions of people who are at varying distances from the Lord. Let’s think about this. Those who are apart from God, who know of him but are far from him, they will seek the Lord. They’ll seek to find his wisdom.
And those who are outside of God’s will, and perhaps even those who are outside of God’s presence, if they are apart from Christ, but who long for both, they must knock on the door in order to enter in, in order to be in the kingdom. But the children of goddess, the children of God are already in the presence of God. And so they don’t need to seek God because they’ve already found him. They don’t need to knock on the door because they’ve already entered his presence. And so the children of God all the children of God need to do is ask their father.
Ask the father for what they want. And when we ask God for wisdom, when we ask God for discernment, he gives us every good thing that we need in his name. God wants to answer our prayers for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. That’s how Jesus taught us to pray. And so God wants to answer these prayers for discernment, for wisdom.
And again, Jesus illustrates this principle of having a good heavenly Father with another analogy, another living parable. He asks, which of you, if your son asked for bread, will give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him? God is a good father. We see God acting as we would expect, a good earthly father, but even better, even more so.
Think about this. If you’re a parent or a grandparent, you know that you would do anything for the good of your children or your grandchildren. You know the fervency with which you would seek out what is best for them to thrive. You would seek for them to have anything that they needed in this world, wouldn’t you? Even if you’re not a parent, even if you’re not a grandparent.
You know from your, if you have a good relationship with your parents, with your grandparents, you know the lengths that they would go for you to serve you and to give you what you need in this world. Yeah, we have a heavenly father who’s just like that and even more, wants to give us all that we need, who listens to us, listens to our requests. He knows our every need, and he meets it according to his will when we seek him. He provides good things, especially his wisdom. At the same time, God also expects us as his children to treat others the way that he has treated us.
He expects us to have his character, to reflect it out into the world through the way that we treat one another. And so what we learn is that Jesus disciples pray for wisdom from God and how to treat others as they have been treated by God. Paul says in Colossians 128, he is the one we proclaim admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom so that we may present everyone fully mature Christ. So we might ask ourselves, how does God want me to treat my brothers and sisters in Christ? The answer to that question is the answer to another question.
How has God treated me in reference to my sin? God created us without sin. He gave us dignity and a purpose. When he created us in his image. He gave his people Israel, his law, to teach them how to live in a community where all people were devoted to God, where they were a nation of believers who followed God’s will not only in their relationships with him, but in their relationships with one another as well.
In every way following God’s will through the law, Paul says, we become aware of our sin, and as we become aware of our sin, we become aware of our need for a savior. And God is the only rightful judge. He doesn’t allow sin to run rampant in our lives because he knows how destructive it is for our lives. Instead, what he does is he lovingly speaks the truth and his will and our need for a savior who could take away that sin, who could transform our hearts through his grace, who could transform our relationships through his mercy, restore us both to him and with others, and teach us how to love him and to serve him and to love others and to serve others in his name. God sought us in our darkness.
He brought his light into that darkness.
He doesn’t force himself through the doorway of our lives, nor does he force his will or his way over us. Instead, God waits for us. He convicts our hearts, and then he waits for us to respond. Ultimately, Jesus paid the price for our sins through his death on the cross to bring God’s grace and mercy into our lives so that we could have our sins removed. They could be forgiveness through the blood of Christ, and our souls could be saved through the power of God.
So God listens to our requests. He provides for our every need with good things according to his will. He doesn’t force his way in. As Cs Lewis insightfully wrote in his book the Screw tape letters, God cannot ravish, he can only woo. The creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves merely to cancel them or assimilate them will not serve.
And so we are called to emulate God’s mercy and grace. When we’re faced with the sin of others in our relationships, both personally and at work, at school, wherever we find ourselves, were called to emulate God’s mercy and his wisdom. God doesn’t force himself upon us, but gently woos, and he respects our free will. And finally, Jesus summarizes how the children of God are to live out the character of God, who would have his children treat others as he has treated them. He says in verse twelve, so in everything, in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.
For this sums up the law and the prophets. Jesus says that the entirety of the Old Testament can be summarized in those words in this one rule. Do to others what you would have them do to you. How do we apply that teaching of Jesus to our lives? First of all, we need to avoid judging others harshly.
We need to avoid condemning them. It’s not our job to judge. It’s not our job to judge sin. That’s God’s role. And if what we need to do is we need to establish boundaries in our lives where we can confront those who sin against us in love and avoid condemning them for what they’ve done, that’s a hard balance.
It takes wisdom. It takes discernment from the Lord. But there’s some actions that come out of that. Instead of speaking harshly to others or about others, it’s our job to examine our own hearts, to examine our own actions. Are there areas in your life where you’re quick to judge, where you’re quick to get angry with other people?
You know that there. That there are areas. If there are, if those are realities in your life, you know what areas you struggle with, your triggers. You know the things that cause you to get angry easily. And so what we should do is we should ask God to help us, to give us wisdom, to remove the plank from our eyes.
We’ll look more at how prayer plays a role in that in just a moment. But we also need to approach others with humility. We need to recognize that we also need a savior, just like others do. We also need God’s grace and forgiveness. And we need to practice empathy.
We need to realize that when we’re dealing with family and coworkers and friends and classmates, if you’re in school, that we need to try to understand their perspective and their struggles. We need to approach conflict with a heart that seeks forgiveness and desires reconciliation. And no matter where we are, no matter what role we find ourselves in, we need to lead with grace. In your professional life, you can lead by example, by treating colleagues with respect and understanding, even when they make a mistake. It’s been said, and I agree, that when people fail us, our reaction says more about us than it does about them and their failure.
Do you believe that? Our reaction, when people fail us, says more about us than it does about them and their failure? And so we need to avoid gossip and criticizing others harshly in your family and your personal relationships. We need to model forgiveness and grace that God has shown us on social media. Before we post or comment on things, we need to take a moment to reflect on whether our words are judgmental.
Whether we’re condemning other people, we need to be quick to forgive and slow to judge. You need to remember that Jesus teaches us to avoid harsh judgment, and instead we need to show grace, what we learn. And if you’re going to take anything away from today’s message, it should be this. That God’s children see others with God’s eyes and they love others with God’s heart. God’s children see others with God’s eyes and love others with God’s heart.
How do we put that into practice? We need the wisdom of God. We need to seek God’s wisdom to know how to relate with others as he would with us. And so we need to seek God in prayer every single day for wisdom and discernment. Ask God for help, to see others through his eyes, to love them with his love.
Even in difficult situations, even in conflict, even when we’re confronted with the sin of other people against us, we need to listen to people who are more mature and wiser than us, those who know the word of God better than us. We need to seek their guidance from those that we trust because they know the word of God. We can join together with brothers and sisters in Christ in a small group. And I think this is a great place to pause and give a plug for rooted coming up in September. A shameless plug, right?
If you’re not in a small group, if you’re not doing this in community, these small groups are a place to live this out in a safe space where we can sharpen one another, challenge one another. We can come to our group and say, hey, I’m dealing with this conflict at work or at home. What do you guys think? What do I need to do here? Can you pray for me?
Can you help me through this? And a small group, a rooted group, is a great place to experience that transformation with your brothers and sisters in Christ. There’s a mutual benefit to this. Not only do you get poured into, but you’re also able to help and encourage others as well and help them grow. And so that’s a great way to grow.
Starts in September. 1 Wednesday in September shameless. Plug’s over. Okay, I’m back. Finally, when we’re in doubt, we just need to live out the golden rule.
Make a conscious effort to treat others as you would want to be treated and in the way that God has treated you, even more. So that means being patient, kind, empathetic, merciful, showing grace, speaking the truth and love, just like Jesus did to us. And when we do that, it’ll transform people’s lives, including our own. When we let our actions reflect the love of Christ, we become witnesses of his love and mercy in our lives.
Jesus teaching in Matthew seven is calling us to a radical way of life. Flies in the face of the world that we live in, of the canceled culture that we live in. It reflects the heart of our heavenly Father, reminds us that our judgment is flawed, but that his judgment is perfect, that only God can judge righteously. And so we’re to resist the urge, the human urge, to take God’s place, his rightful place, and judge and condemn others. And instead, we’re to seek God’s wisdom in prayer, to treat others with the same grace and mercy that he has shown us.
As we enter this time of invitation, I invite you, I challenge you to examine your heart. Look to God’s standard over your life and over the lives of others, not your own. Are there areas in your life, is there a relationship in your life that you need to go to that person this week because you’ve judged them harshly, because you’ve condemned them, you shut them out, you’ve canceled them. You need to go to someone this week, today even, and seek reconciliation with them. Is there an area in your life where you know that you just get triggered all the time?
You know, it’s so easy for you to get angry when people do fill in the blank. Then seek God’s wisdom today. Pray and ask God to change your heart, to reflect his heart toward you. Let’s be a community that embodies the radical middle, balancing the love of God with the truth of goddesse. And as we do that, let’s strive to live out the golden rule, to treat others as we would want to be treated, and in doing so, reflecting the love and the grace of God to a world that so desperately needs it.