We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

World Vision, Gay Marriage & Judgment

Judge Coco Declares Ang Out of Line!

Courtney “Coco” Mault via Compfight

Yesterday World Vision announced that it is now allowing gay Christians in legal same-sex marriages to be hired as well as gay Christians who follow their policy of abstinence outside of marriage. The social media reaction is quite varied as you might expect, ranging from support to extreme statements of judgment and derision toward those who are leading World Vision and the LBGTQ community. Rather than responding to their decision regarding hiring practices, we wanted to use this as an opportunity to reflect on how Christians so easily slip into judgment in matters like this. Here is an excerpt from Greg’s book Repenting of Religion:

We cannot judge others because it is not our place as humans to function as the center and judge of other people. But we also cannot judge others because we ourselves are sinners who deserve judgment. If we don’t want to be judged, Jesus says, we must not judge. The measure of judgment we give is the measure with which we shall be judged. …

This is why human judgments are always hypocritical. The act of judging others subjects us to the same judgment we apply to them. The hypocrisy of our judgment is manifested in the fact that it is always selective and self-serving … Our knowledge of good and evil is always bent in our favor. Because we are trying to fill the vacuum in our spirit with our judgments, we amplify the sins of others while minimizing our own sins.

In Matthew 7, however, Jesus teaches us to do the exact opposite. We should consider our own sins to be logs and other people’s sins to be specks! The picture of people with tree trunks sticking out of their eyes looking for dust particles in other people’s eyes is absolutely ludicrous—and that is the point. We are finite, sinful human beings, and as such, we have no business setting ourselves up as moral police of others, acting as though we know the state of other people’s hearts and concluding that we are in any way superior to them. While we can discern the impact of behavior, the only conclusion we are allowed to know about a person’s heart is that he or she has infinite worth before God. …

If one struggles in this area [of judgment], it may help to imagine a life-story that puts a person’s sin in a context in which it is rendered into a dust particle, even when it’s destructive and must be stopped. Perhaps the person was abandoned or abused as a child. Perhaps the person has a brain defect that causes sociopathic behavior. Perhaps the person has never been loved or was psychologically damaged by other means. Perhaps, along with all this, he or she is undergoing terrible demonic attacks. Unless we have taken the time to incarnate ourselves into the person’s life, we cannot know. And even when we know his or her story intimately, there is still much we cannot know.

What we can know is that we have tree trunks in our own eyes that keep us from seeing accurately, so we must, on the authority of Jesus Christ, view the person’s sin as mere dust particles in comparison to our own. And we must do so while ascribing to him or her the unsurpassable worth Christ ascribes to us.” (109-111)

Related Reading

Challenging the Habit of Judgment

Jesus said, “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” (Matt 7:2). In our world where we encounter a nearly constant stream of judgments on social media or the news,…

Tags: , ,

Judgment and Idolatry

Why was the forbidden tree in the center of the garden called The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Since the Bible depicts eating from this tree as the reason humans are estranged from God and the cause of all that’s wrong with humanity, eating from this tree is obviously a terrible thing.…

The Good Samaritan, Non-Violence & Eternal Life

Renaud Camus via Compfight An expert in the law asked Jesus what he had to do “to inherit eternal life” (See the story in Luke 10:25 and following). Jesus asked him what he thought the law said about this issue. The man responded, “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all…

How God Judges Sin

In his third sermon covering material from his book Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Greg explores the topic of judgment. In this clip, Greg suggests that while God certainly does judge sin, how he judges is very different than we might expect. You can view the entire sermon here on the Woodland Hills Church site. You can find the…

God’s Heart to Prevent Judgment

In Ezekiel we read a passage that depicts Yahweh as warning his people about their impending punishment by saying, “I will pour out my wrath on you and breathe out my fiery anger against you” (Ezek 21:31a). As we find in several other texts, Yahweh is here depicted as a ferocious fire-breathing dragon—a portrait that…

Revolting Against Judgment

A few years ago, I committed to blessing all people at all times. (See yesterday’s post for more about this.) The first thing I noticed was how many “non-blessing” thoughts I had about people. I wasn’t very aware of it before, but my brain often created a running commentary on the people I observed or…