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.

Love OR Judgment – You Can’t Have Both
Image by Morgan Sessions
We cannot judge others because it is not our place as humans to function as the center—because God is that center—and judge other people. In addition, we 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 the 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. 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.
Jesus teaches the exact opposite (Matt 7). 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 the 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.
In Matthew 7, Jesus is doing nothing less than contrasting two mutually exclusive ways of living. We either live in love, or we live in judgment. The extent to which we do one is the extent to which we do not do the other. If we stand in judgment and do not forgive, we ourselves will be judged and not forgiven (Matt 6:14-15). If we do not show mercy, we will not be given mercy (James 2:13). If we condemn others, we will stand condemned (Luke 6:37).
Conversely, if we die to ourselves as the center and thus die to ourselves as judge, we will receive the life of one who will never be judged. If we accept Christ’s reconciling act and simply have faith that God is who he says he is in Christ, that we are who God says we are in Christ, and that all others are who God says they are in Christ—in other words, if we simply abide in love—then, in fact, all we are is defined in Christ. In Christ there is no judgment (Rom 8:1), for we have entirely opted out of the judgment game created when we lost Paradise.
Recognizing that we can only lose in this game, for we are ourselves sinners, we no longer try to get life by critically evaluating ourselves or others before God. We simply receive, live in, and give the love and mercy of God that has triumphed over judgment.
—Adapted from Repenting of Religion, pages 109-111
Category: General
Tags: Judgment, Living in Love, Love, Repenting of Religion
Topics: Following Jesus
Related Reading

The Lego Movie & Free Will
Last week Greg tweeted about two movies that have themes related to human free-will and God’s control of the world. They were: @greg_boyd: Does God want a permanently frozen “perfect” world or an open-ended world filled with wildly imaginative people? Watch “The Lego Movie”! @greg_boyd: Meantime, me & some peeps are going to watch (again!)…

What Jesus Revealed About Being Human
According to the creation story, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they essentially ceased being the wonderful, God-centered, God-dependent human beings the Creator intended them to be. They became less than fully human. Instead, they began using everything and everyone in the world as surrogate gods, trying to get from people, deeds, and things…

The Call to Suffer
Paul tells us that in all our relations, we are to “have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had” (Phil 2:5). Though he was “in very nature God,” he didn’t cling to this status. Rather, for our sake he set aside his divine prerogatives, took on the nature of a servant and “humbled himself…

The Rule of Love
The traditional confession that Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres (“Sacred Scripture is its own interpreter”) presupposes that there is one divine mind behind Scripture, for example. Moreover, Church scholars have traditionally assumed that Scripture’s unity can be discerned in a variety of concepts, motifs, themes and theologies that weave Scripture together. And to speak specifically of the…

The Goal For Your Life in 2015
Love is the reason anything exists. God created the world out of love—to express his love and to invite others to share in his love. The central goal of creation is succinctly summed up in a profound prayer Jesus prayed just prior to his crucifixion: For [the disciples’] sake I sanctify myself, so that they…

Featured Sermon Series: Scandalous Love
The Scandalous Love series is often considered one of Greg’s and Woodland Hill’s most foundational series. In fact, it was so important that it subsequently led to the Can’t Stop the Love series. Defining the true character of God is at the heart of what ReKnew is all about, so we wanted to host…