Judging With the Eyes of God

1 Samuel 16:1-13

Proverbs 15:1-11

*Matthew 7:1-6

When are we supposed to judge? I know many people’s immediate response would be: never. Yet, the truth is that we have to judge every single day, practically every single moment. Simple judgments like what is more important to me? What do I want to make more time for? What should I spend my energy on? Or more complicated judgments like, what is right and wrong? Who do I trust? Who do I want to draw close to? How do I act with them? We could go on. You might not realize it, but you and I are being judgmental every single day and we need to be. Today, Jesus is not telling us that we shouldn’t judge, instead, he is trying to show us how to judge rightly. As he has always been doing in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is trying to transform us into the kind of people who can live in and create His Kingdom.

So, it makes sense that an important part of our journey is to learn how we might judge rightly. How else would we ever hope to build a perfect Kingdom full of justice, mercy, love, and peace? On top of that, knowing how to judge rightly is the only way we would ever fit in that perfect world.

It shouldn’t surprise you, that the place Jesus starts with judgment is that we need to first judge ourselves. Remember recognizing our spiritual poverty was the beginning of the Beatitudes and recognizing our sin was the end of the Lord’s Prayer. We need to understand our own weaknesses, the ways we have turned away from God, the ways we have failed to love our neighbors - before we ever hope to really be helpful before we can ever hope to move forward.

This personal brokenness might be difficult for a few of us to come to terms with and Jesus says this will happen. We can become so focused on the wrongs of those around us or even those in other nations, that we fail to even recognize the great big plank in our own eye. Jesus is not saying that there isn’t that sliver in someone else’s eyes. The wrongs you see are real, but the problem is that you can’t even see them clearly. You don’t even know what the wrongs really are, because our eyes are so clouded, broken, and full of things that don’t actually help us see - things that don’t help us know what is truly God. We can’t truly help anyone until we can, with God’s help clear the great big wrongs that blind us and we live by.

For many of us, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. All we have to do is look back at previous arguments or fights - do you have one in mind? - as you reflect on your conflicts you should be able to see how your grievous pride, impatience, anger, fear, or any number of sins got in the way of you actually finding a resolution or forgiving or making space. It's not about placing fault because that never helps, it is instead about recognizing our role in creating and resolving a conflict so that we might move forward toward’s God’s kingdom together.

As we continue to do more reflection on who we are, the reality is that we are so much more capable of truly seeing our major wrongs than seeing clearly the wrongs of others. That is what the great big plank in our eyes represents. We are so much more able to see our sins and our blindness than we are to see others. The truth is all of us have a great big plank in our eyes that we need the help of Jesus to pull out. In partnership with Jesus, we are the only ones able to remove our blindness, though others may help, just as we may help with the sliver in their eyes.

As we look and uncover this great big plank in our eyes, we realize a scary reality, our sin and blindness are bigger than what we see in others. Sure we may not be in gangs, or killing people, or in the middle of wars, but that is more a product of our situation, not of our godliness. Our planks are manifold, so it would be impossible for me to name yours for you, but they all come down to how we are not loving God, our neighbors, ourselves, and this world as we should. Our lives have always been about taking care of relationships and upholding people in godly love. All of this other stuff, the jobs, homes, hobbies are just instruments to show that love, they are not the things we need. We’ve looked at that the last two weeks if you want to look back.

Jesus has a very interesting way of trying to show us our faults, our sins, our planks. He says, “How you judge, you too shall be judged. How you give, you shall be given”. So first, how we judge. We judge people every day, but how much of that judgment comes down to whether this person should have done this, or this person did this wrong. I would encourage you to write down every time you make a judgment about someone and then ask yourselves, “Do I really do this?” I can blame my wife for going and taking some time for herself, but how often do I do the same thing? I say we don’t have enough time together and then I go on my phone. I get angry at someone for cutting me off, but then I am doing the same thing 10 minutes later. Yet these are only direct parallels, when we make a judgement, we might not do the same thing, but we do something similar. A vegetarian might blame meat eaters for the methane gas released, but then order an Amazon package to their house. I might get angry at the lack of humanitarian care for those being attacked or killed but then turn away from the people I see in need on the street. Some of these may seem like trivial examples, but the trivial is often what we are more able to see at first. The whole point is that we can’t even live up to our own judgment of right and wrong, so why do we expect others to live up to it?

Even the standards we set are too high for us, but realize that this hasn’t even come close to the standards of God. How do we ever hope to measure up to his judgment? Remember on top of this, that these things we do wrong are only what we see right now. Remember that great big plank in our eye. If we can’t live up to our judgment of a little sliver, that plank in our eye will really drag us down. Thank God, for His merciful love.

The measure you give, the same will be measured unto you. Imagine for a moment you had nothing: no money, no stuff, no family, no friends, no skills, nothing. There are a lot of people like this. People who cannot give us anything in return other than themselves. Have we given to those that can’t give back to us? Even if it is still difficult, it is a lot easier to sacrifice for a friend, spouse, or child, who already gives back to you, but can we do that for those around us who can’t give back or who already seem to be taking? I would guess that the majority of us don’t truly sacrifice and we need to grow into that. The interesting thing, you may not realize this, but this hypothetical example I just gave you is exactly how we approach God. Everything we have and are comes from him, and so we have nothing to give but ourselves. So again, have you cared for others in the way that you want God to care for you?

This might seem like a very bleak starting place, but we have to recognize where we are if we ever hope to move beyond it. As Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy and so on.

That brings us finally to this moment of baptism. Today, Mary Anne and I are humbling ourselves before God. We are saying that God, we need your help, we are not good enough on our own, we don’t know what is right, we know that we are sinful and already, even though he is only 10 months old, Matteo is sinful too, so God we need your help. We need to recommit ourselves to you God and commit ourselves to raising our son in a relationship with you God. That is the only way forward. That is the only way, we can be what we need to be. We need to primarily have you as our parent, our Father, or else I will never live up to my earthly role as a father. The plank I am continuously trying to shed will get in the way.

I cannot remember a time in my life, like being a parent where I have had to so continuously make judgment calls. Some of them I have gotten wrong, because of my faults and the repercussions aren’t far away. Some of them I have gotten wrong because I didn’t pray or think. Some of them I have gotten right because I did take time to ask God. Yet, no matter what, I can tell you that God has shown up so many times and honestly saved me, so many times. And this is only what I can see, so I find myself thinking what don’t I see? What can't I predict? I need God in my parenting, as I need him in everything else.

So, here I have acknowledged, yet again, that we need to judge. It is actually our duty to judge so that we can live and help others live rightly. So, we come to a part of the passage that we probably struggle with: “Don’t give what is holy to dogs or your pearls to swine”. We don’t like this, because the obvious ramifications is that Jesus is calling someone dogs and someone swine, but before we judge that we must judge, “what is Jesus’ point?” Well, if I was to give something Holy to Layla my dog like the shroud of Turin or a piece of the cross, what would she do with it? She would chew on it and rip it up, even though she is a great dog. If we were to throw pearls, jewels, gold or anything precious into a pig pen, they would trample it, ignore it, maybe even eat it. It is very evident in these examples that different creatures are more or less able to recognize and care for what is precious and Holy. The same is true for humans. We should feed, house and clothe one another because those are good things any one and most creatures can recognize, but they are not Holy or precious things. What is precious and Holy? Ultimately we are precious to God, and the things that resemble God are Holy. So, we need to be conscious and judge what are we giving our lives to, there are a whole lot of things and people that we have given our lives to, but most of the times we find our lives, our worship, our desires ill used, sacrificed for less than God and treated as less. At the same time we have given up goodness, what we new to be right, because of fear, we have put our relationship with God to the side, because we have something better to do with our time, we have given up caring for a neighbor, because I don’t want it to be awkward or to damage someone's pride. We could go on. The truth is we give up what is precious and Holy almost daily to the things and even people that don’t appreciate them, that don’t care for them.

Baptism is one of the greatest acts any single person can approach because choosing it is judging to give what is precious and holy, our lives, or the lives of our children over to the one that will truly take care of us. It is only God who can recognize our lives for what it is. In some ways, God is the only one that sees Matteo for who he truly is and who he can become. So, the greatest judgment I or any of us could make is to help him or anyone follow Jesus. With every judgement call the question that should surround it is, “How can I help myself and others follow Jesus greater?” That will lead to removing planks, removing slivers, giving, having mercy, but ultimately more than all of that it will lead to the Kingdom of God and there is nothing better to give our lives for. AMEN