Let Us Stop Judging Others and Start Living!

I know that at some point in your life you have looked at someone and uttered these words, “if I were them I would have…” You can fill in the blank.  We like to walk around and look at people that we have deemed worse than us, and judge them.  It makes us feel good about ourselves, we like to think that our sin is not as bad as their sin.  What does it get us, to go around make others feel like they are not as good as we are.  It truly gets us nowhere.  In fact Christ talks about this in Matthew he said; “Stop judging others, and you will not be judged.  For others will treat you as you treat them. Whatever measure you use in judging others, it will be used to measure how you are judged.  And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye^* when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log from your own eye; then perhaps you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”(Matthew 7:1-5)

Christ is telling us that we are not to go around and look down at them only to make ourselves feel better about whom we are.  We must take a look at ourselves and realize that we too are sinners, we are no better than anyone else.  We are to realize that even if we have been serving God for years at one point in our lives we too were full of sin.  We must learn to respect each person, to love them as Christ loves them.  When we see a fellow Christian struggling we are to help them, we are not to judge them or look at them and think we are better than them.  Christ is not telling us to ignore sin in others, He is telling us to have compassion and love for them.  We read a about an event in John chapter eight about how the leaders of the Jewish church wanted to trap Christ so they found a woman who was committing adultery and brought her Christ and asked what should we do with her? This how He responded, “All right, stone her. But let those who have never sinned throw the first stones!” ⁸ Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.  When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.  Then Jesus stood up again and said to her, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”  “No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”(John 8:7-11)

Notice how He never condemns or belittles her, He shows her love, then at the end He tells “go and sin no more.’  He shows her much more respect than those who felt they were better than her.  He respected her and wanted her to know that she was loved.  If we want to see lives changed and people coming to know the love of God we must stop feeling that we are better than they are, all sin is equal in the eyes of God.  It all separates us from God’s love, we must learn to be humble to treat people with love.  To understand that they may not accept our love or God’s love but we are to never look down on them and feel that we are better.  If we truly want to live life we must accept the love of God and realize that we are to live sharing the love of God, not trying to point out that we are better.