What Jesus Really Meant About Judging

Kent told the story of a student he had known since high school — call him Sam — a committed young Christian who went off to study film at SMU. There were not many other committed Christians in the film department, so before long he was at lunch with a fellow film student and began to share how he came to faith in Christ.

He barely got started. She cut him off: "Look, I don't need the rules, I don't need the guilt, so just leave me alone." And she got up abruptly and left.

Kent's reaction was not anger. It was grief. How sad that the greatest message of freedom and release this world has ever heard was experienced by her as a message of repression and guilt.

How did that happen? How have we let the best news in the world land on so many people as bad news?

That question is the doorway into this passage. "Judge not, that you be not judged." Jesus is not being sentimental. He is protecting the reputation of the gospel — and it is often his own people who put it at risk.

Kent said this passage is emancipating, and then reached for an image nobody expected in a Presbyterian church in Miami: it is like the first time you went skinny-dipping in a lake as a kid. That freeing.

His point was serious. It is not my responsibility to declare who is in and who is out. God will be the judge.

People ask him all the time — do you think so-and-so is a Christian? His usual answer: God knows. I don't. I may have an opinion based on how he or she lives, but God knows and I don't. Do you think that person who died is in heaven? God knows. I don't.

That is not evasion. It is a job description. You were never given the office, so you can put down the gavel.

And Jesus attaches a warning to picking it up anyway: the measure you use will be measured to you. Whatever standard you impose on other people, they will impose right back on you.

Strict is a hard way to live when it comes back around.

Kent joked that in these six verses Jesus gives his views on judicial philosophy, ophthalmology, and animal husbandry. Verse 3 is the ophthalmology.

"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"

The comedy is deliberate. A speck of sawdust and a construction beam. Jesus is not describing a slight imbalance of perspective; he is describing a man walking around with a plank sticking out of his skull, squinting at somebody else's eyelash.

And notice the verbs. You *see* the speck — you are looking hard at it, examining it closely. You do not *notice* the log. The thing that is objectively larger is the thing you are least aware of.

That is how it works. Our own faults do not feel like faults from the inside. They feel like context, reasons, personality, circumstances. It is other people's faults that look like faults.

The log is not hidden. It is just yours.

Here is what this passage does not say: mind your own business.

Jesus says, "first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." First and then. He fully expects there to be a *then*. The goal was never that you would stop caring what happens to your brother's eye.

What he forbids is the order. Correction that comes from someone who has not dealt with themselves is not correction; it is superiority wearing a helpful face. That is why he uses the word hypocrite.

But correction that comes from someone who has been honest about their own log — that lands completely differently. You can always tell. Somebody who knows what they are like themselves can say a hard thing to you and it does not crush you.

The log has to come out first, and not so you feel worse. So you can see. So that when you do help, you are not stabbing around blind with a plank in your face.

And here is the animal husbandry — the verse that stops "judge not" from collapsing into having no discernment at all.

"Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs."

If verse 1 were the whole story, the Christian life would mean never making any assessment of anybody, ever. Verse 6 makes that impossible. Jesus assumes you can tell the difference between someone who is genuinely asking and someone who only wants something sacred to trample.

That is discernment, not judgment, and the difference matters enormously. Judgment declares a verdict on a person's standing before God — not your call, ever. Discernment reads a situation wisely and responds accordingly — required of you constantly.

So hold both. Refuse to render verdicts about who is in and who is out. And do not be naive about where you scatter what is precious.

Remember Sam's classmate. Sometimes the most loving thing is not another argument. It is patience, and a life she can watch.