Our Relationships with Others
Matthew 7:1-6
Beware of Judging Harshly (vv. 1-2)
- Be discerning (Matt. 7:15-20, James 2:18)
- Do not be destructive
Be Aware of Judging Hypocritically (vv. 3-5)
- The spec in “their” eye
- The plank in your eye
- The hypocrisy in our hearts
Be Wary of Judging Harmfully (v. 6)
- Godly truth and testimony
- Ungodly trampling and tearing
More to Consider
The picture of somebody struggling with the delicate operation of removing a speck of dirt from a friend’s eye, while a vast plank in his own eye entirely obscures his vision, is ludicrous in the extreme. Yet when the caricature is transferred to ourselves and our ridiculous fault-finding, we do not always appreciate the joke. We have a fatal tendency to exaggerate the faults of others and minimize the gravity of our own. We seem to find it impossible, when comparing ourselves with others, to be strictly objective and impartial. On the contrary, we have a rosy view of ourselves and a jaundiced view of others. Indeed, what we are often doing is seeing our own faults in others and judging them vicariously. That way, we experience the pleasure of self-righteousness without the pain of penitence. So, “you hypocrite” is a key expression here. Moreover, this kind of hypocrisy is the more unpleasant because an apparent act of kindness (taking a speck of dirt from somebody’s eye) is made the means of inflating our own ego. John Stott
It was F.B. Meyer, I believe, who once said that when we see a brother or sister in sin, there are two things we do not know: First, we do not know how hard he or she tried not to sin. And second, we do not know the power of the forces that assailed him or her. We also do not know what we would have done in the same circumstances.
Stephen Brown, Christianity Today
Given half a chance, people often crawl out of the boxes into which we've relegated them.
Larry D. Wright.
