What Does “Judge Not Lest You Be Judged” Mean?

The first part of the sermon is going to be answering a question, and then I'm going to take the next part of the sermon, the last part of it, and explain how this becomes practical. There's a very practical and important application to this question. And the question is, you know, Jesus says, judge not that you be not judged. And I've had a couple of people say, what does that mean? So I would you give a sermon on this? Judge not that you be not judged. Because we do know that in, unfortunately, in certain groups of Christian groups, this is used to mean you can't judge anybody over anything. Well, you just can't judge. Or as my granddaughter only said to me once, you can't judge me. Now, who are you to judge me? She's only said that he wants. She's never said it again. Who are you to judge me? Eight years old.

She found out I firmly believe I have a right to do so.

But what does that mean? Now, we usually look at what it doesn't mean, right? But we know that we're not to go around judging, but we do know we are to judge righteous judgment in accordance with what God says. So, you know, when someone says, I'm sorry, my lifestyle, my homosexual lifestyle, who are you to judge me? Our answer is, I'm not. God is.

Okay. Well, I'm just passing on the information here, okay? God is making this judgment, and I'm supporting that judgment, and we should be doing that. We should be able to say, this is what God says. So, we, you know, I've heard entire sermons explaining what that means, but we know that. We know that we are not to, or we are to make judgments, but what does he mean, you know, in the positive sense? Let's go to Matthew 7 and look at this. Matthew 7.

So, let's look at the context, and then what I want to look at is, can we judge people wrongly? I mean, okay, we know what it does mean. Yes, we're to make judgments in accordance with God's way, in accordance with God's law, but then how can we judge in a wrong way? So, I mean, what's the point he's making? Instead of the opposite is what we usually talk about. He's not saying don't make judgments. Okay, we know that. So, what are we not to judge? Okay, so how do we look at this command? He says, judge not that you be not judged. Okay, unfortunately, people just stop there.

Judge not that you be not judged. For with what judgment, verse 2, you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. So, he says, now remember, how you judge is how you're going to be judged. Now, if I'm judging something by the law of God, that law is also staring back at me. If we're honest before the instructions of God, anytime we say God says this, and yet we're doing it, then we're being hypocritical, right? So, the law of God is powerful. God says, do not steal. But if you're cheating on your income tax, you're stealing. So, that's a two-edged sword. Do not judge us, you be judged is, be careful how you wield this sword, because there's another edge you can come back and cut you on it. Make sure that you're dealing with your problems first, and that's why he says, what he says next, why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, and you're not considering the plank in your own eye. And we've talked about that. This is a well-known scripture. Unfortunately, it becomes a cliché. You got a speck. Your brother is a speck, and you've got a two-by-four sticking out of your eye. Every time you move, you knock people down, right? Nobody wants to come close to you because you have this huge two-by-four sticking out of your eye. And it is true that many times, the more we as human beings have the planks in our eyes, the more we want to look at other people's specs. And so his point here is, by the way, there is a plank and there is a speck. So he's not saying, do not judge. Everybody's okay. That's not the point. The point is, there is a speck in your brother's eye. In other words, your brother has a problem. But the first thing you do before you go deal with your brother's problem is this.

Or how can you say to your brother, let me remove the speck from your eye and look a plank as in your own eye, hypocrite. First, remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. Now, I want you to notice he says, you still go deal with your brother's speck. So he's not saying, don't you dare judge that speck in your brother's eye. So the analogy becomes very clear. Deal with yourself first before you deal with anybody else. Deal with yourself first, then deal with the other person's problem. What you might find out is that yours is actually much greater than theirs. And of course, one of the things he's dealing here with is self-righteous. Self-righteousness, a self-righteous person, or whatever we suffer from self-righteousness, we're always looking at everybody else's problems. You know, if you're driving home from church today and all you're doing is saying, look at this person, look at that person, you know, this person said that today. You're just judging everybody who was at church today. You probably got a plank in your eye. You probably have a plank in your eye because all you're looking at is everybody else's speck. And what God, Jesus says here is, first, look at yourself. So what he says, judge not lest you be judged. Wait a minute. Look at the standards by which you judge because a lot of times we judge people by our own standards, right? We have standards and we judge people by our standards, not God's. Then, when we're going to judge them by God's standards, we got to look at ourselves first. Now, some people say, well, yeah, but he's meaning we should not really look at somebody else and say, well, you have a sin. Well, let's look at the next verse because this usually isn't attached. This is part of what he said here, this is ignored. Do not give what is holy to the dogs nor cast your pearls before the swine, lest they travel them under their feet and turn and tear you to pieces. That is one of the most judgmental statements in the entire Bible. And Jesus says, look, don't go around judging each other because the judgment you use is how you're going to be judged. If you judge people by your personal standards, God's going to judge you by his standards. Now, okay, so make your judgments on God's standards, but be careful. Look at yourself first. And then he says, hey, and let's just not go around, you know, trying to correct everybody and throughout, you know, just try to be a show everybody your righteousness. He said, there's certain people that you shouldn't even tell the truth to. Oh, that's pretty judgmental, isn't it? There's certain people you shouldn't even tell the truth to. That's what that means. They're not going to listen to it. So don't go tell them. So he makes a very judgmental statement. There's other statements he makes in the in the Sermon on the Mount that shows that that's, you know, he's not saying, don't make judgments. He's just saying, we have to be very careful how we judge each other, how we judge each other, and especially in the church. So how then can we judge others in a wrong way? How can we do that? Because we have to make judgments.

But if we have to make judgments, how are we careful not to disobey what he said by making bad judgments? We're going to look at some ways that you and I can make some very bad judgments about other people. Some of them are obvious, and some of them are not. The first one is that we judge someone is beyond God's redemption.

That person is so evil, they're beyond God's redemption. I don't know. I look at people in history and I think, how could that person ever be redeemed? You know, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Caligula, okay, Nero. How could those people ever be redeemed? And then I remember, well, that's not my call to make, is it? I don't know who will end up being saved and who won't, but God gives everybody an opportunity. We cannot judge someone as unredeemable, someone that cannot be saved. Only God can make that decision, and He doesn't let us make that judgment. We can say that is an evil person, and it will take God for them to repent, and that's true. Of course, you and I were evil, and it took God to make us repent, too. So, you know, it's easy. You know, I like comparing myself to Adolf Hitler because I turn out a good guy every time. I mean, I'm a good guy compared to him. Now, I compare myself to Jesus Christ, and I have real problems. So, it's nice to say, yeah, Caligula, yeah, he's gone to Lake of Fire. Well, now I compare myself to Jesus Christ, and it's like, oh man, that's a whole different standard here, right? So, we can't just judge people as unredeemable. Only God can do that, and our answer has to be God knows. Only God can fix that one. Only God can fix that problem, which is one of the things we're all learning, by the way.

Something I remember an old man telling me when I was a kid. Some of you remember this old man.

I listened to a sermon, and he said, no human problem can be solved by a government, or a social movement, or a educational system, or money. Because at the core of all human problems is a corrupted human nature. And the only one who can create or change human nature is God. So, until Christ comes back, nothing actually gets fixed. Anybody remember who that old man was? How many know who that old man was?

Herbert Armstrong. Yeah, I remember him saying that. I remember reading it, and I remember thinking, yeah, even as a kid, yeah, he's right. Because, you know, as a kid, kids are idealistic. We want to change the world. I want to change the world, you know. I mean, I thought I could change the world. And you find out you can have God change you, and you can change what's right around you only as God works. And that's the best you can do, right? That's the best you can do.

God changed the world one person at a time until Christ comes back, and then he changes it.

He changes it. We can't figure out who gets redeemed or who doesn't get redeemed. The second resurrection is not for us to decide. God will decide it. And some people don't get redeemed. I'm so glad I have no say-so in that. I have no say-so in that. And neither do you. So this is an obvious way, okay, that we can pass it. Oh, that person's just there. They're going to go like a fire. We don't get to say that. Okay, but most of us don't do that. I mean, probably no one here has ever done that. So, okay, we don't know. So we understand that. A second way is that we actually refuse to accept somebody back into our fellowship who was sinned and repented.

In other words, we know they're sinned. Everybody knows they're sinned. Galatians 6.

This was a problem the New Testament church faced big time. And the Apostle Paul threw your grandmother in the jail. And jails weren't, you know, I've been in a lot of jails visiting people over the years. Maxima security, minimum security, dirty ones, clean ones, you know, everything you could think of. But none of them. The worst jail in this country doesn't even compare to the best jail in the Roman Empire. And you, he threw your grandmother in that jail and she died a horrible death. He was throwing Christians left and right in the jail. And now he says he's a Christian and they face this. So when he writes this later to the church in Galatians, in Galatians 6, he's very sensitive to, if someone sinned, do you bring them back? Because remember when Paul first came into the church, there were certain congregations that wouldn't let him come in.

And he understood why he never condemned them for that. Verse 1, brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such as as a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted. That's very interesting. Be careful. If someone has really done bad, maybe they stole, maybe they went to jail, maybe they committed adultery, maybe someone got pregnant at a wedlock and now the couple's just embarrassed. What do they do? All the things we do as human beings, all of us, I mean, you know, we won't ask anyone to get up and share something you've done. And that person's sin becomes known to everybody. How long before you stop talking about it?

After they've repented. He says, be very careful. There's a warning here that God doesn't let Satan come after you and you get tempted. Maybe now one of your sins will be exposed to everybody. He says, bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one... It's funny here. In this context, he goes back to exactly what we read Jesus did. Okay, we're dealing with somebody else's sin. He says, first, but let each one examine his own work, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone and not in another. For each one shall bury his own load. Very interesting. He goes back to, look at yourself.

Aren't you glad that God doesn't make us confess all of our sins in front of each other?

Aren't you glad of that? And then every once in a while, one of us gets our sins exposed and everybody gets to sin. And we have to remember who we are. If they've repented, now if they haven't repented, and this is a teaching in the church, it's a teaching in the scripture. I've had to do it occasionally, and it's something I hate to do, but every once in a while you have to go to somebody and say, look, until you repent, you can't come to church.

It's a horrible thing to have to say to somebody. And a lot of times I've seen people repent and come back because they repented. God took them where they needed to go. You work with them, you pray with them, you visit with them, and they repent. And every once in a while, you'll get someone who just won't repent. And usually where they go in life is not very good. So, that's the second way we can judge somebody, is in a wrong way. We just won't let go of something they've done. Now, I say, because this has come up, the person that was an alcoholic for 20 years, and so they repented, you know, they had to leave the church for a while because they just wouldn't overcome it. They went to the hospital, they got dried out, and they went through counseling. And now they've gone years and years without being an alcoholic. Okay? And so, you're having a party at your house. You still don't put them in charge of the bar. You say, well, we've forgiven them. Yeah. Think of the, maybe the worst weakness you have. Do you want to be thrown into that, and tempted with that? Well, why would you do that to a brother? But I've forgiven him. That's not the point. The point is you don't throw them into a situation where they may be tempted. That's not loving them. The third point, and now this gets a little more complicated as we go through this. The first two are fairly easy. You know, first one, we really don't do that. Second one, most of the time we don't do that. We make false accusations. Now, there's an interesting passage in Deuteronomy where they were told, you know, bearing false witness is a horrible sin. Remember that the commandment is, it doesn't say do not lie, although do not lie is part of it. It says do not bear false witness. It's a legal term. To stand in a court and lie about something in order to get somebody off or in order to get somebody condemned was considered by God to be the same as murder. To lie in court because it perverts the entire justice system. I just did a The TV program I did this week was on our perverted justice system. And, you know, the US justice system, by the way, is the best in the world. That's a little scary, but it is the best in the world. But, you know, if you don't think it's really perverted, turn on late night television and you'll see a commercial from a law firm suing a pharmaceutical company because they had this drug that they knew made people go blind. They did all these terrible things to people, and now there's three million people sick and they get class action suit. The next one is for Monsanto. Everybody knew Monsanto was poisonous a long time ago, right? They were poisoning all of us a long time. Well, now there's tens of millions of people suing them. Then, you know, how about the tobacco industry? We knew that they were selling cigarettes and saying it doesn't hurt you.

Then all kinds of suits came against them.

Our judicial system, and all you have to do is think of the lobbyists in our Congress.

They're buying and selling influence over the lawmakers. That's all they're doing. They're buying and selling influence over the lawmakers. It has become... I mean, the system was always certainly flawed because it wasn't the kingdom of God. It's become downright evil.

It's become evil. They're buying and selling influence all the time.

Sort of like Jose and Amos, which we just went through in the Bible studies. By the way, I think we're going to try to do a Bible study this coming Wednesday night if we can set it up. I'll let you know Tuesday in my update whether we're going to do it or not. So, continuing through the minor prophets. But the idea of perverting justice is absolutely appalling to God. That's why there's a passage that talks about it is sin before God to favor a rich person instead of going by the law. In fact, there's a lot of Old Testament and New Testament passages about using money to influence law as being abhorrent to God. You know what he also says? He says it's abhorrent when you favor a poor person because they're poor. The law is the law. It's supposed to be evenly dealt with. Now, that doesn't mean there were different penalties for intent.

That's why Solomon says in Proverbs that we all know, I'm paraphrasing him, but he says, we all know there's a difference between the person who steals because they're greedy and the person who steals because they're poor. I mean hungry. But he says they all still have to appear before the law. In other words, there's some kind of jurisdiction that takes place. The law is still the law. But we all know there's a difference in how you would, if you were a good judge, on exactly how you would deal with that, right? But they would still have to have some kind of penalty because they broke the law. I told this story before, but I think it's, I don't know if it's true or not, LaGuardia, who was the mayor of New York in the 1930s, would go to court at night. There was this little thing in the law where the mayor could go and actually be a judge. Now, it wasn't major cases. And there was a case brought before him, or a woman. Now, this is in the middle of the Depression, Great Depression, a case brought before him. And he looked at the law. What she'd done is she's actually stolen food. Her and her children were out on the street. They'd been abandoned by their, I think, abandoned by her husband. And they had nothing to eat, and she stole food. And he said, the law is the law. You're guilty. Ten dollar fine. So I don't have ten dollars. He said, okay. He says, I also find, and of course, hundreds of people would come to watch him do these judgments. He says, I find everybody in the court, I forget what it was, a couple quarters or something, because you live in a city that would allow a woman, a couple children, to be out on the street and not have food. So I find everybody. So he took the ten dollars out of the hat and gave her like a hundred. That's good justice. Okay. The law is met, but everybody's also, hey, we're all responsible here. So everybody, and he said everybody laughed and threw the money in and gave it to her. And that's justice. But he also didn't say, look, you stole. It's okay. Actually, it's not.

But we're all going to help you out here. So to pervert justice is a serious issue. But how many times do we make a false accusation and not realize we're making a false accusation? There's where we get in trouble.

We make a judgment about something and don't know. And you think about Hannah in the Bible.

She goes to the temple. It was the temple, it was the Tabernacle at the time, to pray because she couldn't get pregnant. And Eli the High Priest sees her there. She's praying out loud because she's just so desperate. And he accuses her of being drunk. That's a false accusation. And Hannah, being the humble person she was, said, oh, no, I'm not drunk. I just really want God to hear me. And God then inspired Eli to say, he's going to give you a son. And that's where we get Samuel from, the prophet Samuel. But that was a false accusation. It's not easy to receive a false accusation. Probably most of you have, and I have at times, and it's difficult to take a false accusation. But are we guilty sometimes of making false accusations?

Because we simply believe something about somebody. We suspect somebody. And we just simply accuse them.

I hear rumors all the time about, you know, some person, your church did this. Oh, what's the proof? And if there's no proof, I say, okay, aren't you going to talk to him? No.

You can't make an accusation without proof. It's wrong. Now, if there's proof, you can go say, is this true or not? And if the person has the right to say, you know, no, it's not true. Let me tell you what happened. Fine. No problem. But just because someone makes an accusation. And, you know, it's funny, as a minister over the last 35 years, I have lots of people come, and not too much here. I'm not saying it's happening here. But I've had lots of people come to me make an accusation against another member, and I'm furious with me because I won't go to something about it. I say, but you don't know. No, but somebody told me. And it may be true. I don't know. I'll have to pray about it. If it's true, we'll find it out. But I'm not going to go accuse them without proof.

See, we have to be very, very careful. We have to be very, very careful. Because what happens, someone tells you, you know, this person over here, they're an alcoholic. They're drinking. They're getting drunk all the time. I saw them, and they tell you a story. See, every time you see that person in the church, you find out that, you know, you just look at them, look at them different. Every time you see them laugh a little bit too loud, I bet you they've been hitting it, you know?

Pretty soon, you don't interact with them too much. Pretty soon, you don't interact with them too much.

Right? Because I know that that person... Pretty soon, you tell somebody else, you know, I was told a while back that that person is a drunk, and I believe it. And then you find out they have some kind of illness, and they're taking some kind of medicine, and it makes them dizzy from time to time.

Do you realize that's bearing false witness? That's breaking one of God's Ten Commandments. We take that one very lightly, don't we? We take that one real lightly.

See, we have to be very careful about this, because it is slander. You know, there's an example of this in Joshua 22.

Mr. Luck talked about Joshua. I'm going to go talk about Joshua. We didn't know each we were going to. Joshua 22. This, though, is after Joshua has conquered the land, after they've conquered Canaan, and the tribes are dividing up the area of Canaan to settle in.

And three of the tribes had said, we don't want to be settled on the one side of the Jordan. We really like that area on the other side, because we haven't. And God said, sure.

So two of the tribes and half of Manasseh were, okay, we're going to have some territory over here and expand out, because we like that territory. God said, fine.

And when they came to the region of the Jordan, this is verse 10 of chapter 22 of Joshua, which is in the land of Canaan, the children of Reuben, the children of Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh built an altar there by the Jordan, a great, impressive altar. Now, see, understand what happened is Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh crossed the Jordan and went over to where this land was that hadn't been part of the original possession, but God said they could have it.

And they built a giant, impressive altar. Now, the children of Israel, verse 11, I love the way this is translated. Now, the children of Israel heard someone say, behold, the children of Reuben, the children of Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh, had built an altar in the frontier of the land of Canaan and the region of the Jordan on the children of Israel's side.

And when the children of Israel heard it, the whole congregation of the children of Israel gathered together at Shiloh to go to war against them. Shiloh's where the tabernacle was. I want you to notice, Shiloh's where the altar was to worship God. They had built a giant, impressive altar that made the altar built for God look insignificant. This was a massive, impressive, well-built, permanent stone altar.

And they said, yep, they're already pagans. And they gathered together to go have a civil war. They just wiped out the Canaanites, or most of them, not all of them. And now, now they're going to go over and wipe out two and a half tribes of their own people. Because, hey, we're the people of God. An accusation's been made. We need to deal with it right now. Now, fortunately, some cooler heads prevailed because it says in verse 13, they said Phineas, the son of Eleazar, the priest.

So they set the son of the high priest over there. Now, if you read the rest of it here, what happens is the son of the high priest meets with the leaders of Reuben and Gad and half the tribe of Manasseh and basically says, I mean, it's a tirade. How God has been with them, God, you know, they don't have any faith. That was their problem. They've turned against God so easily. They become pagans overnight, you know, just on and on and on because somebody said.

And when he was done with the tirade, the leaders said, no, we build it because we wanted our children to always remember it's not an altar, it's a memorial. We wanted our children to always remember that the people on the other side of the Jordan are our people too. We wanted them to remember that we're all one nation. That's all we were doing. They were about to fight a civil war over something somebody said. That's a really grave warning to all of us all the time. Be careful about something somebody said because it's amazing how things can be misunderstood and how many wrong things can be said about people that we can say about each other.

And this brings us to our last point. The last way we make false judgments is gossip. Now, gossip is different than a false accusation because a false accusation leads to, we've got to do something about this. Okay, we've got to take care of this. I need to go talk to that person and put them in their place. I've got to go get that speck out of their eye. Okay, make sure your plank is gone first. Make sure your plank is gone first or you may be making a false accusation.

And if we tell somebody else, you know, without going to them and finding out what really happened, then we're just spreading a false accusation. You know, the biblical verse in Deuteronomy that's misunderstood so much, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Go read that someday, the context of what it's said in. The context of that is if someone goes before the law and lies about somebody else in testimony, and the judges and the priests have determined that they have lied, that they have to suffer the exact penalty that that other person would have experienced. So, in other words, if you said, I saw this person commit murder because you didn't like him, and then it's proved they didn't commit murder, and it's proved that you weren't even there, you didn't see it, you just made it up, guess what they had to do?

You community had to take you out and stone you to death. Well, that sort of cuts down on false accusations, doesn't it? But gossip is different. You're not necessarily making an accusation. You're just spreading, you're just sharing. You're sharing personal information. And a lot of times it can be true. Sometimes it's not true. Sometimes it's partly true. But you're just sharing it with your friends, with other people. Now, there's times to pass on information. And someone comes up to you and says, hey, remember so-and-so we went to school with whatever happened to him. You say, I found out he man, he got arrested for armed robbery.

He's been in jail for five years. Now, that's not gossiping. Someone asked a question, you gave a legitimate answer. And it's factual, right? That's it. That's it. It's a bad thing. Oh, I didn't know that. Gossip has a different intent, though. Gossip, and I'm going to talk a bit about why we gossip. Gossip has a different intent. We have to be aware of the intent of why we do this.

Like I said, many times it's factual or at least partly factual. Unlike the false accusation. But it is actually a wrong judgment. We're judging. Do I not judge? I should be judged. We're judging. Let me tell you about their marriage. Let me tell you why they're separated.

Did you hear so-and-so got set? They're not even...they're separated. Yeah. They're doing some counseling. You know, I...many, many times I've told people, okay, you're going to separate for a while. I mean, I didn't tell them. They said they were okay, but we have...you have to get back together. Work this out and get back together. What do we do at church? Well, it's best just to go to church and sit together. Well, one member says, I'm not going to come to church. So what happens? Someone comes to church and her husband isn't coming because he's working with some...on some problem he has. And I tell her, you just tell people, well, where is he? Well, you know, he just stayed home. Well, why? He just felt like he needed to stay home. That's all you have to say. You don't have to tell...we are not responsible to tell everybody the private things in our lives that should not be shared. Now, there's a times we do confess to each other, right? But when you confess to somebody, it's because you trust them. When you confess to somebody, it's because you know they care. Because they're going to treat you right. Now, they might look at you and say, that was stupid. Okay, well, that's good. Sometimes you need...I have friends that tell me I'm stupid every once in a while. I have some minister friends that literally...that's stupid. And I'm glad someone told me. My wife does that sometimes. She uses it a little nicer about it, but I know exactly what she's saying. You know? You think you should do that that way? Well, yeah. But you're mad. Well, yeah. You really want to...I mean, you might drive that person out of the church. Well, yeah. When all of a sudden it's like I'm losing more and more power, you know? And it's like, how's she doing this? I'm just losing my power here. Maybe you should just go talk to them. Well, yeah. I mean, I just...everything's changed overnight. Or I mean, in 30 seconds, you know.

We all need that. But there's a difference between, let me know what's happening in your life. If you don't want to share it, you don't share it.

Why do we gossip? Well, one reason... Sometimes we like passing on the dirt about others because it makes us feel superior. It just makes us feel good about ourselves. Like I said before, I feel real good every time I compare myself to Caligula. I'm a good guy. So we sort of compare ourselves to others. Oh, wow, they got that problem. I'm glad I don't have that problem. Did you know?

Another reason is that it's attractive because of our desire for secret knowledge. All of us like the feel of knowing something others don't. It's just weird about human nature. That's the whole idea of Gnosticism, which was that ancient religious system which is still around today, that you're saved by secret knowledge. No, we're not. We're saved by Jesus Christ. Now, He gives us knowledge, but it's not the knowledge that saves us. The knowledge comes from Him because we're being saved. That's a huge difference, okay? It's a huge difference. But we all like to have a little knowledge that nobody else has. Sometimes we like them.

That's why Solomon says, the words of a towel-bearer are like tasty trifles.

Oh, man, that tastes good. Wow, I like that.

Another reason we gossip. In all honesty, there are people, and a lot of times it's because their whole lives have been filled with conflict. They only feel sort of happy when they're in some kind of conflict. And so the more conflict they can create, the happier they are. The more stories they have, the more they can put other people down, the more they can tear other people up, the more they can see fights going on. I mean, they have to be in a fight all the time.

I don't know. God's Spirit brings us peace. There's enough fights in life without going out and picking one, right? But there are people who need conflict, and people who need conflict love gossip.

But I'm only telling the truth. Yeah, but why are you doing it? Why are you telling that? This is going to Proverbs. No, no, I'm just going to read this. See, I'm turning there. Proverbs 26, Solomon writes, Where there is no wood, the fire goes out, and where there is no tail-bearer, strife ceases. As charcoal was to burning coals, and wood is to fire, so is the contentious man to kenzel strife. Contentious people love gossip.

They just love to spread it. One of the most important passages about the tongue is what James writes. I thought about giving a whole series of sermons on just the book of James. I got five sermons I could create from the book of James.

One of the things he talks about is how if you can't learn to control what you say, and unless you're a whole lot better off than I am, I still deal with things I shouldn't say. He says, you aren't truly got control of yourself as a Christian until you control everything you say. Wow, that's hard, right? He says, because it's our tongue that gets us in trouble all the time.

There's an old story. I put this in one of my pastors' updates here about a year ago. There's an old story. I've read it numerous times, and I don't think it's a true one, because it's always a little different every time I read it. So I think it's some story that someone uses an illustration probably 50, 60 years ago, and it's become, you know, you can read it in all these books as if it's true. I don't think it is, but it's an interesting story. And one of the versions is that there's a pastor, and he has a church office in his building, and a person comes into the church office one morning, and they're coming in, and the secretary's there, and she says, oh, I saw the pastor's car. He's here awfully early, and the secretary says, yeah, he's been here, I think, all night, all night. And the door opens, and out comes this beautiful young woman that everybody knows, her and her husband have been having troubles. And she comes out, and, you know, she's a little disheveled, and she leaves. And then the pastor comes out, he looks exhausted, and he says, I'm going to go home for a little bit. I need to get some rest. And he shuts the door, you know, stays in his office, and the woman, oh, you know, and she leaves. Well, she goes and tells her friends, you can't believe what I saw at church today, when I went to the church building today. You know, so-and-so, who's heard her husband are having troubles? Yeah, she spent all night in the pastor's office with him. And, you know, who knows what's going on? Well, then what's a person told another person? A person told another person? A person told another person? And tell the entire church, you know, you know how this gets spread out. The whole entire church now knows, absolutely, did you hear that they've actually, they've caught our pastor committing adultery? Red-handed! Really? Yeah! 16 people saw it! It got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then, the pastor and his wife asked the woman to come into the office. She comes into the office and he says, explain what you saw. And she explained. And he said, what you didn't know was, my wife and I got a call, like, you know, three o'clock in the morning, her husband had left her. She was so distraught, she was thinking about suicide. So, we had her, my wife and I had her come over to the office. You just didn't see my wife. She was sitting behind the door.

And we were there working her through this problem. And the woman says, I'm so sorry! What can I do? What can I do? I mean, how do I... He says, you realize now that the elders are meeting to possibly fire me from my job. And she said, what do I do? He said, well, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to cake. Do you have a... What are these feather pillows? She said, yeah. She said, I want you to take that big feather pillow. I want you to go top to a hill here where the wind's really blowing. And I want you to ask God for forgiveness, then cut it open and scatter those feathers into the wind. She said, well, why do that? He said, well, afterwards you have to go collect all those feathers. She says, I can't do that. And he said, there's the problem with gossip, isn't it? You can never clean up the mess you created. You can never take those feathers back. There's somebody someplace always believing what you started. I always thought that was a really good illustration of what gossip does. And it's so easy for us to do it.

There is time to pass on information. And there's time not to. The wisdom is knowing when you do it and when you don't do it and how you do it. And I'm going to give you five questions to ask yourself every time you're in a conversation and you are about to tell somebody or somebody is about to tell you something about somebody else. Some secret knowledge about their life, some negative. If it's a positive thing, it's good. A positive thing should be passed on, but if it's some negative thing in their lives. Here's what you need to ask. So someone's told you something. Before you pass it on, is it true? Well, you don't know. Most of the time we don't know. How do you find out? Well, you go ask the person. Well, I don't want to do that. It'd be embarrassing. Then maybe she'd not say anything. You know, if you can't go ask the person, don't say anything.

Is it true? Is the story an attempt to destroy the person's reputation?

And will it destroy the person's reputation needlessly? Maybe the person's reputation needs to be, okay, we need to consider this. Now, there's some things you have to go deal with. You know, if you find out, some friend of yours in the congregation here is using illegal drugs, you better go talk to them. You better find out if it's true and you better go talk to them. You don't want to wake up one day and find out they died, right?

Because you didn't do something. So there is a time to react. But you've got to work these things through. Why is it necessary for others to know this? Let's use the example. You have a friend, someone tells you that they're heavily in the drugs, they're worried about them, and so you and that friend, you go see them and you find out it's true and they're begging for help. Now, who do you tell? Everybody in the church? Now, you go get them to somebody who can help them. Maybe you pray with them. I've told many people you've got to go. You've got to go get cleaned. You've got to go to a hospital or you'll die. You can't get cleaned on yourself and I can't get you cleaned. You've got to go to somebody who can work you through this or they'll kill you.

And you take them to people who help them, not to people who can help them. Then you have to ask, why is the person telling me this information? What's their reason? Sometimes it's just sometimes the person has no wrong motive, right? They're just thinking about somebody. Oh, I've been worried about so and so. You know, and I just found out he lost his job because, wow, he actually did some pretty unethical things and they fired him for, you know, pretty unethical behavior. And then afterwards we think, you know, I probably shouldn't have told anybody that, right? They say he lost his job is enough. It's probably enough at the time.

Then there's time to tell people things because they're important. It's to get people help.

So we all have passed on things and later probably thought I probably shouldn't have said that, right? So we need to think about this. And the last question, should I go to the other person and they get his or her side of the story? Oh, man, I tell you, if there's two people, you say there's two sides of the story. No, there's usually three. I know there's what the one person says, what the other person says, and there's reality of what actually happened. And probably no one will ever figure out what actually happened because we all filter everything through our own brains. So the third story is what we're trying to find, and it's almost impossible to do so.

So some people will tell each other gossip, and even if it's false, many of the times we don't know that, it's what we saw. So we believe it's true. We believe it's true. But sometimes what we saw isn't what we saw, and we don't know that. We don't know the backstory of what happened.

Remember, dealing with the damage caused by gossip is like taking a feather pillow and dumping all those feathers into the wind and then going and trying to pick them all up.

So just because Jesus' words in Matthew 6 are often misused to say we shouldn't judge people, we know that we should make judgments, even about other people, by in accordance with the law of God. Now I say judgments. Our judgment is whether something's right or wrong. Our judgment isn't, oh, you get to go to Lake Kefire, okay?

Our judgment isn't judicial in that we don't hold court. Our judgment is whether it's right or wrong. And there are certain judicial decisions that are made in the church in terms of whether a person could attend or not. But there's always the doors open because we always want repentance. The whole purpose is repentance and restoration.

Then we come to the other problem that's actually more real to us. How do I make, sometimes, and even unwittingly, am I making wrong judgments? So we had four ways we looked at. Judging someone as beyond God's redemption, we don't get to make that one.

People ask me, is Judas redeemable? I don't know. I don't know. God knows. I don't. Refusing to accept that God has forgiven someone when they have repented. When they've repented, we're to restore them into relationship. All of us want that. All of us need that. Making false accusations.

Bearing false witness. And then the last one, which is the hardest one for us, it's spreading gospel. Gossip. Let's face it. Many of you have known each other in this room for 10 years, 20 years, some of you 30 or 40 years. So you know all kinds of stuff about each other. And it's easy to pass it on when we don't have to pass it on. The past doesn't matter. Seeking people to helping them get help is what matters. Not simply passing on the information. You know, there's lots of times people people ask me about prayer, you know, how about like the prayer list that comes out to the, from the home office. I don't put anybody's prayer on that prayer list, even if we announce it locally, unless you ask me to. Because if it's your private information, and you want to share it with us, and you want to share it with 8,000 other people, I don't put it there unless you want me to put it there. I respect the fact that you may want privacy. There are many people who say, please don't even ask the church to pray for this. The local church, maybe some issue they have. I say, okay.

That's just respecting where people are, you know. Please don't tell the church about my sin. I'm not going to do that.

He was without sin, right?

So we all have to try. Gossip's the hard one.