To Judge, or Not to Judge

Have you ever corrected a fellow believer using God’s Word, and their response is “Judge not lest you shall be judged?” Or how about this one? “It is not your job to judge. Only God can judge me.”

Well both statements are totally based on not “rightly dividing the word of truth”. Telling someone that they cannot judge is, at best is a false teaching.
These people who make these statements do not read the whole context of the passage to understand what Jesus is actually teaching. They like to quote this passage:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

Matthew 7:1

If they only had read a little further, they would have found out that Jesus was, in fact, teaching us how TO judge. Did you get that? Jesus was teaching us HOW TO judge, not teaching us NOT TO judge. If you read verse 5, we see that Jesus teaches that we must get rid of the beam in our own eye before we can help our brother with the splinter in his eye. To put it another way, we have to take care of our own sin/sins first before we can help our brother or sister. If we are doing the same thing as our brother or sister, how dare we judge them! If we do, we are a hypocrite!

Let me ask you this. If you of a brother or sister in your church group that is living in sin, do you try and correct them using God’s Word? Or, because of your belief that it is not our job to judge, or you’re afraid that if you do, you will be judged in the same manner, that you let that brother or sister continue in their sin? Which do you choose to do? I bet that quite a few of you would say that you would correct them using God’s Word. If you correct them using God’s Word, did you know that is judging them? If you don’t do anything, why are you letting sin grow and fester in the church? Let’s say for example you have a basket full of apples, but one of them is rotten. Do you remove that bad apple so that the rest can be saved? Or do you allow that one bad apple to spread its rottenness to all the other apples? I know your answer. It would be to remove that one bad apple.It is the same with one brother or sister who is living in sin in the church. Their sin will slowly infect the rest of the members, not necessarily with the same sin, but sin as a whole. We are commanded to purge that sin from the church body so it doesn’t spread.

Paul has this to say:

7 Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:
8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9 I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:
10 Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world.
11 But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.
12 For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within?

13 But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.

1 Corinthians 5:7-13.

In verse 11 Paul is not just telling us “these sins only”, but telling us that if a brother or sister is willfully and continually sinning, we are not to have anything to do with, no even to eat with them. That sounds a lot like judging to me. Look at the very next verse. “… do not ye judge them that are within?” The ESV says it this way:

“For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?”

Yes, we are to judge those inside the church so we can purge the leaven (sin) from the church! We cannot allow sin to grow and fester within the church. Now for the mic drop.

“Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgement”

John 7:24

Guess who said this? This came straight outta Jesus’s mouth my brothers and sisters!!! Jesus is telling us to judge righteous judgement. He is not telling us NOT to judge, but TO judge! We judge righteously by using His Word, and ONLY His Word. So, correcting someone who is sinning by using the Word of God, is judging righteous judgement.

In conclusion, it is our job to only judge those in the church. God is the only one who can judge those on the outside of the church.