The need is clear in my mind for all of us. We need to judge less. I catch myself time and time again talking to my wife about someone for 5, 10, 15 minutes and at the end of it realize I have been judging that person the entire time; by something this person said, or did, or just who this person is. Ridiculous, I know.
This got me thinking of why we are so judgmental. To me its pretty simple: we get judged by everything we do on a regular basis. Our work is judged by a boss or supervisor; we get judged by how well we cook by people telling us if it's good or not; we get judged by how we are dressed; we get judged by our speech, whether we are tactful or not. It's no wonder why we judge others, we ourselves get judged all the time.
It is really tough to categorize judgment. When is it needed? When is it not? How do we exercise it?
I really like things simple. I try hard to live a simple life, not complicated by unnecessary things. So, here is my simple assessment of judgment. It is really not our place in any way to judge people unless they themselves ask for it. If we are going to judge ourselves that is our choice (I do believe we need a healthy view of ourselves), but we have no right to judge another person (outside of a work environment, but even here we tend to judge not performance, but the person, sad but true).
This world is too full of people giving their opinions on people who have no business giving an opinion at all. We see a person like this or like that and we say out loud something critical that brings judgement on that person.
No where is this more prevalent than inside the church. We give critiques on how loud music is, or how long the message is, or we don't like how this person acts and the list goes on and on. More often than not we give our opinion of things and call it fact, but really it's just unnecessary judgement of a person. I personally fell prey to this on Sunday morning this past week. I won't get into the specifics, but I judged heavily and gave my opinion on a matter as what would be best and who did it help? No one.
The reality is we pass judgement on another person because it is easier to look at what someone else needs to change instead of what we need to change in our own lives; we judge because sometimes we are afraid if we had a healthy view of ourselves we wouldn't like what we see. So, instead of investing in a healthy view of ourselves we just look at others and tell them the ways they ought to change; the things they need to improve upon.
Jesus tells us not to judge others because the standard we hold others to will be the standard we will be held to (see Matthew 7). To me, that's sobering. Not only is Jesus telling us not to judge, but He also does it (see John 4).
Maybe instead of judging others we should start accepting them as they are knowing we don't have things together either. Maybe what is needed is not more fixing others, but more looking at ourselves and seeing we have this massive 2x4 log sticking out of our eye and we need to take care of that before we tell others what they need to fix. Maybe this is Jesus' way of saying, you have no right to judge anyone because you will never be perfect enough to judge. Maybe this is just another way of saying we don't think Jesus is enough, so we judge thinking we are helping Him (just ludicrous, but this is primarily what is at the heart of judgement).
We judge way too much. We need to stop. We are not helping others by telling them what they are doing wrong, we are just doing more damage.
We need not be afraid of looking at ourselves and getting healthy. The more we start to get healthy ourselves I can guarantee the less we will judge.
Thoughts are of course always welcome.
This got me thinking of why we are so judgmental. To me its pretty simple: we get judged by everything we do on a regular basis. Our work is judged by a boss or supervisor; we get judged by how well we cook by people telling us if it's good or not; we get judged by how we are dressed; we get judged by our speech, whether we are tactful or not. It's no wonder why we judge others, we ourselves get judged all the time.
It is really tough to categorize judgment. When is it needed? When is it not? How do we exercise it?
I really like things simple. I try hard to live a simple life, not complicated by unnecessary things. So, here is my simple assessment of judgment. It is really not our place in any way to judge people unless they themselves ask for it. If we are going to judge ourselves that is our choice (I do believe we need a healthy view of ourselves), but we have no right to judge another person (outside of a work environment, but even here we tend to judge not performance, but the person, sad but true).
This world is too full of people giving their opinions on people who have no business giving an opinion at all. We see a person like this or like that and we say out loud something critical that brings judgement on that person.
No where is this more prevalent than inside the church. We give critiques on how loud music is, or how long the message is, or we don't like how this person acts and the list goes on and on. More often than not we give our opinion of things and call it fact, but really it's just unnecessary judgement of a person. I personally fell prey to this on Sunday morning this past week. I won't get into the specifics, but I judged heavily and gave my opinion on a matter as what would be best and who did it help? No one.
The reality is we pass judgement on another person because it is easier to look at what someone else needs to change instead of what we need to change in our own lives; we judge because sometimes we are afraid if we had a healthy view of ourselves we wouldn't like what we see. So, instead of investing in a healthy view of ourselves we just look at others and tell them the ways they ought to change; the things they need to improve upon.
Jesus tells us not to judge others because the standard we hold others to will be the standard we will be held to (see Matthew 7). To me, that's sobering. Not only is Jesus telling us not to judge, but He also does it (see John 4).
Maybe instead of judging others we should start accepting them as they are knowing we don't have things together either. Maybe what is needed is not more fixing others, but more looking at ourselves and seeing we have this massive 2x4 log sticking out of our eye and we need to take care of that before we tell others what they need to fix. Maybe this is Jesus' way of saying, you have no right to judge anyone because you will never be perfect enough to judge. Maybe this is just another way of saying we don't think Jesus is enough, so we judge thinking we are helping Him (just ludicrous, but this is primarily what is at the heart of judgement).
We judge way too much. We need to stop. We are not helping others by telling them what they are doing wrong, we are just doing more damage.
We need not be afraid of looking at ourselves and getting healthy. The more we start to get healthy ourselves I can guarantee the less we will judge.
Thoughts are of course always welcome.
