The thing about judgment is: It’s not your job! It’s also not MY job. I heard the best definition of “judgment” at a Sozo training last year: “Judging is when you think you know the motive behind someone’s actions or thoughts.”
Ouch! It’s not that you don’t sometimes know the motive, but you can refuse to take the next step and act out your judgment. You can choose instead to bless them and pray that person into an encounter with the love of God. Making a judgment of someone is trapping him or her in one form of behavior. It is making an excuse not to love them. It means no matter how hard they try, you limit their future by keeping past actions at the forefront of your mind. I can remember telling someone who had made some pretty serious judgments about me, “Do you not realize that even if I did do that, I don’t do that anymore? God is changing that in me.
Condemnation is the hardest thing to live with, whether it comes from you or from someone else. I know. I’ve tried. Condemnation is when you have been sentenced to guilt and shame because of a real or supposed past action.
Condemnation says you’ll never be any different; you’ll always fail, you can’t change.
Ah, and then there’s grace. Grace says I can never do something so unworthy that will give God an excuse to stop loving me. I always have favor with God. There is never a time when He condemns me to past performance. Why? God is all about creating my future. He continues to encourage us toward our future and is confident that He will bring me to a “flourishing finish”. (Philippians 1:6) That’s who He is. The very word “grace” is acceptance for the undeserving. How can I ever entertain the idea that God would love me in spite of my sin, but not them?
There are two scriptures that came to me as I was writing:
Philippians 2:12: …work out your OWN (did I highlight that enough?) salvation with fear and trembling.
Romans 14:10-12: But why do you judge your brother? Or why do you show contempt for your brother? Each of us will stand before the judgment seat of Christ.…Each of us shall give account of himself to God.
The truth is if I’m busy working out MY salvation, I won’t have time to worry about yours! And if I’m getting my life ready for Jesus to judge, I’m thinking I will want it to overflow with things the Spirit taught me and equipped me and led me to do. So, scratch judgment off your to-do list. It’s really not worth it. Jesus is not going to ask you how your brother, or your sister, or your neighbor did. He’s interested in how you let “God work in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” I think I’m going to work out what it is that God is working IN me so that my life demonstrates His goodness, and grace.
There are many “givens” in our lives. We will have enemies. We will have offensive people. We will know unlovely people. He will not want to know if I had enemies, but if I blessed them. He will not want to see if I was unforgiving, but that I “lived forgiving.” He will be most excited to see that I was a “servant of His grace” to everyone who needed it; the unlovely, the mean-spirited, the unkind, the hurting and fearful, and especially the undeserving. And He’ll be looking at the times I reached out in faith, with grace, and opened my arms to someone in His Name.
Okay, I think I’ve got it. How about you? I am NOT going to waste my time working out the details of your salvation. Come to think of it, God does a pretty good job on His own.
I’m resigning that job, effective today!
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