Sunday February 5, 2023 | Danny Churchill
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."
The church too often puts on display bad news that drives people away from God. This sermon confronts this pattern and shows us a different way—a way of love that can provide an experience of good news.
Many people have walked away from the faith or at least have questions about what God is like because of their experience of the church. The good news has not been presented and embodied as good. In fact, a whole lot of bad news has been experienced in the church, things like judgmentalism, sexual abuse, hypocrisy and violence. The horrible things that people have done in the name of Jesus throughout church history should be enough to make us all take pause and reflect on how we’re representing Christ to others through our actions. To help us address this pattern, Danny Churchill, offers a different way.
At the core of this bad news church experience is judgmentalism, the lived-out expression of a person’s belief that they are morally superior to others. Judgmentalism leads people to feel “less than” and to experience the church as hypocritical and fake. Instead of learning to love together, the church has developed a culture of learning to judge others together. Judgmentalism is a relational-killer that goes against all that Jesus taught.
Instead of judgment, we are to live in a way that assumes we don’t have the full picture. We can’t see things clearly when it comes to others because we have an obstructed view. We have a plank in our eye that hinders us from seeing what’s going on in the other person. Anything we’re noticing in someone else that we’ve deemed less than ideal is insignificant compared to the work we need to do in our own life.
We, the followers of Jesus, are on a journey to be formed more into the image of Jesus —and we haven’t arrived yet! We are a work in progress. We all have planks that we’re working on and trying to remove so that we can see things clearly. We must not point out someone’s “speck” unless they’ve invited us in and asked for our help. When we are asked to walk alongside another person, Danny offers a set of questions to help us avoid the trap of judgment:
We are built to live in community and to be with others who can share the load. We need one another, which means that we need help. We must adopt patterns of love, as opposed to judgment, so that we can serve each other well. As we are doing this, we will actually put on display God’s good news.