Todays sermon was on Judging people. It made me feel good to hear it because it agreed with what I preached a few years ago. I also had to pay attention as it was a message I have to listen to and live by.
Am I my brother keeper?
Start with reading 1 Corinthians 5: 1 – 13 Matthew 18: 15-19
OK let’s get things clear first. During the course of this blog post when I say brother I am not referring to my flesh and blood brother Steve. If I’m talking about Steve I’ll mention him by name. By Brother I’m talking about fellow Christians our Brothers in Christ. And I’m not just limiting it to males either I am also going to be using the word to refer to females. I know I should say our brothers and sisters in Christ or siblings in Christ, it just that it’s easier to say and also… Brothers Keeper is more memorable than siblings keeper, I’m going to stick to saying Brother. But you know I mean.
Am I my brothers’ keeper?
Growing up I got the impression that the answer was quite obviously “no” I am not. Steve should just look after himself and I’ll take care of myself thank you very much. Look out for number one, make sure I’m Ok don’t worry about not only my actual brother but sisters, relatives and friends and people you don’t know. They’ll look after themselves just get on with our own life.
Now with me then having very little knowledge of anything biblical I figured that if it was a good enough answer for someone to give to God when asked about a brother then it’s good enough for me.
However lets put the saying in context. Cain had just killed his brother Abel. It was not in the heat of the moment it was planned. ‘hey Abel lets go out to the field!’ Where he then killed him.
Along comes God and asks Cain. ‘Where is your brother Abel/’
To which Cain replies “Am I my Brother’s keeper?”
The original context of those words is an attempt to create some sort of Alibi for a despicable murder.
And I was using that as my role model?
Christianity takes that whole concept of interpersonal relationships that I had and turned it on its head. Where I had said” It’s all about me” I just have to care for me and not worry about them. Jesus says ‘no – you are your brothers’ keeper. You are to, not only, be there for Steve but everyone, your family, your neighbors even your enemies.’
From my reading of the bible there is only one time when it’s all about you and that is the point when you are to answer God’s call and give your life to him. That time when you become a Christian. Repent and believe.
So the only time Christianity is "all about you" is when you get saved after that it all about what you do for God (worship him with thought, words and deeds).
After all you have given your life to Him what gives you the right to say “thanks for saving me but I’ll do things my way thank you very much, I won’t bother you again ‘till I need you and then only as a last resort.
No we are to love Him, to worship him with our hearts, minds, body and strength. We learn from the Bible, about Him. We go out and do actions for those who need help in what ever form, be it food, shelter counselling what ever. We tell others about Jesus so they too can be saved. All this is done as worship to Jesus…. and as a very blessed side effect we then become better people. Become Christ-like
See the difference, we don’t become better people first in order to serve, we serve to better God’s kingdom and as side effect we become better. At the start in small ways and then larger as our skills and responsibility grows.
Let us look after all at what Jesus calls the two greatest commandments. Mark Chapter 12 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. 31The second is this: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.'There is no commandment greater than these.
First off love God, then love others. So it’s dedicate your life to God and then dedicate it to others.
This may leave you feeling a bit left out, thinking if I am caring for everybody then my needs are not going to be met. Well if everybody is looking after everybody then someone is looking after you too.
So the short answer is Yes I am my brothers keeper.
There are many ways to look after your brother. Financially, with prayer, with gifts of goods or help, teaching, listening the list goes on. Tonight I want to focus on one that is not talked about often and isn’t very popular.
And that is Judging your brother.
Now the first things I often hear when this is mentioned is that we should not judge others. ‘Jesus said “Do not judge, and you will not be judged.” I’m told we should not put ourselves in the place of God it is his place not ours to judge.
And that is all good and true except for one thing. If we take these quotations and comments on face value that we are not to judge, then it negates a very large portion of the rest of the bible. Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Amos, Peter, Paul, James and John all judged people.
I think first off we need to define what judging is and then what are the limits placed on us by God in regards to judging.
OK let’s go to the dictionary.
To judge:
1 : to form an opinion about through careful weighing of evidence and testing of premises
2 : to sit in judgment on : TRY
3 : to determine or pronounce after inquiry and deliberation
4 : GOVERN, RULE -- used of a Hebrew tribal leader
5 : to form an estimate or evaluation of; especially : to form a negative opinion about (shouldn't)
6 : to hold as an opinion : GUESS, THINK
A definition not explicitly stated here but hinted at in item 2 is that of the final judgment of our sins. It is wholly and completely Jesus role to say I judge you for your sins, I judge you for not coming to me for forgiveness. You are now condemned to your eternal punishment. That is God’s role. Never ours. Jesus’s quote to “Judge not’ is relating to this.
Item 6 is just semantics, word play, using the word judge in regards to guessing. That does not relate here.
Item 5 is one that I think riles many people and rightly so. It is when you evaluate someone on limited information, often the estimation can be tainted by prejudice and stereotypes and there fore is wrong. This certainly is one where we must not judge as we can be judged with the same use of bias.
Item 4 is from where we get the name of the book of Judges from in the Old Testament. That form of Judge obviously does not relate to us today.
Items 1, 2 and 3 is where we come in.
In tonight’s reading from 2 Cor 5 Paul has discovered that in the church at Corinth there is a man who is having sexual relations with his step-mother! But Paul in verse 3 says that even though he is not there ‘I have already passed judgement on the one who did this” And later in verse 13 ‘expel the wicked man from among you”
If we are not to judge, if it is not our place to tell another what to do then how can Paul be saying this! And it’s not just Paul. Nathan judged David for his sin with Bathsheba is just one other example. You may say that these people where specially sent by god to that situation well Paul also tells the Corinthians in verse 12 that it is their place to judge those who are church members.
As brothers and sisters in Christ it is our responsibility to call each other on our sins. I will go into that in detail soon, but one thing it is not our duty to do is judge those outside the church, we are not to judge for their sins those who are not Christians.
If someone calls themselves a Christians and is sinning yes you are to call them on it, but if they have no relationship with Jesus then how can we hold them to the standard He has set for our lives when they don’t even acknowledge Him?
Paul said it to the Corinthians again in verse 12’ What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? God will judge those outside.”
We are not to call them on their sin – our responsibility is to bring them to Jesus. Once they follow him they will understand the standard they have and then we are to begin the judging.
So now we understand that as our brothers’ keeper we are to hold them accountable to Jesus’ standard of morality how then are we to do so…
Firstly I think we should decide if the matter is really something we should worry about. In Pauls day a problem a lot of people were having in both the Roman and Corinthian churches is that people were eating meat that had been offered to an idol or false god.
Some in the churches considered this to be tantamount to being worship of the idol itself and considered it a most dreadful sin.
Paul however did not consider it a sin, because after all ‘God is bigger than the boogy man”. Paul in Romans 14 considered the eating of meat to be a “disputable matter”. One mans faith allows that while anothers will not and goes in to give instructions to the one whose faith allows it to be mindful of the weaker brother when eating such meat and not to do so. Not as their act is a sin but as it will hurt his brothers faith – brothers keeper time again.
Today we will have disputable matters, such as, for example, reading Harry Potter or other fictional occult based books. Some people will find them to be in no way affecting their walk with God – others will – it is a disputable matter in that regard.
Some matters are indisputable –sexual immorality, blasphemy, theft. The bible has lists of such things.
So if we see our brother doing something indisputably sinful then we need confront them on it but importantly we must examine ourselves before we do so.
Jesus said. If you are going to get a speak of sawdust out of your brothers eye then you had better make sure you have gotten the plank of wood out of your own eye. I am pretty sure he was using exaggeration to get the point across here after all it would be very difficult to get a log into your eye in the first place, let alone not know it was there.
This exaggerated example can be taken two ways.
1. Often when someone has a problem in themselves they will see that or different problems in others in a highlighted degree. And by denouncing the others smaller problem they draw their attention away from looking at their own problems.
Now this does not mean if I see someone shoplifting and tell them to stop that I am a closet thief, it just means that the sin is obvious and I’m calling them on it.
What it means is if you have, for example, a problem with alcohol, perhaps even being an alcoholic that you will resoundly and loudly denounce anyone who drinks more than a few sips of communion wine on Sundays yet be in complete denial or ignorance of your own drunkenness. Jesus speaks against that hypocrisy.
2. It can also be taken that we need to acknowledge that before God we are all sinners, without His forgiveness we are all condemned and if we approach someone who is caught in some sin no matter how minor without our acknowledging, at least to ourselves, that we are sinners too in need of Christ then we have a plank of wood in our eye.
Both explanations have merit and in situations both are valid. When you are judging your brother we must first identify “Do we have planks in our eyes?” Are we attempting to transfer our blame and guilt to another? Are we acknowledging that “There but the grace of God go I?” Are we being humble and introspective before we approach our brother?
If we still feel able then we need to follow the method as laid out by Jesus in Mathew chapter 18 tonights other reading.
15"If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. 16But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.' 17If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
Go to your brother – one on one, and have a talk. When you approach in an attitude of humility and love – with that plank out of your eye at least two things will hopefully happen. They will listen to you and you will listen to them.
Can you imagine someone from the congregation bowling up to you after a service with an attitude that oozes how self-righteous they are feeling and loudly saying “Hey – Stop sinning, I know what you are doing Stop it!”
What is your first instinct? Mine is that I’d want to do something to that person I’d need to repent of later. After that and if I hadn’t ran away, I wouldn’t be listening to them, I would be defensive and argumentative and stubborn and come away feeling angry and wanting to hit things (or people). I would not be going “oh yeah you are right, sorry, I must stop that and go to God in repentative prayer” – unless it was incredible sarcastically.
But if someone comes to you quietly and says something like’ you know we all have problems, I can have trouble shutting up sometimes but I noticed that blah blah – do you want to talk about it?’ how more receptive would you be then to that person’s correction of you?
With the plank out of your eye and with humility the brother may listen and be ‘won over‘
The other thing that may happen is that you may find out you got the wrong end of the stick and the person was not sinning and you were wrong.
We may not have all the facts of the situation and what it looks like a person is doing may not actually be something they are doing.
Or it may be a disputable matter, that you have the weaker faith in this matter, and this will be a time of teaching and strengthening for you.
A minor example of this is that there was this time I was judged in a way. I’m from Southland you see. I grew up there, and started work there. Apart from a certain vocal inflection (rrrolling of the r) there is something else southlanders are known for. We eat swede’s, raw or cooked they are yummy and it never gave me a second thought how it was not a delicious food.
However I moved to Rangiora and a new member of the youth group was from England and her part of England swedes are not used as food. They are considered to be not fit for human consumption. Swedes are only to be fed to animals. Pigs especially.
So I’m there busy chomping down on a nice raw bit of southland swede while some more is cooking in the pot for tea and she is there nearly throwing up. Sort of like how I would if she cracked open a tin of whiskers cat food, took a big spoonful, swallowed in sheer delight then offered me some.
So she judged me as being foul and disgusting almost sinful in my actions – but it wasn’t In this case it was just a clash of cultures, she could not comprehend someone eating what she thought of as pig food. But to me it was second nature.
When we see an action of another, is it a clash of culture? Is it a disputable matter? Go to the Bible what does it say? Pray, read and study it together. In humility both need to go to God
Now however what if you were right, it is indisputably sin and they won’t listen to you?
Jesus says to go back and to take some witnesses. Not people who will just stand around like bouncers while you repeat your previous accusations. But people who have seen for themselves what the person has been doing.
Again this will need to be done with humility and introspection. It is not ganging up on a dirty rotten sinner, but in Christ’s love helping someone to improve themselves and situation.
Again if the person refuses then it needs to be brought to the church. In our case the vicar, the wardens or vestry members would be the people to approach and not roll up here during the notices and say we saw Andrew eating weird stuff.
And then finally if they still will not change their actions of sin then as Paul said “expel the wicked man”
Note that at no point are we to judge that they are not Christians or going to hell or that they do not believe in Christ. All that is being done is that the person actions are being judged as sinful actions that are not to be done by a church member.
This is done for the person and for the church. Paul warns in 1 Corthinans using the example of yeast in bread dough, that a little bit of allowed sin will corrupt the whole church.
So the method to judge another is:
Examine yourself
Go to the person privately to talk and listen
Take witnesses with evidence
Take the matter publicly to the church
Expel the person from the congregation.
I have never been part of a congregation who has had to expel someone. Whether that has been because the situation has never gotten that far or that there has never been a situation like that I don’t know.
But the thing to remember here is that the end result is not the punishment and expulsion of a person but rather what God wants is repentance, reconciliation, love and forgiveness.
Have a look at 2 Corinthians 2 5:-8
5If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you, to some extent—not to put it too severely. 6The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. 7Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. 8I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him.
Scholars are divided as to if the person mentioned here is also the person expelled in the first letter. Some say yes some say no. I do not see any direct biblical evidence that they are they same person but I’d like to think it was.
Either way a person has hurt the congregation and Paul says once the appropriate punishment has been meted and the person is sorrowful then to welcome him back with love.
The whole process is not about the punishment it’s not about the sin it’s about the rehabilitation and reconciliation.
We have all heard the tales about bitter ex-Christians who have been called on their sins and perhaps punished who turn their backs on Christ. Paul here warns not to over punish – only to do that which is sufficient, then to forgive and comfort.
Remember that to forgive and comfort.
We approach the judgment with humility, we act it out in sadness and then forgive with love and grace.
When you think about it a bit this is also God’s way of treating us as well.
Except for the case that He does not have to worry about his own sin first – as he has none. God is patient with us, slow to anger and abounding in love. I love the words some of the older translations use for patience “long suffering” God suffers a long time for us to repent so there can be a reconciliation. The punishment has been meted out – to Jesus.
Then He calls us to Him with forgiveness and comfort.
Surely we can also do that for our brothers? After all we are their keepers
