The Sin of Judgment

When I boil the gospel down to the bare bones of what it means to be a Christian, it comes down to one thing - love. God is love, and we are called to love. There, that should be simple enough. The fact that we suck at doing it is another simple fact. I ask folks what the opposite of love is, and most say it is hate. The direct opposite of loving my neighbor is hating my neighbor. I guess that is pretty simple to. But I think it is off. There might be a few situations where I might hate someone, but it isn't where I struggle. And generally it isn't where I see the people in my world struggling either. I think that the opposite of love is judgment. It is far worse than hating.

At a deeper level, I find that the place we are the most judgmental is towards ourselves. Many Christians have an attitude that being transformed into the image of Christ means that we have to change all of who we are into all of who He is. I wonder sometimes if we might get farther by focusing on just loving ourselves rather than trying to change ourselves. If I remember right, the great command has at it's very root, the foundation of loving ourselves. If I love myself, then I can love my neighbor. If I can love my neighbor, then I love God. I have heard many preachers teach the opposite of this - that there is something very wrong with loving ourselves. They teach that we are wicked and deceitful and capable of nothing good. I believe the opposite - that we are bought with a price and have a new heart in Christ, and that there is profound good in us. Too much wrong teaching has many of us convinced that if we are ever to be loved by God, we had better stop being us and become someone very different.

I am really tired of the sin of judgment. If there were one thing in the body of Christ I would eliminate, it would be that. It is bad enough that we tend to judge each other. But it is a wholly different thing when we do it to ourselves. We decide that something about ourselves is wrong or unlovely or damnable is some way. Rather than being Jesus to ourselves, we critique and condemn and reject (just like Jesus did, right?). When Jesus said that the same measure we use to measure to others will be used to measure us, I think this was what He was talking about. We judge others because we judge ourselves. Psychologists have known this for years - why is the body of Christ so far behind? Love your neighbor as yourself. This ain't rocket science here.

I'd like to talk about a different way. What if we were to believe that we belong to God and that He is working in us? I we could buy that, we could next buy into the thought that His working in us can be trusted - we could begin to trust that every movement inside is somehow affected by the Spirit of God living there. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't make mistakes - it would mean that we could trust His working in us, despite the mistakes. I mean, let's be honest - either the Spirit of God is in us as believers, or He isn't. If He is, then we can know Him and trust Him and rest in the fact that He is alive in there.

If we could really trust that He is working, then our journey would be about learning to trust Him rather than trying to fix us. It could become about Him, and not about us. What a novel idea.