DN=: Part 6–Judgmental

Those people are on a dark spiral downward. But if you think that leaves you on the high ground where you can point your finger at others, think again. Every time you criticize someone, you condemn yourself. It takes one to know one. Judgmental criticism of others is a well-known way of escaping detection in your own crimes and misdemeanors. But God isn’t so easily diverted. He sees right through all such smoke screens and holds you to what you’ve done.

You didn’t think, did you, that just by pointing your finger at others you would distract God from seeing all your misdoings and from coming down on you hard? Or did you think that because he’s such a nice God, he’d let you off the hook? Better think this one through from the beginning. God is kind, but he’s not soft. In kindness he takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life-change.

You’re not getting by with anything. Every refusal and avoidance of God adds fuel to the fire. The day is coming when it’s going to blaze hot and high, God’s fiery and righteous judgment. Make no mistake: In the end you get what’s coming to you—Real Life for those who work on God’s side, but to those who insist on getting their own way and take the path of least resistance, Fire!

If you go against the grain, you get splinters, regardless of which neighborhood you’re from, what your parents taught you, what schools you attended. But if you embrace the way God does things, there are wonderful payoffs, again without regard to where you are from or how you were brought up. Being a Jew won’t give you an automatic stamp of approval. God pays no attention to what others say (or what you think) about you. He makes up his own mind.

If you sin without knowing what you’re doing, God takes that into account. But if you sin knowing full well what you’re doing, that’s a different story entirely. Merely hearing God’s law is a waste of your time if you don’t do what he commands. Doing, not hearing, is what makes the difference with God.

Romans 2: 1-13 The Message

Sorry for the long quote there, but I wanted to point out two phrases in the very same passage: “Judgmental criticism” and “righteous judgment.” Both phrases have forms of the word “judge” in them, but they are very different.

It should be clear from the context that righteous judgment belongs to God alone, for God alone is righteous by nature. Because of His unattainable righteousness and holiness, He alone has the authority to judge in the sense of meting out justice for our sin.

As we have talked about in Part 3, righteous DN= self-righteous. The only way that a person could attempt to judge another’s destiny would be from a position of self-righteousness.

But as we have also discussed, self-righteousness is unrighteousness. How then can the unrighteous judge anyone? Indeed, they have already been judged themselves, not only for the sins they themselves have committed, but by the greater sin of attempting to push God out of the Judgment Seat which is rightfully His.

This is the difference between judgment and being judgmental—it’s all about who is passing the judgment. God is qualified and has the authority to judge sin. We aren’t, and we don’t.

EXERCISING JUDGMENT DN= BEING JUDGMENTAL

Although self-righteous, judgmental criticism is a problem for all people, the distinction between God’s judgment and man’s judgmentalism is relatively clear.

What is not as clear as it needs to be, however, is the difference between judgmentalism and exercising sound judgment.

My son, do not let wisdom and understanding out of your sight, preserve sound judgment and discretion. Proverbs 3:21 NIV

One of the complications of the English language is words with multiple meanings. “Judgment” is one of those.

God will sit in judgment of us all; therefore, we should not stand in judgment of one another. Yet we are to preserve sound judgment? How does that work?

It’s really not that difficult when you stop to think about it. If your judgment is toward a person and stems from motives of criticism and self-righteousness, then you are being judgmental. This is the bad one.

However, if your judgment is focused toward an action or situation, and is based upon wisdom, common sense or sound reasoning, then this is the good kind.

Where the problems arise, is when a spirit of offense prevents the person being judged from distinguishing between the two.

Good judgment vs. bad judgment

If someone attempts to shame you for your sin, make you feel like a bad person, tells you you’re going to Hell, calls you a name, places a group label on you, or blames you for something for which you are not directly responsible because of your association with that group, then that person is being judgmental, and your offense is justified.

If, however, the other person is attempting to help you correct your behavior respectfully, sharing from his or her own experience a bad result from their having done something similar, calling you by your own name, looking you in the eye, emphasizing the solution instead of the problem, but most importantly, is focusing on the behavior without attempting to analyze your motives or your character. . .then you need to work past the emotional reaction of offense and listen to what you are being told.

Chances are this person knows something you don’t. And they are exercising sound judgment, without being judgmental, by telling you that.

(Coming up next, STORYTIME! Going to do something a little different for Part 7–Hatred.)

DN=: Part 2–Freedom

“All things are allowed,” you say. But not all things are good. “All things are allowed.” But some things don’t help anyone. (1 Cor 10:23 ERV)

We are big on freedom in this country, aren’t we? We have a Bill of Rights in our constitution guaranteeing us freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion and petition. When our soldiers go off to war, we are told that they are “fighting for our freedom.”

It’s in all the songs we learn as kids. America is the land of the FREE and the home of the brave. We are proud to be Americans where at least we know we’re FREE. From every mountainside, let FREEDOM ring.

Christians are also fond of the words “free” and “freedom.” We also have phrases that we repeat or sing in songs, such as:

Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed.
My chains are gone; I’ve been set free.

Nevertheless, Christians can easily fall into the same trap as the rest of the world in the sense of abusing personal freedom at the expense of the freedom of another.

FREEDOM DN= LICENSE TO DO WHATEVER WE WANT

Within a generation of Jesus’ death, both Paul and Peter were dealing with this problem in the early Church:

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then? Galatians 5:13-15 (MSG)

Make the Master proud of you by being good citizens. Respect the authorities, whatever their level; they are God’s emissaries for keeping order. It is God’s will that by doing good, you might cure the ignorance of the fools who think you’re a danger to society. Exercise your freedom by serving God, not by breaking the rules. Treat everyone you meet with dignity. Love your spiritual family. Revere God. Respect the government. (1 Peter 2: 13-17 MSG)

Do you see the tie there? Freedom = service. Some translations actually use the word “slave.”

Now for Americans, that notion can be jarring. For Americans of African descent in particular, it can feel like a harsh slap in the face. After all that this country and its people have gone through to win freedom, God wants us to be slaves again?

The original Greek word in Peter’s letter is doulos, which does mean slave, but not in the way we Americans think of it. When we hear the word “slave,” we think of forced labor. In other words, a slave’s status is determined by the work the slave does and the conditions under which he is compelled to do it.

A doulos, on the other hand, is also a bondservant, or one permanently bound and subservient to a master; however, their slave status is determined not by their work, but by their relationship to their master.

The implication then, made by both Peter and Paul, is that to be a bondservant of Christ, one must no longer be a slave to sin. After all, as Jesus Himself said, “No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24a NIV).”

Furthermore, in this context a doulos is a VOLUNTARY bondservant. We are born slaves to sin, but we CHOOSE to be “slaves” for Christ. The only way to be in a position to make that choice is to have first been freed from the grip of sin in our lives. A slave cannot free himself; he can only be freed by the master. And the Master said this:

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. (John 13:34 NIV)

And also this:

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. (Matthew 25:40b NIV)

Therefore, serving God and serving other people are actually one and the same. So being a doulos to Christ means being a doulos to the world as well, but to its people, not its philosophies.

As no one can serve two masters, and as it is impossible to serve both Christ and our own sinful desires, so it is also impossible to simultaneously serve the world while doing whatever we want.

This is the reason that no one is justified by their works alone apart from having been freed by the Master, with whom they have a relationship.

Which brings up another DN=.

(Which will be covered in Part 3–Righteousness)

DN=: Part 1–Does Not Equal

Perhaps, like me, you have noticed a preponderance of equal signs lately, on Facebook and elsewhere. I have also noticed a link between the equal sign and false accusations of “hatred, bigotry and ignorance” being directed at people who are not necessarily on board with the equal sign.

This got me to thinking about people and their differences. Obviously, there’s a whole bunch of us on this planet. We are all unique, as are our experiences and perspectives. We all see life a little bit differently. Yet it seems that we all carry with us the assumption that everyone sees life in exactly the same way.

I expect this is our natural self-centeredness at work. If someone doesn’t share our point of view, well, then there must be something wrong with that person.

This much is natural, but it seems that in this generation our society has taken this concept to absurd extremes. Simple misunderstandings of diverse points of view have become breeding grounds for character judgments and demonization.

This progression has given birth to the phenomenon known as political correctness, in which people speak in code words with the purpose of not offending others. Unless they feel offended themselves. In that case, there is another set of code words with which they can label and demonize their opponents without taking the time to hear them out.

Anyone else see a disconnect here?

I may have found a way to disarm this bomb, however. If we are speaking with integrity, that is, if we say exactly what we mean and mean exactly what we say, then in theory, we have eliminated the possibility for misunderstanding.

One problem with this theory however—people who speak in code also assume that you are doing it as well. So rather than hearing what you say, which is exactly what you meant to say, they waste much mental energy trying to figure out the hidden agenda you don’t have.

So in order to better understand each other, we need some clear definitions of the words we say and the thoughts and intentions behind them. To this end, I have come up with my own variation of the equal sign: the DN= (Does Not Equal). The purpose of DN= is to clarify the motives behind our words to be more thoroughly heard, and therefore, better understood.

To illustrate the DN= principle, let’s start with a word all Americans know–freedom.

(And that’s just what we’ll do, if you come back for DN= Part 2!)

Deliverance

No, not THAT kind of Deliverance!

(Yeah, that’s more like it.)

Have you ever found yourself in a situation that seemed hopeless? Did you pray to God for deliverance? I have found myself in that place on numerous occasions.

God always answers prayers for deliverance, but sometimes it’s not the answer we were expecting. We have a tendency to treat God like an ATM—swipe our prayer card, and out come the blessings.

But sometimes the answer is “no.” And sometimes it’s “not yet.” And sometimes, it’s “Yes, but not the way you’re thinking.”

God wants us to live life to the full; however, He is always more interested in our holiness than our happiness. We would love for our deliverance from trials and tribulations to be as quick and painless as possible.

But more often than not, God’s plan is to deliver us through the trial, rather than from it. And painless isn’t always part of the plan. In fact, sometimes the pain is the plan.

The trials we undergo may seem like the end of the world while they’re happening, and yet, we always come out the other side, maybe not totally unscathed, but still standing nonetheless. We may have some scar tissue, but we also frequently have a sense of liberation. We got THROUGH this! And it didn’t kill us!

Here’s the thing about deliverance though. The process of being delivered through a trial is supposed to be a lesson about reliance on God’s strength when our own is failing.

After all, why did we cry out to Him in the first place? Because we knew that we were at the end of ourselves and it was only His strength that could deliver us.

So naturally, what do we do first when the next trial comes along? That’s right, we try to fix our own problems and rely on our own strength. Again. Although we know we should never take God’s deliverance for granted, we do it anyway, because it is in our nature to forget things like that.

Fortunately God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, anticipates this, and is always there to pick up the pieces AGAIN (and again, and again). What a great thing it is to know that we can always fall back on His patience and mercy!

Still, I think we ought to make more of an intentional effort to remember why God delivers us in the first place—because He is with us, and He is for us. If He was in our corner the last time we had a problem, and we know that He doesn’t change, then it makes sense that He will go to bat for us again the next time we have a problem.

So instead of having a high-speed come-apart the next time life beats us down or backs us up against the wall, we should approach our trial with confidence, knowing that we will be delivered, and that we won’t have to rely on our own strength to get it done.