We're going to continue in our summer long study through the
Sermon on the Plain, which is the Gospel of Luke's account of
the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew.
And we're going to come to our last two sermons in this often
considered the greatest sermon ever preached by Jesus.
And I've heard it said the word is timeless, but it's always
timely. And for the topic of the word
today, it will, I'm sure meet some of you even in in some of
your struggles to follow Jesus today or this week or in the
last couple weeks. So let me start just to stir in
your mind our need for such a message.
Just a simple question. Maybe it happened this morning,
maybe recently. When's the last time you thought
to yourself in a moment, let's say of of anger, you looked at
someone's mistake and you said, what were they thinking?
Maybe it happened on the way to church.
I often think of my unhinged anger as I'm driving and we all
just cut each other off. What a beautiful picture of
life. And you just look over and you
think, what an idiot. What were they thinking?
And of course, there's other moments of life where you have
to rub shoulders with people who make critical thinking errors
and they make missteps. And of course, we need to be
reminded that not only can you see it in others, but others can
see it in you. I've heard the popular phrase,
Jesus, save me from your followers.
Christianity would be so easy if it was just us in the Bible.
But the Lord and His graciousness help us to learn
what it means to love by practicing in one another.
It can be very difficult at times to not look at each
other's mistakes and misunderstandings and write each
other off. Well, Jesus has a word for that.
Before we look at the word, I'll share with you an excerpt from a
popular book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People. And in this one section, he
gives the habit of seeking to understand and to do this, to
share this habit. He shares a story I'll share
with you now. He said I was riding a subway on
a Sunday morning in New York, and people were sitting quietly,
reading papers and resting with their eyes closed.
What a beautiful, peaceful scene, probably all of them on
the way to church. Then a man and his children
entered the subway car and the man sat next to me and closed
his eyes, apparently oblivious to his children who were
yelling, throwing things, even grabbing papers from the fellow
passengers. Parents, you can relate to this
moment where your kids are not the best representation of your
family, He goes on to say. I couldn't believe he could be
so insensitive. Eventually I turned to him and
said, Sir, your children are disturbing people.
I wonder if you could control them a little more.
We've got the the high schooler and junior highers in with us.
So a word to all parents, if they're disturbing, others will
begin to judge you. That might happen today, says
the man lifted his gaze as if he saw the situation for the first
time. He said, you're right, I'm so
sorry, I should do something about it.
We just came from the hospital where their mother has passed
away about an hour ago. And I don't know what to think.
And I guess they don't really know how to handle it either.
The author says suddenly I saw everything differently.
The question that we're going to wrestle with this morning is how
can we be people following Jesus to avoid the human instinct of
being overly judgmental and hyper critical of one another
all the time? This is a sermon that I need to
hear from my own life and just living in the culture we live in
where it's easy to look out and see the hyper judgmental over
critical spirit in the air over every person's missteps and
misunderstandings and the political divides and the church
divides that exist. Jesus will speak a word so that
we can become people who overcome the temptation to be
overly judgmental. And so read along with me in
Luke chapter 6, starting in verse 37.
Jesus says judge not and you shall not be judged.
Condemn not and you shall not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give and it will be given to you with good measure.
Pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put
into your bosom, for with the same measure that you use it, it
will be measured back to you. Jesus says in this sermon that
he's just giving this master view of radical love.
He says don't judge, don't condemn, forgive with
generosity. And in the same measure that you
give it, it will be given back to you, which is, to begin, the
point. All of us will be tempted to
judge. And as a reminder, all of you
will leave this place and you will find yourself in a position
under a microscope of judgement. And so as we have done
throughout this sermon series, we'll start by looking at what
Jesus is not saying when he says judge not lest you be judged.
He's not saying that we're not allowed to do any discerning
judgement in life ever. You know, this is often quoted
as the favorite memory verse of those who don't attend church or
would call themselves non believers so that any Christian
they rub up against they can always say don't judge.
Jesus says not to judge me. Only God can judge me.
No one else can judge me. And we live in a a day where
people want to look at any discernment or any declaration
of what is true and good and decry it as overly judgmental.
Well, that's not what Jesus is saying.
Jesus actually wants us to be discerning people who make wise
and good judgment. This is why, as we'll look at
next week in verse 44, he says for every tree is known by its
fruit. We're going to be given a
measurement by which we can take the teachings and of men and and
judge them as wise and good based off the fruit they produce
or to push them away as someone who's teaching as a wolf in
sheep's clothing. So Jesus is saying, use good and
discerning wisdom on whether or not to listen to people, and
he'll give us other moments of discernment on how to navigate
the world without just blindly trusting everything.
It's good to have discernment. I've heard of a lot of ways that
people get out of jury duty, and I'm sure some of them work.
One of them is not that it's against your religion to sit in
a seat of judgement. No one can get a call to jury
duty and say, sorry, I'm a Christian and Jesus says that
I'm not allowed to judge anyone. No, in fact, Christians should
probably be the the person that you would want most on a jury
because our whole heart is to go through it with patience and
wisdom and charity. And that is what Jesus is
getting at. He he's talking about the
measure by which we do things and how the heart behind how we
do things. And this is an overflow from
previous moments in this sermon where Jesus is saying what it
looks like to be in his Kingdom is to be a person of radical
love. That when people speak evil
against you or revile you, your response is not to return serve
in kind, but to love them. Still, when people ask of you
give extra when people borrow things, don't expect it in
return. And now he's saying when you
find yourself in a moment when you have to use discernment and
make a judgment to reconcile a relationship, to navigate a
disagreement or a misunderstanding, he's now
saying keep loving. Extend your love even to these
moments where you're tempted to be hyper judgmental and
critical. Don't be unfair critics of
people's moments of failure or weakness or misunderstanding.
And and part of this lesson is learned as you just studied the
Gospels. This is the context of the
culture Jesus was ministering to everywhere he went to offer wise
and sound healing, teaching literal miraculous healing,
where he went to teach people what it meant to live in the
Kingdom of God. People followed him, the
religious leaders of the day, with a hyper judgmental and
critical spirit over everything he did in his teaching.
They tried to trap him in his words, in his good works.
They tried to trap him as a law breaker for doing things like
healing on the Sabbath. Ultra judgmental and even the
people he was ministering to, they would associate Jesus with
guilt as association that the people were sinners and tax
collectors and unclean. And so he himself couldn't
actually be someone worth listening to.
Everywhere he went he had critics and hyper judgmental
people trying to tear down the good works he was doing.
We'll actually see a story of this as you continue to read in
the Gospel of Luke, just the next chapter over.
Luke Chapter 7, a beautiful story.
Jesus invited into Simon's house.
And as he comes in, there's one person that greets him and it's
a woman they say was so grateful to see him.
She began to wash his feet with her hair and she used the water
of her tears to cleanse her feet.
She broke oil and and and put it on Jesus as a sign of devotion
and love and respect. And in this beautiful moment of
a woman offering praise to Jesus, what was the response?
Hyper judgmental and critical. People looked at it and said who
is this person? If he was actually a prophet, he
would know she was a Sinner. If he was actually anyone worth
listening to, he would know the people you're not to associate
with. There's a similar story of a
woman that comes to anoint Jesus with oil before the cross and
even his own disciples that say we're indignant because the oil
could have been sold and the money given to the poor.
They were judging the hidden motives of this woman's act of
devotion. And in all of these things, this
is where Jesus is taking his warning that when you become
hyper judgmental, you become very quick to condemn.
That's why he said condemn not and you shall not be condemned.
To condemn someone is to judge with a severe verdict of guilt.
So you have the moment, the thought experiment of your own
life. What were they thinking?
And before you can even consider the answer or be the the behind
the scenes story of what's going on in that person's life, you
think I'll never talk to them again?
We used to be friends and now we're not.
They've done something so heinous, I'll never forgive
them. So Jesus saying, not only should
you be so prudent and patient with your judgement, you should
also be charitable with how you judge the outcome.
And right now, in your hearts, in my heart, in the conditions
of every person that Jesus gives this message to, there are two
natural postures of judgement. There is a judgement of
condemnation. It's easy.
It's the human instinct. If someone makes you mad and you
just write them off, you size them up.
It's harsh and severe. You take someone and you now
define them by their misstep or in a misunderstanding or their
weakest moment, and they are condemned in your life.
But there's also by God's grace for the people who follow Jesus.
There's another kind of judgement and it is the
judgement of charity. It is the judgement to look for
that moment of misunderstanding and air on the side of loving
that person, air on the side of what we would call in the court
of law the benefit of the doubt. Where there could be a
misunderstanding, you give them the benefit of the doubt, or
someone might have tripped over their words or actions and it
affected your life. You give them the benefit of the
doubt that that is not the person that they are trying to
be in your life. We call this in the court of
law, reasonable doubt that we don't want to air on the side of
guilt, that the burden of proof is on the prosecution, the
accuser, and not on the person sitting under the microscope of
judgement. Another way to put this, and
maybe a more practical way for the relationships that exist in
the sanctuary is to assume positive intent.
Here's a phrase that maybe you can write down on the the
refrigerator is you just do life with one another and you have
all sorts of moments, just everyday life in the household
that you live in where you have a decision to make about why
someone made such a grievous error against you.
This would be called not jumping to the worst possible
conclusion. There's a marriage conference
that comes through and one of the things they teach every
year, they have the man and wife look at one another and repeat
these words. I am not your enemy.
And it might be a good exercise after church.
Maybe you have to say it in the moment to reconvince your spouse
that you're actually on the same team.
So I have to say this to my wife.
Often times we're on the same team.
We can't let these little people divide us.
We got to stick it out. And this is what Jesus is
saying, that there is a charitable way to view the
intentions that people had in their missteps.
And here's the great news. In both of these postures of
judgement, the posture of harsh condemnation and the posture of
charitable love, you have all done this without a doubt.
Everyone of you, no doubt, has made a quick judgement and got
it wrong and chose to condemn someone or write them off and
size them up and, and and and look at them and say I don't
care what you meant, you hurt my feelings, I don't like it.
But all of you, without doubt, have also given the judgement of
charity to someone. And I can say that with
confidence because we all give ourselves the judgement of
charity. When it is time to come to
someone and explain your side of the story, ask for forgiveness,
We always are very quick to say, I'm so sorry.
That's not what I meant. When you're your own defense
attorney, it's very easy to say, you know, I'm so sorry.
I was super stressed. I shouldn't have said that.
I won't say it again. And you believe yourself.
You say it was a long day. I don't know what I was
thinking. Will you please forgive me?
In all of those appeals, you are placing yourself smack dab in
the middle of the benefit of the doubt.
And that is why this sermon is just an overflow of the Golden
rule. To treat others the way that you
would like to be treated also means to judge others the way
that they would, that you would like them to judge you.
So when you come to them and you plea for the benefit of the
doubt in in order to save the relationship, this is what Jesus
is saying. Well, what measure would you
extend to them when it's time for you to extend the assumption
of positive intent, the benefit of the doubt, the reasonable
path forward to to, to move on and not hold it against them,
Will you extend the same offer that you plea for yourself?
RC Sproul says we have all been hurt by the sins of other
people, but remember, it is rare indeed that the people who have
hurt us by sinning against US ever intended with malice or
forethought the full measure of pain they created in our hearts.
Sin has some very unattended consequences in life, and
there's no doubt that when someone sins against you that it
hurts your heart deeply. But this is a great reminder to
give them grace, that the extent of the pain was not the
intention of the mistake. That they weren't sitting up at
night thinking, how can I really push this person to the edge?
I'm so angry. I have so much malice towards
them. I want to sin against them to
where they really feel it. Mostly that that exists.
There are psychopaths in this world, but mostly our heirs
create all sorts of unintended pain.
And if we could trust that the other person truly is sorry for
the unintended consequences, then we could move forward to
the last step that Jesus offers, the measurement we extend to one
another. He says judge not let you be
judged, condemned not let you be condemned.
And then he says, now forgive and you will be forgiven.
Great news. Once again, Jesus is not saying
that we are to to navigate life by pretending that offence never
existed or pretending that we're never sinned.
Again, she actually says there is a a part of this call that
assumes that someone has actually caused something to
where they're going to need forgiveness from you.
You're going to have to forgive. And forgiveness is the exact
opposite of a severe, a severe and harsh judgement of
condemnation. There will be real offenses.
We will all sin one unto another.
But what Jesus is warning US against is thinking in your
heart or in your mind. I will never forgive that
person. What they did is unforgivable.
And this is going to now start to point us to the way all of
this is actually going to happen.
It cannot be a workshop, a sermon.
Take good notes and and good luck.
I've heard it said that hurting people hurt people.
It's probably true of a little bit of that in all of us where
where we have found ourselves hurt by someone else.
So often that turns into something that we do to
propagate that hurt in other relationships.
It's a it's a very sad consequence of the of the of the
effects of sin. But the good news, it is also
true that forgiven people become forgiving people.
And this is where all of this has to start.
I'll repeat this cannot be accomplished by taking effective
sermon notes and trying your best.
It's accomplished in this very simple statement.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
This is an impossible sermon without a clearview and radical
faith in the gospel. So what is the gospel?
I loved getting to baptize all of the people that I was a part
of with Chris in the river. It was a confession of the
gospel taking root in their life that they were putting their
faith in. And the gospel is that we are
all in desperate need of the forgiveness of sins.
All have fallen short of the glory of God.
All have committed offence. All are sitting under the
microscope of judgement and gospel means good news because
it is that Jesus came into the world to pay the penalty in full
for our sins. His death on the cross.
And as I was in the baptismal waters, the the the going into
the water and coming out is really the public confession of
an internal confession of your heart.
And it is this that you believe that your sins are forgiven,
paid in full by Christ. And so I asked every person that
we put under, do you believe that Jesus paid the price for
your sins? Yes.
But then I took it a step further.
But do you believe that he paid with the death on the cross and
the shedding of His blood, every single sin in your life, that
there is not one sin you have committed that is going to be
rectified by karma, good works or you trying better, that your
only hope is that Jesus paid in full.
It is finished on the cross, yes.
And then I took it even further. Do you believe that when you
come out of these baptismal waters and you make your first
misstep, when you are reminded that you still live in a fallen
world with a fallen sin suit of a body, and when you sin next,
do you believe that grace will cover your sins from here until
eternity? Yes, well then let's baptize you
because you have just put your faith in the gospel and the
gospel is that you are forgiven. If you've received it, you now
are on a mission to extend it. That is why one of the most
self-righteous things that you can do, if you hate religion,
you should hate being self-righteous.
The most self-righteous thing you can do is to look at the
faults of someone else and say that is unforgivable.
To become a person who is not willing to forgive others is to
deny the reality that you are standing under the grace of God
and His unbounding forgiveness for your life.
Where sin abounds, grace abounds more.
To forgive others is to stand under God's goodness and say,
because I have been forgiven. So Jesus says with that measure,
give it away. Do you imagine if we lived not
in a culture of judge, mental criticism and quick condemning,
but a culture of gracious forgiveness?
I've been forgiven. So you're forgiven.
And it is with this in mind that you will understand verse 38 as
you first read it, as I read it aloud, maybe you thought, what's
he getting at? Here's what he's getting at.
Give and it will be given to you.
Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running
over will be put into your bosom.
For with the same measure that you use it, it will be measured
back to you. And this is what Jesus is
getting at. There is a principle of Fair and
balanced weights in the gospel and to preach this, Jesus
hearers would have fully understood that he was giving a
picture of what takes place in the market of traded goods.
This is the picture of of how you exchange goods in the
marketplace. Anyone who's ever gone into a
marketplace, you know that you can offer a certain measurement
of any commodity that you have and you can either be very
generous with your measurement or you can be, let's say, stingy
to increase the bottom line. So let's say in their day they
were going to sell their wheat and they have a decision to
make. They can they can kind of prop
up the wheat in the bag and then cut it at the very top and make
sure they only sell exactly what is required to legally sell a
bushel. Or they could do what Jesus is
saying or Jesus is saying. Now when you go to the market
with this picture in your mind, push it down, get it real
compact in there, really tight in in the basket and then shake
it so you can push it down even more.
And then he says running over, don't skim off the top, let it
be over the top of the basket. That's how you will give what
I've given to you. Maybe to give it a modern day
analogy, how many of you guys have ever been to Mongolian BBQ?
You're going to get the measurement of the mighty con
bowl. If you haven't been to Mongolian
BBQ, they give you a bowl and they say you can fill it up.
And so anyone who's been there with any kind of shrewdness for
the bottom dollar, you take those noodles and you push them
down as far as you can and you, and then when you get to the,
the, the, the chef, he's got a stick in the big thing and, and
you got the noodles overflowing. That's the picture of a generous
measurement. And with that in mind, he's
saying, well, what is the, the commodity?
The commodity is forgiveness. The commodity is love and
charity and quick to cover everything with grace with the
the the the amount, the measurement that it's been given
to you give it away overflowing because you could be tempted to
hear this message and say, OK, legally to follow Jesus to be a
law abiding Christian and a good churchgoer.
I've got to remove bitterness and I've got to forgive people.
So this person, I don't like them, but I'll forgive them.
And Jesus says, no, that's not the measurement that was given
to you. God gave a measurement that
overflowed with forgiveness. I can preach confidently that
not one of you has offended God to the point where he's almost
out of grace for your life. I can preach confidently that
the source of forgiveness that we stand under the grace of
today is not stingy. There is nothing that any of you
will do to go and fall in the in the attempt to be righteous in
the failures of life and come back.
And I will not have to ever preach a gospel where there are
some who are far out and disqualified.
I will always be able to preach where sin abounds, grace abounds
even more. The Fountainhead of forgiveness
is overflowing for all of us. It's not stingy.
And so when I stand in the baptismal waters and I pull them
out of the water and I say, now go forth and grace abounds.
I don't want to preach a stingy fountain of God's grace.
And I don't want to preach it from behind the pulpit, and I
don't want to preach it with my life.
And I want to encourage you for those of you who are following
Jesus to preach generous forgiveness and grace with your
life. That's what he's getting at.
I've heard it said you can't out give God.
And often times that's just limited to this one little
category of the way that you give him the provisions of your
money or resources. But think of it in these terms.
You can't out give God's grace. And for this Jesus says, you
know, there's, there's a way to measure the fruit of your life.
Let's just measure the fruit of our lives.
Have you been quick to judge others?
Have you been quick to condemn the missteps and
misunderstandings of others? Let me let me give you 2 pieces
of fruit for you to measure. One of them is just radical
peace. Jesus followers have what he
calls Shalom or peace in their lives.
Roman says if it's possible, as much as depends on you, live
peaceably with all people. So when you become a follower of
Jesus that wants this to be overflowing your life, one of
the fruits that you get is you have a heart full of peace
towards people. That's good news because if you
haven't figured out this lesson in your life yet, if this is
speaking to you in real time and you're like, this is me.
I'm judgmental, I'm critical and I'm harsh all the time.
Here's what I can tell you about your life without knowing you.
You don't have a real peaceful life.
It's not real joyful to walk around and just see fault in
everyone and everything. And yet when you start following
Jesus, he will cover all of these missteps with Shalom with
peace. And here's another amazing fruit
that will come when you do this with your life.
Not only we have peace, but you'll also have people.
One of the the fruits of belonging to the Kingdom of God
is that he calls us to love God radically and love people to
love our neighbors. As Jesus gives more instruction
on how to reconcile with people in Matthew 18, he says go to
your brother and if he listens you will win a brother.
Which means as you live in this culture where it is so easy to
do the opposite, it is so easy to unsubscribe and unfollow and
unblock and leave church and change friend groups and and
remove yourself from the last workplace to get to the new one.
And it's always someone else's offence against you.
What you will find is you live with a wake of ex friends behind
you, and you will continually go down the road of condemnation
until you're all alone. But the way of Jesus is that he
was a friend of sinners, a friend.
He lived in radical community with people that were all sorts
of different tax collectors and zealots and prostitutes and
Pharisees and fishermen and with the Master, the Teacher, the
Savior as the North star of their culture.
They had each other, they stayed together, and that can be true
of your life. You can actually have peace and
you can have the fruit of people in your life.
And once again, throughout this sermon we've had to say the only
way any of this is possible is with a clear vision of the
person in the heart of Jesus. And that's why he says in verse
40, sorry, in verse 39. And he spoke a parable to them.
Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into the
ditch? In his day, scribes, Pharisees,
Sadducees, lawyers, they had one thing in common.
They were critically judgmental with a very limited view of what
they were judging. They wrote people off and called
them sinners, and Jesus came and saw them as people that were
worth dying for. They were blind to the heart of
God. And as a reminder for your life,
your ability to actually judge people's hearts and minds and
actually know what they're going through and what they've been
through and what God sees in them is practically blind.
So dangerous to size people up based off their clothes or their
tattoos or the car they drive or the mistakes of their life
because you can't see the depths of their heart.
You are blind. And if you're rallying people to
also make judgement against them, you are blind leading the
blind. And here's what's going to
happen. You will hit the ditch.
Just look at our culture. Blind politicians leading the
blind, blind celebrities have no vision for where they're taking
people and and it's a common end of story.
Everyone hits the dead end and everyone divides in the end
where there's a spirit of retribution and revenge and
condemnation and writing each other off.
You are walking towards the Cliff of a relationship.
Great memory verse for all of us in moments of conflict within
relationships is First Corinthians chapter 13, verse
12. You've heard First Corinthians
chapter 13 if you've ever been to a wedding.
It's the whole chapters about the definition of love, what
love looks like. Why does Paul write that
chapter? Because of a church that was
divided and fighting. He said one way that you can
overcome all of your little divisions is to study and
practice the character of God's love with one another.
And then when he gets to the very end of the chapter, listen
to what he says. For now we see in a mere dimly
lit but but then we'll see him face to face.
Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am
known should be circled in everyone's Bible.
I see through a mere dimly lit. I can't make a full assess
judgement of what God is doing in your life.
In the times we live in, there's a day where we're going to see
him face to face. There'll be no need for a son.
There's so much glory. But for right now, give each
other grace. We all have a tiny view, a tiny
perspective of what God is up to in this world and what God is up
to in each one of our lives. We all see through a mirror,
dimly lit. Can the blind lead the blind?
No. So what's the answer?
Verse 40, a disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone
who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher.
I love that everyone who's perfectly trained.
Maybe it would help all of us to just take a step back from the,
the, the heated moments where all this gets tested and
remember that from baptism to heaven is essentially training,
You know, before you get saved, you're kind of being recruited.
We want you to join the Kingdom of God, newness of life,
forgiveness of sins come in recruitment.
And then you put your faith in the power of God's saving grace
in your life and he makes you a brand new creation.
And now it's training. So 1 thing that you can just
have as a a rightful perspective for the challenges, the trials,
the difficulties in this life, including the difficulties of
people is God loves training his disciples difficult people.
Thanks for the training. I hope I do better next time
misunderstandings, miscommunication.
Thanks for the training. I've I've got a mere dimly lit
and I can't wait till I see it all, says those who are
perfectly trained And what happens to those people?
They'll be like the teacher. This is why the whole series,
we've come back to this one common theme, the way of Jesus.
To be patient and loving in your judgement, to be cautious and
gracious in condemnation, to be generous in forgiveness is to be
like Jesus. Everything that you'll read in
this sermon, as Jesus says, here's what my people will look
like. He's saying here's what people
who model their lives after my perfect life will look like.
The only person to model your life after, the only person that
will create a culture of grace and forgiveness is the person
and the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
That's it. That's the whole point of all of
this is be more like me. John 316 says for God so loved
the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever
believes in him should not perish but have everlasting
life. Verse 17.
God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world.
Be like Jesus. Ephesians 4 verse 32 Be kind to
one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as
God in Christ Jesus forgave you. This all is an exaltation of the
beauty and perfection of the ways of Jesus and a desperate
plea in humility to say, Lord, without the power of your
Spirit, we could do nothing. As we get trained, become more
and more and more like the Master.
And so before we close, I just want to look at one more passage
of Scripture because there's a chance that some of you may have
heard this sermon and thought to yourself, wow, I so wish this
person could hear this. Some of you were listening to
the sermon and you were nudging your neighbor.
This one's for you. You're thinking about who you
want to send a message like this to.
Even in a message about charitable judgment and cautious
condemnation and generous forgiveness, we could still be
tempted to make it all about someone else.
And so Jesus gives US1 last picture so that we would fully
understand where all of this starts.
Verse 41. Why do you look at the speck in
your brother's eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own
eye? Plank.
Another word for log. A comedic picture, Really.
Someone with a log in their eye and trying to do eye surgery to
get a piece of dust out of someone else's eye.
Verse 42, he says, how can you say to your brother, brother,
let me remove the speck that is in your eye when you yourself
don't see the plank that is in your own eye.
Hypocrite. First remove the plank from your
own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that
is in your brother's eye. So tempting to want this sermon
to be for someone else. And Jesus says well wait a
minute. All of that judgement and
condemnation and unforgiveness you have for someone else.
Are you not guilty of similar sins?
This is a master teaching by Jesus to humble all of us.
The judgement would start with ourselves and not others.
And I can tell you this. I can share this beautiful
picture with logical steps of how it works.
Because as I look out into the sanctuary right now, I don't
know the thoughts of your mind. I don't know the the depths of
your evil hearts. I don't know the real history of
any of you. Right now I look out and the
best I could ever see is tiny specks of sin.
But there is someone that I know the racing thoughts of.
There's someone that I know the evil intentions in the heart of,
and that's myself. I know all the failures of my
heart. I know the times I've been
tempted to act in my carnal flesh and return evil for evil.
I know the times that I have been tempted to react to someone
in a way that is the opposite of love.
I know the times that my prayer life has become dead.
I know the times where I've read the Word and been in rebellious
unsubmission to it. I know the times that I've been
short tempered with my wife, I've been harsh with my
children. I know the depths of my own sin.
So compared to what I know about you, my sin makes all of you
look like Saints. And that is true for every
single one of us. This verse is not simply given
to the one with the most sin, it is given to all of us to start
with the reality that our biggest plea for forgiveness is
not for The Dirty sinners we have to do life with.
Our biggest plea for forgiveness right now is for our own hearts.
And when we realize that as much as we can confess sin, as much
as we allow the Holy Spirit to draw out our own need for
forgiveness, we will meet the grace of God in overflowing
abundance. We will become people who can
then extend the grace of God in overflowing abundance.
And This is why every week we hold the bread and the cup, and
we remember the cost of our own salvation.
The cost of our salvation was not that we just became better
people. The cost of every single one of
the forgiveness of sins that have been granted freely is the
death of the Savior on the cross for you and for me.
Paul writes to Timothy in First Timothy chapter 1.
This is a faithful saying worthy of all acceptance, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am
chief. As we take communion today,
consider the love of God. Christ came into the world to
save sinners, of whom we are all chief.
But he who is forgiven much can love much.
May you be people who live in a radical culture of love and
forgiveness. Thanks for joining us today.
If you would like to watch the full service, check out the link
in the description. For next steps and to learn
more, visit calvaryboise.com.