I am a recovering youth pastor. Fifteen or sixteen years with high school and college students, and I loved it. One of my high school guys — I will call him Sam — graduated and went off to SMU to study film. A committed young Christian, and eager to talk about it, which put him in a distinct minority in the film studies department.
Early in his time there he was at lunch with another film major, a young woman, and he started telling her his own story: how he had come to faith. I do not think he got very far into it. She cut him off. Look — I don't need the rules and I don't need the guilt. Leave me alone. And she got up and walked away.
Sam told me about it afterward, and I have thought about it ever since. Here is the most liberating message this world has ever heard, and she had received it as a message of rules and repression and guilt. How does that happen? How do we manage to turn the best news there is into bad news?
Matthew 7 is where Jesus gives us his views on judicial authority, on ophthalmology, and on animal husbandry. At this point you are thinking, Pastor Kent said what. Here we go. Three guidelines for kingdom living.
Leave judgment to God
Judge not, that you be not judged. However you judge other people, he says, they will judge you back; whatever standard you impose will be imposed on you.
Understand how freeing that is. It is like the first time you went skinny dipping as a kid — and I dare say that is the only time that word will be uttered in a Presbyterian church in Miami this morning. It is not my job to declare who is all right and who is not. People ask me sometimes, do you think so-and-so is a Christian? My stock answer is: God knows, I don't. Somebody dies and I am asked whether he is in heaven. God knows. I don't.
God is a judge, yes. He is also a Father, and he has already returned a verdict on everyone who comes to him in faith. Guilty, but pardoned.
You have probably heard the old story of the judge whose closest friend comes before his bench and gets the stiffest sentence the law allows — and then the judge steps down, takes off his robes and offers to pay the fine himself. Good analogy. It does not go far enough. Make the defendant not a friend but an outright rebel, a miscreant who has broken every law there is. The judge throws the book at him, brings down the gavel, then rises, removes the robe, walks down and puts an arm around this rebel: your penalty is already paid, your sentence already served. Not only are you free — come home with me as my adopted child and live with me forever.
That is what God has done in Christ. He has taken rebels and made them sons and daughters.
Leave criticism to others
Here is Jesus on ophthalmology. Why do you point at the speck in your brother's eye with a log sticking out of your own?
It is a ridiculous image. I suspect the crowd on that hillside laughed, and Jesus laughed with them.
I may be oversensitive here, because I have in me a real proclivity to be hypercritical. Put me in almost any setting and I can find the fault. My longest-standing prayer for myself is that God would take it out of me. Some of you are thinking, keep praying, Pastor Kent. I know.
About twenty years ago I went through a stretch of wrestling with God — angry, shaking my fist at him, which I am sure terrified him. Why would you allow this? How are you glorified in this? Like Job, I did not get an answer to my question. What I got instead was surgery. He started showing me things I had said to people and ways I had hurt them. Nothing that would make headlines; all of it interior; all of it horrifying to look at squarely. So I tracked down a handful of people I owed apologies to. Wrote or called each one and said, I am sorry for what I said to you and how I treated you. Every single one of them was gracious. Every one said, of course I forgive you.
Maybe God is showing you a few of those. It is so freeing to go and do it. Ephesians 4:29-32 became my life verses, and they might be yours: let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth, but only what builds up; be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Leave pearls to those ready to receive them
And now animal husbandry. Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs. For what it is worth, the word translated pearls is in Greek margaritas. So do not pour out your margaritas before pigs. That has no theological value. I just thought you might like to know.
Wait — did he not just say do not judge? He did. We do not judge people; that is God's work. We do have to judge actions, and that is called being a moral agent. Some things are right and some things are wrong. We are a pro-life church and we stand unabashedly against human trafficking. No one should own another human being, period.
What Jesus is asking for here is discernment about when. Most of us have somebody — in the family, maybe in the marriage — with whom we have shared our faith and gotten nowhere. Stop pressing. No more tracts left where they will find them, no more links they really ought to read, no more invitations after she has said no. All you will do is help them dig in harder. Tell them: I have got it, and I am going to be praying for you. Then do that. And when an opening comes, walk through it.
Leave judgment to God. Leave criticism to others. Leave the pearls to those ready to receive them. One day he will string those pearls into a garland and we will lay it at the feet of the one who had every right to judge the world, and came to save it instead.
