What Did Jesus Mean by "Judge Not Lest You Be Judged"? (Matthew 7:1)

The following is a transcript of the video above featuring Chris DeRoco explaining Matthew 7:1:

"Judge Not Lest You Be Judged" ~ Matthew 7:1

In Matthew 7, where it will say, "Judge not," Jesus is talking, "lest ye be judged." And a lot of people will take that out of its context. Like, "Hey, we are not supposed to make judgments about people, or we're not supposed to differentiate between ideas." When again, that has nothing to do with Jesus's words or context, especially of all of his teachings.

Where in another passage, I think it's in Luke, where he says, "Do not try to take the speck out of your brother's eye until you've taken the log out of your own eye." And I think what he's saying there is that we need to be careful. We need to be discerning. We can make judgments. For example, God calls us in that passage to help your brother take something out of his eye. That means that you're making a judgment about what's going to hurt him or what's right or what's wrong.

The key there is doing it with humility. Taking the plank out of your own eye. So how do we make judgments about things without being judgmental? Which is really the sinful part, is being judgmental or condemning, thinking that one, you're not worthy of judgment yourself. Two, forgetting that you have issues and you have struggles and you're wrong as well.

So once you get the humility of Christ, then you're able to make judgments without coming across like a pompous judgemental person, like a self-righteous person. And that's being judgemental. But goodness, we couldn't care about one another if we weren't making judgments.

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