Currently, we’re in a message series called “40 Days with Jesus” based on the Sermon on the Mount. In our series, we’re discovering that Jesus doesn’t pull any punches when He preaches. He is serious about the kind of life that He expects His disciples to live. Jesus is dead set against any kind of hypocrisy in His followers. He is interested in our hearts becoming full of God and our actions following our hearts. The wonderful thing is that as we learn from and follow Jesus’ commands in this passage, we lay a firm foundation for a blessed life.
Today, we’ll be looking at a passage from Matthew 7 and I’ve entitled this message “Jesus on Humility.” Of course, the opposite of humility is pride, which is a primary motivator for the hypocrisy that Jesus condemned. As adults, we sometimes play games that aren’t so good. One game we may play could be called “Let’s Label.” To play the game, you first find someone who is different from you, that’s not hard to do. Then you carefully look them over and form a negative or critical opinion of them. That’s not hard to do either, they’re different from you. Then you mentally stick a label on the person and freely share your thoughts and labels with others.
Jesus called the Let’s Label game “judging” and He commanded His followers not to play it.
Matthew 7:1 (NIV) Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
In other words, don’t play the label game or someone will put a label on you as well. Why shouldn’t we judge others? We never know everything about another person. We cannot know the other person’s motives. We have our own biases and aren’t objective in our judging. When we judge others, we put ourselves into the position of God Himself, which is the essence of pride.
I read a story of a young attorney at a large law firm. The head of the firm set out a row of huge turkeys for his employees every Thanksgiving, one turkey for each one. The young attorney was single, lived alone, had no use for a huge turkey, but he took one every year. One year, his close friends in the law office replaced his turkey with a paper-mache turkey, weighted and wrapped just like a real turkey. The young attorney picked his turkey up as usual and got on a bus to go home with it.
On the bus, he sat next to a man who proceeded to tell him that he’d been looking for a job all day with no luck. He had a large family and nothing to feed them for Thanksgiving. So, the attorney decided to give the man the turkey, but in order not injure his pride, he sold it to him for a couple of dollars. The man was moved to tears about the gift turkey.
The next day, his friends at work were dying to know his reaction to the turkey. When he told them about selling the fake turkey, everyone was mortified. They rode the bus for a week, but never saw the jobless man again. What do you think the jobless man thought of the attorney? I’m sure he thought the attorney was the lowest of the low, he would have been sorely tempted to judge him. But the attorney had been trying to do a good deed, he had simply been fooled himself. Don’t judge others, for you never know all the facts.
Listen to my November 7, 2010 message “Jesus on Humility.”