I think that one of the most misunderstood of the commands of Jesus is this one: Do not judge (Matt. 7:1). You tell me: Is it judgmental to stand outside Joel Osteen’s church and preach against him? Check it out on YouTube. Is it judgmental to speak out against the legalization of gay marriage? To tell a friend that her sexual promiscuity is sinful and destructive? To confront a friend regarding his drinking? The command is clear: do not judge. To judge is God’s responsibility, not mine. If I do judge others, I will be judged. But what does it mean to judge? We sometimes think that the prohibition against judging means you cannot make any moral evaluation of someone or their actions. “Whenever Christians say that something is either right or wrong, or whenever they speak out against immoral or destructive behavior in another person, they are told… not to judge.” (James Montgomerie Boice). To judge someone is not about simply making moral evaluations. To judge is to hold someone to our standard instead of God’s, often in a very unloving way, rendering our own de-cision about a person rather than deferring to God’s decision about a person. Jesus refers to “the standard you use in judging.” The standard by which we judge each other is usually based on ourselves, our strengths, our convictions – a standard that we obviously have no problem measuring up to. Instead the standard by which we ought to judge others is God’s standard. God judges us according to His Word and we can only judge as we are applying God’s Word (and even that only carefully, humbly, and lovingly). And only after first applying that standard to ourselves and submitting ourselves to God’s judgment. Jesus uses the question, “Why worry about the speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own?” (Matt. 7:3) to get to this point: Do not worry about the faults of others until you have dealt with your own. Stated positively: Get rid of the log in your eye then deal with the speck in your brother’s. We must first take responsibility for ourselves. Bonhoeffer says it in a way that captures the duality between love and judgment: “…the love of Christ for the sinner in itself is the condemnation of sin. The disciples of Christ are to love unconditionally. Thus they may effect what their own conditionally offered love never could… the radical condemnation of sin.” So is it judgmental to condemn your sister for having an abortion? Is it judgmental to cut off a relationship with a friend caught in sin? To speak out against homosexuality?