Curb Your Enthusiasm | Sermon on the Mount Week 8

Jesus calls upon us to curb our enthusiasm for finding fault in others. Intead we are called to look inward and repent where we fall short. Denise McKinney takes a look at Matthew 7:1-6 and reminds us of Jesus' powerful, culture shifting command.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Sermon on the Mount | Week 8

July 15, 2018 | Denise McKinney

Matthew 7:1-6 (NIV)

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

It’s really not our job.

Matthew 7:1 (NIV)

Do not judge…

Judging = Judging

Matthew 7:1-2 (NIV)

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Matthew 7:1-2 (MSG)

Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging.

It gets in the way of real change.

Matthew 7:3-4 (NIV)

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?

Matthew 7:5 (NIV)

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

This teaching is, rather, ethical instruction about the will of God to counter the human tendency to ignore one’s own faults while needling others about theirs.

~ Klyne Snodgrass

(Jesus and the Restoration of Israel)

They might not be in a place to hear you, even if you are right.

Matthew 7:6 (NIV)

Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

The whole of the Sermon [Matt 5-7] is framed within Jesus’s announcement that what his fellow Jews had longed for over many generations was now at last coming to pass — but that new kingdom didn’t look like they had thought it would. Indeed, in some ways it went in exactly the other direction. No violence, no hatred of enemies, no anxious protection of land and property against the pagan hordes. In short, no frantic intensification of the ancestral codes of life.Rather, a glad and unworried trust in the creator God, whose kingdom is now at last starting to arrive, leading to a glad and generous heart toward other people, even those who are technically “enemies." Faith, hope, and love: here they are again. They are the language of life, the sign in the present of green shoots growing through the concrete of this sad old world, the indication that the creator God is on the move, and that Jesus’s hearers and followers can be part of what he’s now doing.

~ N.T. Wright

(Jesus and the Victory of God)