Reading Assignment: Matthew 7:1-12
Main Idea: Confront wisely.
Key Verse: Matthew 7:12
Five Principles for confronting people of sin:
Boomerang Effect: Don’t condemn or harm people, but do correct and help people.
Double Standards: Don’t be too eager to correct someone else, when I am unwilling to receive correction myself.
Discernment: Know your audience. Don’t deal with people in a formulaic way. Speak to people with wisdom.
Prayer: Seek God’s wisdom in dealing with people. He will give the help that you need.
Empathy: Always put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Don’t mistreat people, but treat them the way you would want to be treated if you were them.
Prayer Suggestions:
Jesus, teach me to be a humble person. Help me to become more receptive to correction. I don’t want to be a stubborn and a proud person. I want to be teachable, who is able to accept correction for my own good. Help me to be a humble person, someone who is always willing and ready to learn and grow.
Teach me to be a good friend to those around me. Help me to love people enough to correct them. Keep me from loving myself too much, so that I am only concerned about avoiding any discomfort for myself. Help me to have Your perspective, because You have brought correction to me for my good. Grant me the courage to bring correction to those I love because I truly seek their good. And help me to do this without condemnation, without harshness, but with gentleness, with clarity, with reason.
I depend on you for Your wisdom. I lack wisdom. I can sometimes be a fool. And so I ask You to help me to be a man wisdom.
Help me to love my neighbor as myself. Lord, ever more remind me of the golden rule, to treat others the same way I want to be treated if I were them. Teach me to be a person who knows how to show empathy toward others. I am not a good corrector, but I seek Your help. Amen.
Sermon Link: https://www.fccbay.org/sermons/archive/2023/3/19/matthew-7-1-6-confront-wisely
Transcript
Let me pray for us and we'll begin.
Our Lord, thank You that every morning we can look to You. Because of Jesus, Your Son, we have an open access into Your presence, and we can call upon You and know that You hear us, You love us, and You welcome us. Thank You that Your disposition toward everyone who repents from their sins and want to be restored to You in the name of Jesus, Your Son, are all welcome to You. How wonderful that is. We pray that You would bless this time together and give strength to each of these precious friends and grant to them Your encouragement to live today for your glory and honor. Thank you for Your word that evermore guides us, teaches us, and gives us wisdom for life. We pray that you would grant to us all the wisdom we need to live as disciples of Christ, useful in Your hands to serve You and to make Your name great on Earth. Thank you for this time together. Bless it. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
The next reading assignment is Matthew 7:1-12. The main idea here is simply this: Confront wisely. Now, some of you were here when I preached an entire sermon on this. And if you weren't here for that but you wish to listen, feel free to download the sermon from earlier this year (link above). In any case, the central theme of this passage answers the question, How do we confront people of sin? How do we bring correction to someone else? I think right off the bat, some of us are probably thinking, “Well, I'm not so sure whether I should be bringing correction to somebody else. I've got lots of things to work on in my own life.” And I think that's a good and humble attitude, and Jesus actually talks about the need for this attitude in this passage. Nonetheless, we are to be Jesus’ instrument to bring His correction to other people, and in this passage, Jesus gives us five principles for how we are to bring correction to someone else. In many ways, this also touches on how we are to go about parenting our own children, not just peers in our lives.
Well, here are the five principles:
First principle. I would simply call this the boomerang effect: what goes around comes around. This is the way Jesus begins in verse one: “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.” What Jesus means is this: the way we treat someone else is the way we will be treated by other people. Now some take these verses the wrong way. They think that if I don’t want to be judged by God, I shouldn't judge other people. But the rest of the Bible teaches us that God's judgment is always impartial and righteous, and His evaluation of us is always based on His perfect standard of righteousness. This means no matter what standard I might use on someone else, God standard toward me is unchanged. So then, what this passage is talking about is how other humans will deal with me if I deal with them in an unfair way. Now, with that set aside, I need to clarify another mis-interpretation of these verses. Some misuse the very first sentence “Do not judge” to use it as an excuse to reject people’s correction of me. And that is really the wrong way to use this passage. You know, if we are wise, we would remain teachable and humble and receive correction, because correction is good for us. I think if we rightly assess our own lives, we would readily admit that we are in need of correction. We're not perfect. We are not as righteous as we should be. We are not as loving as we should be. We don't have as much integrity as we should have. We are not so much like Jesus that we need no correction. This is not to say that every correction is fair, but our attitude should be one of teachability and receptivity toward correction. Now, having dismissed those wrong ways to use this passage, let me focus on what Jesus does mean.
What Jesus is talking about in this passage is condemnation, not so much correction. He teaches us that we ought never to condemn people. And that instead, we should show grace toward people, that if we must bring up an issue with someone, it should never be punitive, but corrective. Our aim should be to help them and not to harm them. And so, when Jesus says, “Do not judge,” He means don't condemn people, because that's not our role. There's only one Lawgiver and Judge. That's the Lord God almighty. He possesses the authority to condemn people and send them to hell. We don't. And so while there is a time and place for us to bring correction to help someone, we should never do it with a spirit of condemnation, because that is not our role. Having said that, it is imperative that we do bring correction when a person seems to be blind to their own sin. Jesus Himself teaches us to do this in Matthew 18:15: “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault.” But again, the aim of all of this is not to condemn someone, but to give them correction. It is to help them, not to harm them. We should be like a physician who handles the scalpel to bring healing to someone’s life, not to not to damage them. So Jesus first lays down this very important perspective when we confront people. We should speak as a helper and not a destroyer. And again, the principle is this, that if we mistreat someone by condemning them, we will get a taste of our own medicine at some point.
Second principle is what I would call double standards. I'm sure you would remember this familiar parable. Jesus says, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” He brings up this almost humorous portrait of someone who's trying to pick out a small speck of sawdust out of someone’s eye while all along he has a giant log in his own eye. What Jesus is talking about here is hypocrisy, a double standard in which I'm not willing to deal with my own sin, but I sure am willing to deal with someone else's sin. And Jesus teaches us that this is not right. And so Jesus speaks to us to give us wisdom, to deal with ourselves before we start to deal with somebody else.
The third principle is discernment. We should understand our audience, who we are trying to correct. The Bible says in Proverbs 26:4, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly.” But then immediately afterwards, in verse 5, the proverb reads, “Answer a fool according to his folly.” Now it almost sounds contradictory, but there is a profound point made here. It is this: you may be dealing with a fool who refuses to listen to reason. In that case, it is not worth your time to bring correction. But you may also be dealing with a fool who is willing to listen to reason. The wisdom we need is to know the difference between the two. This means we should always ask ourselves, “What kind of person am I dealing with here? Is this person open to correction? And if so, how should I go about it?” We should ask these questions because everyone is not the same. Jesus brings up another illustration to portray this. He speaks of animals, namely, dogs and pigs. He says, “Never give sacred things to dogs. They have no respect for them. Never throw pearls before swine. They have no appreciation of them.” What Jesus means is simply that we need to exercise discernment. We need to be wise and cautious about how we confront people. We must be fully aware of who we're dealing with. This means that our approach to people should never be a formula-based approach. You know, if I say these words, no matter who I'm talking to, it will always produce the right results. That's not the way things really work with people in the real world. There is no cookie cutter approach to people. What all this reveals is that we need God's wisdom. We need God's help. Whenever we bring correction to someone else, we need the insight that only God can give us.
This brings us to the fourth principle, which is the principle of prayer. You'll see this immediately after talking about the dogs and pigs that Jesus brings up the matter of prayer. It almost seems like it comes out of left field, out of nowhere, but the reason why Jesus brings up prayer is that we need God's help when we must bring correction to someone else. So, Jesus uses those familiar words to encourage us to pray: “Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door shall be opened to you.” Jesus encourages us to be a people of prayer. Jesus also teaches us that God is eager to come to our aid when we ask Him. Jesus tells us that God is a Father to true believers, Jesus’ true disciples, that He welcomes them as His own children. And as a good father, God will always give us the help and the good that we need. So Jesus instructs us to pray.
Finally, the fifth principle found in verse 12, the principle of empathy. Empathy is where we put ourselves in the other person's shoes. This is so important. Jesus states the principle this way. “Treat others the same way you want them to treat you.” You know, even when we need correction, we sure would not like to be humiliated. And of course, it’s the same with another person. If we must bring correction, we should never do it so as to disgrace or dishonor them. We should never humiliate the other person. And so Jesus teaches us to always maintain this principle of empathy, to treat others the same way we want to be treated. Jesus also stated the principle this way: love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus puts us in the right frame of mind when we must deal with other people’s sins. He teaches us to ask ourselves, “How would I feel if I were spoken to in this fashion?” Now, Jesus obvious doesn’t mean that if I'm a proud person who never wants to be corrected, then I should never correct anybody else. That is not what Jesus is talking about here. But He does mean that we should show consideration toward others by putting ourselves in their shoes.
So, here are the five principles that Jesus teaches us here about confronting others’ sins: The boomerang effect, double standards, discernment, prayer, and empathy. Now as I thought about how do I respond to these lessons from our Lord, I thought about a number of things.
The first thing is simply this that I want to be a humble person and I want to be a person who is receptive to correction, that I would not be a stubborn and proud person, who is unteachable, who reacts and gets angry when someone is trying to help me. And so I would say that's the first thing to pray for. I would say: Jesus, help me to be a humble person. A person who is always ready to learn and grow. Keep me from becoming too full of myself. I don’t want to be so puffed up that I am unwilling to hear reason and Your word. I don't want to be that way. Help me to be a humble and meek person, who is open to listening to Your truth, first and foremost, and to the correction of those around me.
The second thing we can pray about is our need to correct others. In the same way that I need correction through other people, so do others need my correction. And I need to be a willing instrument. And so it's appropriate to pray to the Lord something like this: Lord, help me to be a good friend to those around me. Keep me from loving people's acceptance of me so much that I am not willing to correct someone else. Help me to have Your perspective, because You never held back from bringing correction, because correction is good for me. As I deal with others, grant to me courage to bring correction to others as I should for their good. And help me to do it without condemnation, without harshness, but with gentleness, with clarity, with reason, the same way I would like to be corrected myself. I depend on you for your wisdom. I lack wisdom. I can be a fool. And so I ask you to help me to be a man of wisdom, and give me Your guidance.
Lastly, I think we can pray that the Lord would teach us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This would be the final aspect of our prayer. Lord, help me to treat others the same way I want to be treated. Help me to be a man who knows to think about others’ feelings, who knows what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes, and that I would love my neighbor as myself. Keep me from being consumed with myself. Instead, help me to be more thoughtful about others, how they might feel. Teach me to be a person who knows how to show empathy toward others. I am not a good corrector, but I seek Your help. Amen.
I hope that this passage will speak to your heart, that even if you feel that you’re not in a position to correct someone else, that you would at least begin with receiving the Lord's correction. And then be a willing corrector for someone else. Jesus teaches us these practical lessons for our good and for the good of those whom He has placed in our lives. So with that, we'll wrap it up for today. And Lord bless you, we are done for today.