Judgment

Recently, I was reading this book called unChristian. It conducted surveys and gave statistics regarding peoples' perception and idea of Christianity. Sadly, the news was not good. The book is a great eye opener and everyone should read it at some point. But in a nutshell, the perception of Christianity out there is not like the Christlike radical love that Jesus shows us in the New Testament. We have somehow gotten people to think that we are judgemental, anti-gay, religious hypocrites. Isn't that what the Pharisees were? The Pharisees were a religious and political movement of ancient Israel. The word Pharisee is derived from the Hebrew word perushim meaning "set apart". The Pharisees may have been right about how to live their lives, but were very good at pointing out the plank in other people's eye rather than their own. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said some wonderful things about judgment that I think that we can all learn from:

"When we judge other people we confront them in a spirit of detachment, observing and reflecting as it were from the outside. But love has neither time nor opportunity for this. If we love, we can never observe the other person with detachment, for he is always and at every moment a living claim to our love and service."

"Every day man dies the death of a sinner, he cannot raise himself up above any other man or set himself before him as a model, for he knows himself to be the greatest of all sinners. He can excuse the sin of another, but never his own."

If we continually look at ourselves as the worst of sinners and focus on taking the plank out of our own eye rather than worrying about the speck of dust in other peoples eye, we can turn around the perception of modern day Christianity. We can turn it from being like the Pharisees into the radical servant-like love that Christ displayed in every situation.