Judge Not Series

If you want to follow along, we are going to be looking at Matthew 7:1. We will be looking at only five verses today. While you are looking that up, I was looking on the internet this past week for illustrations to open my sermon, and I came across one that I thought was very good. Not only because it fit very well with today’s passage, but also confirmed what most of us know in our heart that our brains immediately judge people. There is a study that said “Even if we cannot consciously see a person’s face, our brain is able to make a snap decision about how trustworthy they are. According to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the brain immediately determines how trustworthy a face is before it is fully perceived, which supports the fact that we make very fast judgments about people. Researchers at Dartmouth College and New York University showed a group of participants photos of real people’s faces as well as computer-generated faces that were meant to look either trustworthy or untrustworthy. It has been shown in the past that people generally think that faces with high inner eyebrows and prominent cheek bones are more trustworthy and the opposite features are untrustworthy, which the researchers were able to confirm. In the second part of their experiment, the researchers showed a separate group of participants the same images but for only 30 milliseconds while they were in a brain scanner. They then did something called backward masking which consists of showing a participant an irrelevant image or mask immediately after quickly showing them a face. The procedure makes the brain capable of processing the face. Even though the patients were not able to process the faces, their brains did. The researchers focused on activity in a part of the brain responsible for social-emotional behavior and found that specific areas of the brain were activated based on judgment of trustworthiness or non-trustworthiness. This, the researchers conclude, is evidence that our brains make judgment of people before we even process who they are or what they look like.”

Do you buy that? I buy it totally. I think that every day we are constantly making judgments about those around us. We are making all these snap judgments. We are sizing people up. You go throughout your week, you go throughout your day and wherever you find yourself, whether school, workplace, or even church, I suspect that we are looking at each other and we are making judgments and decisions about people on a variety of factors. The common one would be the appearance of a person. Sadly, we make judgments about people based on the color of their skin. We make judgments about people based on their weight and height. We make judgments about people based on how they behave in certain situations. Where we see them and what they are doing. If you are cut off on the road by somebody, immediately you are making a judgment about that person and that they are probably a bad character. If you are sitting at a ballgame and somebody starts doing something that is annoying you, you begin to make judgments about that person that may or may not be true. We are constantly sizing people up and making judgments about people on a variety of things. I pretty much guarantee that many of you are sitting there making judgments about me, which is fine. I can handle it. I am used to it. But I am making judgments about all of you too and I get to see all of you at once. The reality is we are. We are constantly making judgments about each other.

I don’t think that is actually a bad thing. I think that is how God wired us. In some sense, I think it is a survival skill. Let’s imagine we are walking down Lincoln Avenue some evening and it is getting dark. All of a sudden a guy comes running down the street naked with a knife in his hand and he is coming right at you. At that point, you have to make a judgment. You have no choice but to decide if this guy is a little cuckoo or is it just another Bellevue resident out for a stroll that evening. You have to decide that stuff. Today, as we think about judging people or judgments, what we have to realize is Jesus is not totally anti-judging. He is not about anti-judging. But he is against the type of judging that makes people feel belittled or makes them feel condemned that sometimes is characterized by a feeling of worthlessness. That is the type of judging that he is against because it absolutely has no place in the kingdom of God. That is what we are going to talk about today. We have been going through the series called The Story: God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. We are talking about the New Testament story of Jesus and the ministry and the various miracles of Jesus. We have been stuck on talking about a lot of the teachings of Jesus and I have a hard time leaving the teachings of Jesus because when I get into them I find that I am learning a lot and they are amazing. As we know, the teachings of Jesus are just so hard to swallow. Just very difficult. You get the impression when you read it that Jesus really thinks his followers can live differently. The things that he is teaching are actually possible to do. They are not impossibilities, but they are difficult. The passage today is actually very difficult too. That is why we struggle with so much. What I would like to do is read through these five passages and then go back and talk about why it might be difficult. Reading from Matthew 7:1. (Scripture read here.)