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33 “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ 34 But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37 Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

1 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. 3 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? 4 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? 5 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.”

Here ends the reading of God’s Word

The Sermon on the Mount, which we’ve been looking at for several weeks, is about the kingdom of God. We’re told in John 3 that the whole purpose of being born again is we’re born again into the kingdom. What does it mean to be born again? It means you are born into the kingdom of God.

That’s what Jesus told Nicodemus. The kingdom of God is a realm, or put another way, it’s a condition in which Jesus Christ holds sway, his royal power holds sway over you. What you have, at that point, is his power over you, because being born again, receiving Jesus Christ, is to renounce your mastery over yourself.

Becoming a Christian is not just trying to be more moral. Instead, it’s renouncing the mastery you used to have over yourself, renouncing self-determination, and obeying Christ. When you enter into his kingdom, his power floods in on you. One of the great glories, and wonders and joys of Christian life, one of the ironies in a sense, is that it’s not until you give up power that you get power. It’s not until you actually renounce power that it comes flooding into your life.

It’s not the kind of kingly power, dictatorial power, that controls. The power itself is Jesus Christ’s supernatural character. It’s his nobility. It’s his royal bearing. It’s the grace of his youth and the strength of his maturity and the wisdom of his old age all wrapped up at once, descending on us and transforming us into his likeness from one degree to the next. That’s kingdom power.

By the way, I know it’s early, but does the description I just made do anything to you? Do you realize that the reaction of your heart to that description tells you a lot about the state of your soul? Because the Bible tells us that every real Christian has in them “… Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Just as Elizabeth realized, when she had John the Baptist in her womb and she got near Mary, who was pregnant with Jesus Christ, the child leapt for joy in her womb. When you get near description of the kingdom of God finding in fruition in your life, when you think about the transformational righteousness that is coming into your life, your heart leaps, if you’re a Christian. Why? What is that? That is “… Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Now the whole idea of the Sermon on the Mount is to contrast the transformational righteousness of the kingdom with mere legalistic morality. Some weeks ago now, back before Easter and all, we took a look at 5:17–20, where Jesus says to us (members of the kingdom), “Your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees.”

That means that Jesus is saying the kind of supernatural character that comes into your life has to so far exceed the legalistic morality of just plain old good people that it should make everybody’s head spin. Then Jesus is moving through the different areas of our lives and showing us what that transformational righteousness looks like. That’s why, where we get to today, the oaths, is actually the fourth out of six very important examples that so far, he’s used.

He’s taken a look at the area of relationships, the area of sexuality, the area of divorce and marriage (which we looked at last week), and now he’s into the area of speech and words. He’s saying our words and our speech have to be absolutely beautiful, a thing of beauty, something completely different and far above the Pharisees or anyone who tries just to be good.

Christianity is not a bunch of people trying to be good. The Pharisees who Jesus is talking about are people who think that by their own moral effort they can become good people, and of course to a certain degree they approximate goodness but they’re not in the kingdom of God because they are their own king. They think they’ve made it. There’s smugness. There’s self-righteousness, and that moral effort can never ever approximate the transformational righteousness of the kingdom of God.

Now words … When you consider all of the great problems confronting us in the world, is it a good idea to take our valuable time and spend this morning discussing the subject of words and our speech and how we speak to each other? The answer, of course, is yes! The best way to understand this is for me, first of all, to give you a brief background about what the Bible says about the power of words, give you a biblical background, so you can put what Jesus says about words here in the Sermon on the Mount in that framework.

The Bible says that words are unbelievably powerful. The book of Proverbs 12:18 says, “Reckless words pierce like a sword …” Do you hear that? “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” Boy, do you see what it says there? First of all, the power of words is remarkable. There’s a torture called solitary confinement. Do you know what that torture is? It’s not a physical torture, but it’s still torture. It’s torture because the need to talk to and to be talked to is so fundamental to our human existence that to be denied it leads to madness.

We need to talk, and we need to talk to. Don’t you think, then, that words have a tremendous power? Is it any wonder why God is so intimately concerned about how we use this remarkable and wonderful capacity? It’s fundamental to our existence, and because of that, words are powerful. First of all, it says, “Reckless words pierce like a sword …” Proverbs says. That means words have the ability to penetrate all the way down.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can kill me, can kill the real me, the real self. They go beneath the surface of the bones and the skin. They destroy your self. There is no doubt about it. Many murders, many suicides, many wars (maybe all of them) have been caused by words. You see words from parents to children, or words from husbands to wives or wives to husbands, or words from friend to friend that have absolutely demolished our very selves. Words can penetrate all the way to the bottom. They do.

At the same time, they can heal. “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” You see, it’s just as powerful the other way. I don’t know about you … Oh, of course I know about you. I know about you. You and I need not just to be loved but we need to hear somebody say, “I love you. I value you. I care for you. I think you’re something special.” We need to hear that as much as our bodies need food. You know it.

By the way, there are people, especially in New York, who go for weeks, and weeks, and weeks without anybody saying anything like that to them. Isn’t that right? Who is telling you that, right now? How often do they say it? That’s food. Now instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself that no one else is feeding you that, that there is no one else with the tongue of the wise that is healing you day in and day out, instead, turn around and say, “But there are people I could be healing. There are people I know to whom I could be expressing love. I could be saying it,” and you’re not. Because it’s not that easy. Right?

Especially us males. We have a lot of trouble getting beyond a slap on the back as a way of saying, “I care for you.” That’s about as far as we can get. “How ya doin’, fella?” We need words. Instead of saying, “I’m starving,” go feed people. Because you know, it says in Isaiah 58, if you pour yourself out for the hungry, for those in darkness, your light will rise in the noonday. Instead of sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, go and feed somebody. “… the tongue of the wise brings healing.”

Have a wise tongue. Don’t you see the power of words? By the way, it’s not just the words that the Bible says are powerful in their effect on the hearers, the words you say are just as powerful in their effect on you. We read that in Proverbs as well. Chapter 12 says, “From the fruit of his lips a man enjoys good things …” I already said it when we were receiving our friends into membership. When you take a thought and clothe it with a word, it has a powerful effect on you.

If you sit around and say, “God is unfair,” God will look unfair. If you say, “My friend is to blame for everything. It’s not my fault,” you’re blame shifting, and eventually you’ll start to believe it. Your words, the fruit of your words, you eat. If it’s good fruit, it’s good. If it’s bad fruit, it’s poison. Make no mistake; a liar eventually begins to believe his lies. A slanderer eventually begins to hate. A complainer finally loses hope. Your words have power over you.

Words have a life of their own, the Bible says. They’re like birds. They come back to roost. The bad words, the evil words, the rotten words the Bible talks about, the putrid words are like vultures and they’ll come back and they’ll tear your heart out. The good words are like the fruit that a good man eats from. That’s the power of words. Don’t you see why the Bible is so concerned about them? Don’t you see why, today, you need to be weighing your words? Don’t you see that your words are lethal weapons?

Why do you think Jesus Christ says that on the final day, God will judge you? He will bring you in to account for every idle word. You know, an idle word isn’t even a bad word. You know, when an engine is idling, what is it doing? It’s just running and running and running, and it’s not doing anything. It’s not getting anything accomplished at all. Do you know what an idle word is? A bad word? Yeah. It’s just a word that’s just running and running and running. It’s just your mouth running and running and running and not doing any good.

You see, words are powerful. When Jesus says you will be judged for every idle word, what he means is they are lethal weapons. They need to be registered. You should be weighing them. Your words are little bombs that you’re throwing out there, and they’re going to go off in your heart and they’re going to go off in other people’s hearts, so you need to weigh your words. Now how do you weigh your words? In a beautiful way, Jesus Christ, here in the Sermon on the Mount, has two sections on words, this section on oaths, and the other section I read on judging.

What’s so beautiful about it is really, though the Bible says many things … and I’m going to show you how many things here, he says many things about words. Everything the Bible says about words boils down to two principles. Those two principles are truth and love. “… speak the truth in love …” Truth without love isn’t really truth. It’s coldness. It’s imperious self-righteousness. It’s narrow-mindedness. It’s rigidity. Truth without love is not really truth, as we will see. Love without truth isn’t really love. It’s cowardice and therefore, it’s self-indulgence.

If you say, “I love that person too much to tell them the truth,” you love yourself too much to tell them the truth. The truth is what makes you free. The reason you’re afraid to tell them the truth is not so much that you don’t want that person to be hurt, because actually that might help the person. You don’t want to have to go through the unpleasantness. You don’t want to have that person, as you’re trying to take the speck out of his or her eye, get close up on you. Love without truth is not really love. Truth without love is not really truth. They have to go together or they don’t really exist at all.

What Jesus says about oaths has to do with truth, and what Jesus says about judging has to do with love to show us that our words have to be truthful and loving at the same time. Look. First of all, the oaths. Jesus says something quite interesting, and it’s actually fairly simple. There is one point he’s making, and that’s what we can drive home.

“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

When he says, “… you have heard that it was said to the people long ago,” if you remember from former studies on the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is not quoting the Bible. In fact, that statement he just quoted there is not found anywhere in the Old Testament or the New Testament. It’s a summary. Therefore, Jesus is pointing to the teaching of the religious leaders. Now the teaching of the religious leaders was good to a certain degree. It’s true that you shouldn’t break your oaths. The Bible, in the Old Testament, is full of all kinds of statements that say, “Don’t break your oaths.” If you take an oath to God, don’t break it. Don’t forsake it.

Then Jesus goes on and says (isn’t this curious?), “Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem …” What is he referring to there? At this point, we know from the rabbinical teachings of the time, Jesus is talking about the teaching of the rabbis about levels of honesty. The rabbis taught that there were some oaths that if you took them and you broke them, you could be legally penalized. There were other oaths that if you took them and you broke them, you couldn’t be penalized.

So they would say, for example … The rabbinical teaching of the age said that if you swear by the altar, you can break that and not be penalized, but if you swear by your gift on the altar, you couldn’t. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason one was more binding than the other. Jesus Christ is wiping that away and he says, “Do not swear at all …” Now that does not mean you should never make a public promise.

The reason we know that is because Paul, through here, if you go to Romans 9 and 2 Corinthians, you’ll see Paul, through the New Testament, constantly swearing. I don’t mean cursing, I mean constantly saying, “By God’s name I tell you this,” and so on. Jesus is not saying you can never make a public promise. What he is saying is really frightening. I hope all of us think about this and weigh this. This will hurt, but this will heal, like salt in the wound.

He says there are no levels of truthfulness for a Christian. He says don’t swear by heaven because it’s God’s. Don’t swear by the earth because it’s God’s. Don’t swear by your head because it’s God’s. What he’s saying is, don’t you realize that whether or not you say something is in God’s name, it is? Because you can never get out of the presence of God. Therefore, don’t you realize that every single thing you say is as binding as if you did it under oath? Don’t you realize that when you say, “Yes, I’ll be there. No. Yes,” it’s an oath? That’s what God is saying.

Jesus is saying that when somebody says, “Will you pray for me?” and you say, “Yes,” it’s an oath that God holds you as accountable to follow through on that as if you swore on a stack of Bibles, “Of course I will pray. I will not fail to pray. I will pray for you.” When you tell your child you’re going to fix his bike, you have to do it. You’re just as bound to honesty there as if you’d sworn on a stack of Bibles. There are no levels of honesty. There are no levels of truthfulness.

Why? Jesus says, “Because you’re always in God’s presence.” Now how do you like that? You know, “What does that mean?” Well, let’s apply it for a moment. A lot of us make tremendous distinctions between various reasons. For example, in modern society, especially New York City, there’s a tremendous difference between the public record and the private. Honesty in one area is different than honesty in another area.

It was really interesting when Kathy was on a bus on Roosevelt Island and because of a bad seat on the bus, her wedding ring was snapped off and we had to get it fixed. We showed it to the bus driver. She said, “Yep, that’s right. You just need to make a claim; that’s all. I mean, it happened. I saw it happen,” and so forth. Over the next few weeks, we got letters from the operating corporation saying, “Our driver has no recollection of this incident and we cannot, under any circumstances, allow this claim.”

Then three days after that last letter, we got a check for the amount of money that we needed and we had asked for, in the mail. Now what does that mean? This is standard operating procedure. “I will not publically admit to anything because that would make me legally liable, but privately, I know you’re right.” That just institutionalized the way it’s done. We’re not upset about it. It is just interesting. What it shows is, it makes mincemeat out of society, because of all of us know that.

So you don’t know about your other fields, right? You don’t know about other things, but in your own fields, you know how much dishonesty there is between the public record and the private. On the record means, “Maybe I’ll be honest with you.” That’s what it means. “Off the record, I’ll be honest. On the record, “Hey, come on. You know, there are things we have to do.” So you don’t believe the congressional record. You don’t believe the annual report. You don’t believe what the advertisers say. Because that’s on the record. It makes mincemeat of society, and a Christian says, “I cannot be part of that.”

Here is another area. You set the level of dishonesty as the level of honesty there. Christ says, “… let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’ …” Let me give you another one. On the general level, you admit you’re a sinner, right? Sure. You come to church and, “Yes, of course I make mistakes. Yes, I know I do foolish things. Of course I’m selfish. Of course, I admit that I break the Ten Commandments. Yes, I know I’m a sinner and I need mercy in Jesus Christ.” That’s the general level.

Then someone particularly comes and says, “Let me show you what you’re doing wrong. Let me criticize you. Let me show you where you’re sinning.” Suddenly, you never liked me anyway. You see, it’s one thing to say at the general level, “I believe I’m a sinner.” It’s another thing to really practice that honesty at the specific level and look at somebody who is criticizing you and say, “I have to really think about that. There’s a lot to what you say.”

I’ll tell you what actually happens. Unless the transformational righteousness of the kingdom is growing in your life through the Holy Spirit, I’ll tell you what you do. There are big levels of honesty here. “I’ll be honest with my sin at the general level, but at the specific level, I will never admit to anybody face to face I’m wrong, even when I know they’re right, because I can’t stand that loss of face.” That, the Bible says here, is repugnant, antithetical to kingdom righteousness.

You know what happens. Criticism always comes as a kind of alloy. Have you ever noticed that? Criticism never, ever comes purely because there’s always something wrong with it. When the person comes and gives you criticism, the person’s attitude is bad or the person themselves is guilty of it, or the person is exaggerating, or the person has mixed in with a lot of the truth a lot of falseness, right? So what do you do?

Do you ignore all the falseness and the bad motives and find that part of the criticism that’s really valid and say, “You know, you have something there. I need to really think about this.” Or what do you do? You see that little part that’s valid, but you point out all the wrong things and you say, “What about this, and what about this? That’s not true. That’s a false charge and I don’t like your attitude.” You do everything you can to get out from under the true part of the criticism.

How you take criticism shows whether or not you believe in levels of honesty or whether or not you are a person of the truth. Not at the public level versus the private level, not at the general level versus the specific level. Then we have other levels. There are certain people, right? Somebody calls up and says, “Can you come to the phone?” and you say, “Oh please tell them I feel sick. I really don’t feel good. I’ll talk to them tomorrow.” It depends on who the person is, right? I mean, you feel kind of sick, but you don’t feel so sick you couldn’t come to the phone. It depends on who that is.

Somebody else comes and says, “But this is so-and-so.” Oh, that’s different. “Hi. How are you doing? No, I feel fine.” Levels of honesty aren’t allowed. Let your “yes” be “yes.” Let your “no” be “no.” Because, you see, love without truth really isn’t love. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t exaggerate. Be accurate. Be fair. Live with integrity. Don’t have levels of honesty. Your “yes” and your “no” are oaths before the presence of God.

Now the second thing Jesus says is not just about truth, but he says something about love. In Matthew 7, he says a very famous and almost comical statement. He says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged … 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?” Of course, it’s comical because what you have here is a blind ophthalmologist, you see. That’s the picture. There’s no doubt about it. Jesus is trying to be funny.

He’s saying, here you are, coming in for this surgery with sunglasses on. You’re coming in to do brain surgery, right? And you’re saying, “Boy, I can hardly see straight.” You open your eyes and say, “Well, let’s see. I don’t know. Boy. It’s daylight out here. Let me put on some sunglasses.” I mean, it’s funny. It’s scary. It’s pathetic. Jesus is condemning something called judging. What he’s telling us about here is that truth without love isn’t really truth.

What is judging? Well I’ll tell you what it’s not. A lot of people say, “Oh, I know what judging is. Judging means you must never evaluate negatively someone else’s faith or beliefs. You must never say that someone else is wrong in their faith or beliefs. You must never do that.” The thinking goes like this. You’ve heard it, surely. “Religion is a private thing. We mustn’t call into question someone else’s religious conviction. It’s a private thing and what’s true for you might not be true for him and what’s true for him might not be true for you and we have to respect all faiths.” Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Is that what Jesus is talking about here? No, for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you look at the context, it’s very clear Jesus doesn’t mean this. Because in verse 6, he says, “Don’t throw pearls to the pigs. Don’t throw things to the dogs.” Down in verse 15, he says, “Watch out for false prophets.”

Even though we can’t get into who are the dogs and who are the false prophets here, because time is running on, it’s very clear that Jesus is saying that some people have positions that we must denounce and utterly repudiate, right? He couldn’t mean, “Don’t negatively assess someone’s position.”

By the way, there is also something unbelievably illogical about that position. Because the person who says that, “You know, what’s true for you is true for you, and religion is private,” that’s a nice way of saying, “I am absolutely cynical about the possibility of truth. No one can really know what’s true in religion.”

Does that sound like it makes sense? It’s fallacious reasoning. Because what you’re saying is, “We can’t know anything religiously for certain except that.” Well how do you know that? If you can’t know anything religious for certain, how do you know that for certain? If you say, “We can’t evaluate anyone else’s religion,” what you mean is, “We can’t evaluate anyone else’s religion except the religion that evaluates other religions,” and that’s wrong.

You see? How can you do that? You don’t have any basis for that. The problem is it’s utterly fallacious to say, “We can’t know anything for certain except that we can’t know anything for certain.” The Bible says, because God has spoken in the Bible, that we can make judgments about false positions and true positions.

What Jesus is talking about is something very frightening to me, just as frightening as what I just told you about. He is saying, “Don’t be like the Pharisees.” You know, in Luke 18, Jesus tells the parable of the Pharisee that says, “Oh, I thank you that I am not like other men …” Jesus is saying there’s a self-righteousness, a superiority, a looking down on people that the result is, instead of assessing a position, you dismiss a person.

Judging is not assessing a position; it’s writing somebody off. It’s dismissing them. It’s saying, “I want you out of my life. I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.” In other words, instead of assessing a position or a belief, you are dismissing and sentencing and condemning a person, and that’s something that only God in his wisdom and in his authority has the right to do. Now how can you judge? Do you know what the spirit of judging is? There are lots of examples. I made a list of about 15, but because you’re in mercy, I’ll just give you three or four.

First, you judge someone when you say, “I can forgive them, but I can never forget.” Well now there’s a distinction without a difference. Do you know what forgiving means? When they say, “I can forgive but I won’t forget,” what that means is, “I won’t actually kill you, but I don’t want to have anything to do with you.” When you forgive, you absorb the debt that was owed you, and you no longer demand payment, and you no longer withhold anything over that debt. You restore the relationship.

When you say, “I won’t forget,” that means, “I want nothing more to do with you. I sentence you as a person. Get out of my life. I dismiss you. I write you off.” You can do that in hostility, but you can do it without hostility at all. You can trivialize the person. You can say, “You’re inconsequential. You’re not my type. You’re not my class. You’re not my kind. You’re not my style,” and just act like they’re not there. What you’re doing there is you’re dismissing a person. You’re judging a person. You’re sentencing a person.

You can do it some other ways. One of the main ways is by refusing to be merciful. When you’re sitting in line, do you sit there and say, “I’ll bet you that cashier has just had a bad day. I’ll bet you that she’s just new and she’s really nervous and upset, and there’s no reason for me to be sitting here and stewing.” You see, that’s the way it ought to be, but instead, you sit there and say, “I can’t believe this cashier. When I get up there, I’m going to give her a piece of my mind.”

Let me tell you this. The main way in which you judge is by gossiping. I’ll show you why. The whole idea of judging is that you’re concerned not with the principle, not with the belief, you are concerned with writing off and feeling superior to a person. You’re not concerned about the evil in them. You’re not concerned about the sin in them. You’re not concerned about the wrong. You’re not concerned about helping them. Your motive is only to feel superior to them.

There’s the proof. Gossip is the proof. Because instead of going to them and talking to them, you want to talk about it to other people. What could your motivation possibly be to talk to somebody else or to listen to somebody else who is telling you negative things about a brother or sister? What is your motivation? The only motivation …

I know what mine is, and I’m pretty sure it must be in your heart too. It’s just a guess, but it’s probably there. I like to feel superior. It’s a spirit of judging. Only God has the right to do it. Don’t you see why? When you gossip, that shows that you’re really not interested in truth but you’re really interested in feeling better than persons and therefore, the truth without love isn’t really truth after all, just like love without truth isn’t love.

What do we do about this? Let me just close this way. Are you a person, when you weigh your words, lethal things, powerful things, little bombs that are going to go off in your heart and the hearts of other people, how do they judge? How do you weigh your own words? Are your words always truthful and honest, scrupulously? Are they always designed to edify? Can you take a look at every word you say and say, “Will this build somebody up? Will this be helpful?”

If you can’t, what do we do about it? Of course you can’t. I knew you couldn’t. That’s why I have to say this last thing. Jesus Christ says, “… out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” What he means is New Year’s resolutions and trying to turn over a new leaf will never do it, because what we have going on down there is something so basic that we have to have a whole new heart in order to change our words.

Here’s how you get a whole new heart. If you want to be people of the truth, first you have to admit the truth about yourself. That means, as I’ve been saying here all along, humility that is born from the kingdom righteousness of the spirit of God is absolute prerequisite for having beautiful, gorgeous, truthful, and loving words. There has to be humility there. The humility comes when you admit the truth about yourself. The Bible says the truth about yourself is you’re a helpless sinner. A sinner. Yeah.

There are people in New York who know they are sinners, and when you admit that, it changes your attitude toward everybody else. Because you get to the place where you know that when someone criticizes you, you have to say, “Ah, but that’s true,” even if they’re off, even if they’re partly off, even if they’re mainly off. “If they only knew the truth,” so I can’t get that upset about it. That’s the first thing. You have to admit the truth about yourself.

The second thing is that you also have to receive God’s verdict that you are accepted and righteous in Jesus Christ. Judgment, the spirit of judging, is essentially to say, “Depart from me. I want nothing to do with you.” If you are a believer, you know that is what the verdict should have been, right? That God should have said, “Depart from me, ye cursed into everlasting fire …” That’s what the verdict should have been, but instead the verdict is this. Because you received Christ as Savior, “This is my beloved Son [This is my beloved daughter], with whom I am well pleased.”

Because of that, anybody who remembers that cannot judge a person. When you’re ready to listen to gossip, when you’re ready to give it, when you’re ready to run somebody down, when you’re ready just to walk by someone who doesn’t look like your class or style, you have to say, “How can I say to these people, ‘Depart from me,’ when that’s what God should have done to me and he didn’t?” Oh, dear friend, to the degree you remember that, to that degree your words will be beautiful things and “… the tongue of the wise brings healing.” Do you have a wise tongue?

Let’s conclude. Think. “Do I speak the truth in love? Am I loving with truth? If so, it’s because I remembered the truth, the bad news about myself, and that is that I’m a sinner. The good news about me is I’m completely accepted in you.” Oh boy. How you give and take criticism shows you the state of your soul, because if you refuse to give criticism because you say, “Oh, I’m too bad to do it,” you’re forgetting God’s grace.

If you’re too proud in your criticism so that you run people off and make them feel terrible and defensive, then you’re forgetting sin. If you’re too hopeless and say, “That person’s hopeless. I write them off because there’s no way anybody can change them,” you’ve forgotten both sin and grace. To the degree you know who you are in Christ, to that degree, your words will be beautiful things.

What a community we would be if we were speaking the truth and loved each other. Think of how we’d be growing. Think of how close we’d be. Remember these things and you’ll be like Jesus, of whom it was said, “Never man spake like this man.” Let’s pray.