Clarification is needed, in my opinion, on the word, “judgmental”, and the call to “righteous judging”. This topic is tearing at the fiber of the North American church today and is bringing in moral relativism by the truckload.
Criticism, for its own sake, is usually out of a bitter spirit, born out of hypocrisy, and is plainly wrong. It is not motivated by the Holy Spirit in the least.
There is, however, a vital aspect to judging. One of the gifts of the Spirit is the “Discerning of Spirits”, found in 1 Corinthians 12:10. The Greek word for discernment is, “diakrisis”, which comes from two words: “dia”, meaning “through, between”, and “krino”, meaning, “to judge”. In other words, the Holy Spirit gifts people so that they can make a judgment between two things, as to which right, and which is wrong. The specific gift of “discernment of spirits” involves being supernaturally able to distinguish between a person who is serving the cause of evil spirits, and one who is serving the cause of God. As soon as one says, “ No person has the right to judge”, then that person is actually quenching the Holy Spirit’s gifting of people to make judgments which will edify the church.
To say that we the Church cannot judge a situation or a person in sin is to allow cultural relativism to slip into the church, falling into an unbalanced doctrine of judgment. This is happening more and more now.
The Lord Jesus shows that it is good to “judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24). ..we should make judgments based on the yardstick of righteousness as revealed in His Word, which looks beyond mere outward appearances, and are made with the right spirit in heart.
When Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1), we immediately know what kind of judgment He is referring to there. He cannot mean that we must never make any judgment at all, otherwise we would not be able to fulfill some other scriptural mandates, such as never to allow anyone to deceive us...see Matthew 24:4; Luke 21:8; 2Thessalonians 2:3; Ephesians 5:6; Colossians 2:8. If only God can judge, as many think, then how will we be able to fulfill the apostle John’s command: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Far from being wrong, judgment is actually a vital part of the Christian armour!
Christ has placed pastors and teachers into the church precisely to make judgments which will prevent people from being “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting” (Ephesians 4:14). The judgment which the Lord Jesus forbids in Matthew 7:1 refers to a person who makes a judgment about another person, while he himself is doing the very same thing which he is judging in the other! That is hypocritical judgment, a hypocrisy, which is forbidden by Christ.
The kind of judgment which builds up God’s people by advising them of danger or falsehood is an absolute necessity.
