Judge Not

Friends in Christ, human beings are very good at automatically filling in information that might be missing. If you read a sentence, and a letter or two are missing, our mind easily fills in the missing letters – we can read it. This can happen when we are conversing with someone and we don’t know their language perfectly, we can ‘fill in the gaps’ and guess what they are trying to say.

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But this can be dangerous, if we try to fill in information too much about people, without really knowing all the facts. It can lead to rash judgment. A group had a meeting at their home, one person wasn’t there, and so there was complaining, that this person has no respect for the group or the decency to call. But in reality, the person had had a car accident and was pinned under the car.

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We often make rash judgments, without knowing all the facts. Jesus says, ‘Stop judging, that you may not be judged. We don’t want people to make false or rash judgments about ourselves; we know how it feels when someone concluded something about us, which was entirely untrue, or even told this false accusation to others.

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Our minds are weak and we often lack the patience to carefully discern the whole truth. Sometimes we commit this sin based on wounds of our past, or the climate of cynicism leads us to conclude things wrongly. The news media constantly makes quick and often false judgments about people; and they bring in ‘supposed experts’ to demonstrate their claims, which are often very untrue or taken out of context.

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We have all, at some time, been guilty of some serious misjudgment of someone, and we have all, at some time, been falsely judged. It is strange then, that we still keep doing this. Better to follow the saints, who tell us: ‘Think the best of others, presume the best in them.