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The ‘Deadly Virtue’ of Discernment
Jim Weavor, Guest Pastor
Thanks to Renee and James. You all make a good comedy team there. And thanks to the worship team who's led us to this point. It's good to be with you again today. If you're not familiar, I'm not the person that's usually here. I'm Jim Weaver and Pastor Eric is on sabbatical leave this month. After today, his sabbatical leave will be half over. I'm sure it's just flying by for him. But I'm grateful for the opportunity to share with you in these four Sundays while Eric is gone. Last Sunday, said we would be spending this month talking about something that we might call deadly virtues. These are real Christian virtues. They're vital for the Christian life. But they can get misguided, distorted, twisted, and they can become destructive of that abundant life that Jesus wants us to have, that life to the fullest. This morning we're going to talk about the deadly virtue of discernment. Now I'm going to venture to say that there is something that we have all done this morning besides come to church. We've had opinions about things. If you live in a household with somebody else, you probably had an opinion about what sort of mood they've been in today. If you have read some news or listened to some news in the media, you've likely had an opinion about what's going on in the world or what somebody has done. If somebody drifted into your lane or cut you off as you were in your vehicle coming to church today, you had an opinion about their ability to drive. If you were in Bible study this morning, you probably had an opinion about how helpful you found the discussion to be. If you've seen some children in the building this morning, You may have thought they sure are cute. Or it could have been, I sure am glad they're going home with somebody else. Maybe you had an opinion about the music in the service. And I imagine you're getting ready to have an opinion about the sermon. Somebody once said that opinions are like noses. Everybody has one. And I don't think we would try to dispute the truth of this observation about life. But because of the way that we are wired in creation, we do have the capacity to think and to distinguish one thing for another. It's just built into us to have thoughts about the way things are or the way things need to be. But the mental powers and faculties that we have go beyond just this natural inclination to form opinions. What is most important is that God has given us the capacity of moral discernment. God has given us the ability to make moral judgments. We can put things into the categories of good and evil. We can distinguish right and wrong and choose between them. And this is just part of our human nature, the way that God has made us in His image. The other creatures in God's world of creation just don't have this ability to make moral judgments. If you've got a pet dog, you can put out a bowl of food for them. And then they can decide whether they're going to eat what's in that dish or whether they're not going to eat it. And if they don't like the food that you've put into that dish, they don't say to themselves, I sure have a lousy master. I wish I lived in the house across the street. Instead, they eat what's in that dish or they come running gladly when you offer them something else. But we human folks are unique. God has made us so we can think and reason and evaluate things. God has made us so we can distinguish things. God has made us so we can make value judgments about what people are doing, including ourselves. Moral discernment, making value judgments is essential for us as a follower of Jesus. Now somehow the rumor has circulated that Christians aren't the judge in any way. And I suppose this rumor goes back to what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. Do not judge or you too will be judged. But just think about it. If God gave us that power of moral discernment, then Jesus couldn't mean that we're never to use our ability to judge that God has planted within us. And there's even more evidence that Jesus doesn't mean don't judge, period. Notice some other things that Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. He tells us, do not give dogs what is sacred. Or in other words, don't give what is holy to unholy people. And then as Jesus is beginning to bring the Sermon on the Mount to its conclusion, he says, watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. It's impossible to identify what is unholy. and to tell the wolves from the sheep and to pick the good fruit from the bad fruit unless we're making moral judgments about people. When Jesus says, Do not judge, He's not telling us to be value neutral and to suppress this capacity of moral discernment that we have. We are to be able to put things into categories of right and wrong. We're not to ignore good and evil. God wants us to know His truth and to live by His truth. But there are different ways of judging. There is Jesus' way of judging, and there is a way of judging that really doesn't connect at all with the way of Jesus. And this is the way of judging, the way of making moral judgments that Jesus has in mind when He says don't judge. The Christian needs moral discernment. And moral discernment is a Christian virtue. It's a genuine virtue. It's an indispensable virtue that we neglect at the peril of our lives and of the world too. But this virtue of moral discernment can become a deadly virtue. It becomes destructive when it crosses over the line from the way of Jesus to something that's self-centered and severe. It becomes destructive when it's fueled by a negative and critical spirit that's far detached from God's spirit. It becomes destructive when it demonizes and it condemns. Now there are a lot of words we can use to describe this moral discernment when it crosses the line into a non-Jesus way. There are the words judgmental and hypercritical and fault-finding and self-righteous. And there's the big word censorious. This is a fancy word that comes from a Latin word that means to give an opinion or to assess. In the time of the Roman Empire, censors were officials who were appointed to register the citizens and their property and to supervise the moral conduct of people. The censor felt that he was a cut above everybody else. He felt like he was in a class by himself. And this is the attitude of somebody who has fallen into that deadly virtue of making judgments in a non-Jesus way. They feel like they are morally superior. They enjoy looking for the faults and the failings in somebody else. They think the worst about somebody else's motives and they're quick to form their critical judgments. They're condescending in their negative, and they're always against something, whether they have anything positive to offer or not. They'll demonize someone they don't agree with. And they'll regard them as their enemies to be attacked and to be eliminated at any cost. They'll just wash their hands of certain people and dismiss them as beyond hope and not worth the time. They'll render on certain people that verdict of condemned, people that don't measure up to their standards. And they'll go beyond thinking and saying, you did a bad thing to you are a bad thing, and just write somebody off. This attitude is deadly destructive. And it's even more deadly if it's done in the name of God and we suppose that God thinks exactly the same thing about somebody else that we think about them. This attitude of moral discernment in a non-Jesus way is deadly destructive because it does something to us. It distorts our view of ourselves. If we start looking in another direction, then we're not going to see ourselves for who we are. If we begin to point out what's wrong and what somebody else is doing, then we're not going to see so much what's wrong and what we're doing. The more we point out the flaws of somebody else, the less we have to look at our own. The more that we tear somebody else down, the taller I seem to be. To look at somebody and say how bad they are can be a really subtle way of thinking about ourselves, how good I am. But the truth is we all have our weaknesses and our flaws and our broken places and our sins. Company inspection was taking place at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. The inspection was going well until the colonel who was doing the inspection came up to this certain soldier. The colonel stopped. They looked the man up and down And then he stepped, Soldier, button that pocket. And the soldier was rattled and he stammered, Right now, sir. The colonel said, Of course, right now. And very carefully the soldier reached out and he buttoned the flap on the colonel's shirt pocket. we all have unbuttoned pockets, so to speak, and often it's easier to see the unbuttoned pocket on somebody else. In a comic strip, the benign witch Broomhilda asked the troll Irwin, Irwin, what would be the best way to make the world better? And Irwin thanks for a moment and many answers. Well, start with yourself. Give up your bad habits and evil pleasures. Then when you're good, when you're perfect, you'll stand as a shining example to others. Broomhilda says, Well, what's the second best way? You know, a lot of the times we don't want to start with ourselves. We'd rather zero in on somebody else. But Jesus says, 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? 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? You hypocrites, first take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. In a word picture, Jesus is really drawing a cartoon that would make his audience smile until they got the point. There's this fellow who has a plank of wood that's stuck in his eye. And there's this other guy who has a tiny speck of sawdust that's in his eye. And the fellow with this huge plank in his eye ignores the fact that he's walking around with this board that's big enough to be the major beam in a house. It's sticking out of his eye. And yet what he wants to do is to focus in on the tiny speck of sawdust in that other guy's eye. And all the while he is looking for this sawdust in that other guy's eye, he's moving around, bumping into things and knocking things over with this plank that is stuck in his eye. If we get the point, Jesus is saying to us that if we really are concerned about dealing with the wrong and evil in the world, the first place to look is in our own hearts. where we're sure to find something that's not right and something that doesn't measure up to God's intention for us. If we only want to look in somebody else's life for the wrong and the evil, we're showing that we're really not all that concerned about the wrong and the evil in the world because we're overlooking that wrong and the evil that's the closest to us. And that's the wrong and the evil in our own lives. I imagine we're all tempted to do something that psychologists call moral splitting. We can divide the world into the people of light and people of darkness. And we usually put ourselves into that first category, the people of light. The Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn was arrested because he had written a letter critical of Joseph Stalin. And he spent eight years in labor camps and prisons, and then he was exiled for three more years in Kazakhstan. You would think that a person who would experience such suffering, such injustice, such evil would divide the world into people of light and people of darkness with no question about who belongs in each group. But instead, Solzhenitsyn wrote, The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor classes, nor between political parties either, but right through the human heart and through all human hearts. This line shifts inside us, it oscillates through the years. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds. And it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. In the way that Jesus' teaching can often catch us off guard and disarm us, Jesus' command, do not judge becomes the command, judge yourself. Jesus wants us to look into the mirror and to shine that bright light of self-examination within us. Jesus wants us to see the way that line dividing good and evil cuts through our own hearts. Jesus wants us to have clear vision, not distorted vision to see ourselves as we really are. Jesus wants us to get the plank out of our own lives. But this deadly virtue of making judgments in a non-Jesus way is also destructive because it does more than just distort our view of ourselves. It even more distorts our view of God. It keeps us from seeing who God really is. It's actually an act of adultery. Excuse me, idolatry. Got the sermon from last week somewhere still in the brain. Idolatry, putting ourselves in the place of God. It's like we're putting ourselves on the judgment seat where only God belongs. We're climbing up there and we're taking the place of God. And we decide to make the final judgment about somebody. They're stupid. They're worthless. They're evil. They're whatever it is. We act like we have the last word about somebody's life. But this job really is God's job because God only can be the final judge. Only God knows all the facts about a person's life. Only God knows what's in a person's heart. Only God sees perfectly and is all right in his judgments. So only God can be that ultimate judge. Only God can judge our lives in an ultimate way. But you know it's still possible that we might insist on being the judge and jury of somebody. And Jesus warns us that when we do, we then end up ourselves in the courtroom. But we're not there as the judge and the jury. If we take what Jesus says seriously, we're there as the person who is on trial. And we've already set up our standard of judgment in the way that we have judged other people. Because Jesus tells us, for in the same way you judge others, you will be judged. And with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Just think of this picture. We're standing there before God at the judgment. We're going to give an account to God of the way we've lived our lives as His people. Would we be quick to say, hey God, just judge me in the way that I've judged somebody else? I'm not so sure about that. The way Jesus describes it, it's like we are traveling on the road to meet God and we come to a fork in the road and we can travel on only one of the roads. One of the roads is the road of the critical and judgmental spirit. It's the road of the superior attitude and just writing people off. It's the road of condemnation. The other road is the road of grace. It's the road of mercy. It's the road of pardon. If we travel this road of condemnation, this is where God meets us. And God says to us, You've forgotten that you need mercy yourself. You have forgotten what forgiveness is. You've shown that you have not let forgiveness sink all the way down, deep in your heart, throughout your heart. And so I'm going to give you what you have coming to you because you've been traveling on this road. And that's the judgment that you've dished out to somebody else. But if we're traveling on that road of grace, if we're looking at other people with mercy, if we know that we're just pardoned sinners ourselves, if we don't close the door on somebody else because we know the gospel of grace is for them too, then this is where God meets us, on this road. And God welcomes us home. That wise philosopher Yogi Berra once said, When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Jesus wants us to follow that road of grace on which He calls us. This deadly virtue of discernment can be really harmful to us. And it can be even more harmful to our relationship with God. But it is even harmful to the person that we're condemning. When we confront somebody in a judgmental way, when we demonize somebody, when we just dismiss somebody with condemnation, there's going to be a reaction. They may respond to us in defiance and bitterness, They may strike back in anger. They might become even more entrenched and hardened in their patterns of thinking and acting. They might just decide to shut us out and think that we're just mean people. That poet in song Taylor Swift wrote, You've pointed out my flaws again as if I don't already see them. I walk with my head down trying to block you out because I'll never impress you. I just want to feel okay again. Why you got to be so mean? When we condescendingly look down on the faults of somebody else, they may just think that we're mean. And the bigger problem is they may just think that mean is what Christian people are. There's something in common with all of these ways that somebody might react to our negative judgment and condemnation. We're leaving somebody just like they are. Jesus says that people can have specks of sawdust in their eyes. There is something in a person's life that needs to be removed so they can see clearly. And when we reach out in negative judgment and condemnation, It may just cause somebody to turn away from us. And even more, it may cause somebody to turn away from God in whose name we're speaking. And that means that something good, something that God wants to happen in a person's life, that new life may just not come to that person. Negative judgment, condemnation, they never did anybody any good. There has to be a better way, and there is a better way. It's the way of Jesus. It's the way of grace and truth. A pastor had a lawn that was weed infested, and he called lawn service to have them come out and take a look at his lawn. And they didn't want to have anything to do with it because it was in such bad shape. The man in the pastor's church volunteered to come and to dig up the old lawn and to start a new one. The pastor was just about to take the man up on his offer when he talked to a farmer that he knew and the farmer had some other advice for him. The farmer said, Don't worry so much about getting rid of the weeds. Just concentrate and focus on growing grass. And the grass would take care of the weeds. And the pastor took the farmer's advice, and he did everything he could to grow green, healthy grass, and in a couple of years His lawn looked just as good as all the other lawns in the neighborhood. This pastor had to decide what was going to be his main focus. Was he going to be concerned about killing weeds or about growing grass? And he chose to do everything he could. He gave his best time and energy to growing grass. we can spend our time and energy on trying to kill off the weeds in somebody else's life and we're probably not going to get much of anywhere. Or we can plant seeds of the good news of Jesus. And we can seek to cultivate the good news of Jesus. And we can work to see the good news of Jesus grow in somebody else's life. Just think again about Jesus' cartoon of the man with a huge plank in his eye and the man with the sawdust in his eye. The speck of sawdust and this plank didn't belong in the eyes of these men. This sawdust and this plank were foreign bodies that had gotten into the eyes of these men. These men weren't a plank and a speck of sawdust by nature. These men were people, real people who had gotten something into their eyes that didn't belong there. Jesus is saying to us that we always need to distinguish between the real person, the person God has made in His image and Jesus came to redeem. We need to distinguish between the real person and the foreign bodies, the unhealthy things, the flaws, the moral failings, the sins that have gotten into a person's life and need to be lovingly and gracefully removed so the person can experience real transformation and find God's wholeness. Jesus didn't just talk about all this. This is the way that Jesus treated people as real people. This is the way that Jesus loved people. When some religious leaders brought a woman who had been caught in adultery to Jesus, He related to this woman as a real person who really mattered to God. He didn't call her all of those hurtful names that she was used to hearing. He called her a woman. And He said to her, I don't condemn you. Now go and leave your life of sin. Jesus didn't ignore this woman's sin. He didn't tell her to go and do whatever she wanted to do. Jesus held her accountable. But Jesus didn't condemn this woman, a real person either. Jesus saw her for who she was and not just for her sin. Jesus saw her sin as a foreign body, something foreign to that way of life that God intended for her. It was just like a speck of sawdust and it could be removed. This woman could be forgiven and transformed. She could make a new beginning because of the real person within her that God loved. Jesus treated this woman the way that nobody else had ever treated her and it made all the difference in her life. We might say that Jesus in this scene demonstrated His way, which is the way of grace and truth, because this is who Jesus is, grace and truth. The Gospel of John tells us the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. That's Jesus. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Truth, let's go and leave your life of sin. Grace, that's I don't condemn you. Grace and truth, and both are necessary. Jesus' way of grace and truth is really at its core the way of God's love, that love that we see most clearly in the cross. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. The cross is evidence of the truth of God's judgment on the world's sin and evil and brokenness. But the cross is even more evidence of God's grace that brings forgiveness and transformation and wholeness. The cross is both grace and truth. And Jesus calls us to His way of living with both grace and truth. God has given us the capacity of moral discernment and exercising clean, keen moral discernment is certainly a vital Christian virtue in this world in which we're living. It's vital for us to be able to make this kind of moral discernment. That's the truth side of things. But it is indeed possible that all of our judgments can cross that line and become condemnation. And that's where we always need the grace side of things. Followers of Jesus need to be people of grace and truth. We need to be people who can say in the world with a humility that comes from being a redeemed sinner that we are, go and leave your life of sin. But we also need to be people, perhaps even more, who can say in the world, I do not condemn you. The good news is you're loved by God, who can take that speck out of your eye and let you see clearly and become whole. This is Jesus' way of grace and truth. This is Jesus' way of love. There is nothing easy about living this way of grace and truth. There's nothing easy about living this way of love, but there was nothing easy about the cross. With grace and truth because He loves us, Jesus is here to help us follow Him in His way. Would we follow? Would you pray with me? Father, we thank you for that way of grace and truth. We know so desperately that's the way that we need. So help us to experience your grace and to live out your truth. And as we live in this world, help us to be that kind of people. People who know your truth and live it. but people who most of all show your grace and love this world that you have loved in Jesus. For we pray in His name. Amen.