Sermon preached on Sunday, December 4, 2011 at Garden Valley Chapel; Matthew 7:1.

We come now to the last major section of the greatest sermon ever preached by the greatest preacher who has ever lived, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Imbedded in this last major section is a well-known passage that is often referred to and often quoted, and yet it is one that is widely misunderstood.

There is a sense in which the text is so clear that any attempt to explain it can only weaken its impact. And yet, we need to take the time to explain it because it is so vastly misunderstand.

My beloved, we need to understand our Lord�s teaching as God in Christ intended for it to be. In this sense, we need to do more than just explain it. We need to apply it. Deeply understood, our Lord�s teaching will be felt so strongly and "��hit ever so close to home"�� as it deals with something so common to life -�� CRITICISM.

Simply put, criticism is part of living, period. You cannot do anything without being criticized by someone -�� whether you are knitting a sweater, sharpening a pencil, mowing your lawn, or working on your property.

The ever-present fact is: people are by nature critical and condemning. Some, it seems, have a lust for it -�� a zeal for criticizing and condemning others, tickled with the desire to find fault in others.

A critical spirit, a judgmental, condemning spirit, is endemic to man�s nature. Calvin called it a "��disease, which appears to be natural to us all."��

This was true among the scribes and Pharisees in Jesus� day.

If you recall, much of what our Lord teaches in this great sermon is given in contrast to the hypocritical self-righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.

Our Lord says things in his sermon with the religious leaders of the day in mind -�� because of their teaching and practice.

In CHAPTER 5, he gave us the true portrait of a Kingdom Citizen, a genuine believer in the Beatitudes [e.g. their view of life was to be proud, Jesus taught that one was to be humble]. He gave us specific instructions with regard to our life in this world, being "��salt and light."�� He taught us about our relationship to the law, to a large degree due to the false teaching of the Pharisees and scribes. He taught us that the law was immutable and unchanging � that true religion was always a religion of the heart [e.g. they believed only in an external morality; Christ brought about an internal morality].

In CHAPTER 6, God in Christ discussed our religious activity, our giving, praying, and fasting � that it is never to be about pleasing ourselves or about impressing others. All that we do is to be for Him alone. He instructed us on how we are to deal against the danger of worldliness, the danger of living for the things of this life and world.

Now as we come to CHAPTER 7, the Great Preacher, the Lord Jesus will teach us concerning human relationships, our relationship with other people.

This is where we live and breathe each day, but we must not forget that our relationship to God is fundamental and central to all of life.

In the end, that which matters to us the most is not what men think of us, but what God thinks of us. Amen? Amen.

We must realize that our life here on earth is but a journey, a pilgrimage, and that it is leading on to a final judgment, an ultimate assessment, and the determination and proclamation of our final and eternal destiny.

We constantly need to be reminded because we become so �locked-in� to the here and now.

Though many of you might say and ultimately believe that one day you will face God in judgment, how many of us live moment by moment in light of such knowledge. One day we will meet our Maker.

As Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes -��

"��The thing that really differentiates God�s people from all others is that they have always been people who walk in the consciousness of their eternal destiny."

The natural man cares nothing about his eternal future. The only future for him is in this world. It is what he thinks about; what he lives for and ultimately what controls him.

We on the other, as God'��s people, should always walk through this life with the thought of God upon our hearts, upon our lips, upon our life, walking in His presence, and that one day we will meet God.

THAT, MY BELOVED, IS WHAT SHOULD DETERMINE AND CONTROL
THE WHOLE OF OUR LIVES.

We must remember that we are undergoing a process of judgment the whole time. Yet we forget. We forget and we resort to what comes natural to us: we critic and condemn others.

This is exactly what is seen with the scribes and Pharisees. They had become oppressively judgmental. They proudly looked down on everyone who was not a part of their elite system. They were unmerciful, unforgiving, unkind, and totally lacking in compassion and grace.

They were so proud and so self-styled and so self-righteous and so smug and so convinced of their own superiority that one of the natural results of that was that they became totally condemning and judgmental of everybody else.

This is what happens when you develop your own religion, when you invent some system of morality based on your own standards. You start judging everybody else by that standard. You become that person who sits on the throne of that system and judge and criticize others.

The scribes and Pharisees made their evaluations of others based on appearances, on the external and superficial.

In John 7:4 Jesus said to them -

24 "Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment."

Their habit was to judge in this manner -�� according to appearance.

In Luke 16:15 our Lord says to these "��lovers of money" -

15 ��You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts; for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.

"��You think you are something, don'��t you. You think you are right and you have all the answers, you think you are judges, but you are wrong."

In Scripture, we are given the classic illustration of this kind of self-righteous judgment. It is found in Luke 18:9ff -

9 And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt:
10 '��Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
11 '��The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: "��God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
12 '�"I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get."
13 '��But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, "��God, be merciful to me, the sinner!"�

What do you suppose the final assessment was of these two men?

14 "I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted."��

My beloved, listen carefully. Those who justify themselves, those who trust in themselves, are those who are easily the ones condemning others.

Q: Why is that?
A: They set their own standard. They elevate themselves and bring everybody else down below.

That is the Pharisees in a nutshell. They sat as condemning, critical judges of other people. This was how they related to others.

Our Lord then addresses this issue and warns against a wrong judgmental attitude toward others � a discussion that dominates the first twelve verses of this chapter.

- In verses 1-6, He tells us what not to do.
- In verses 7-12, He tells us what to do.

He first gives a negative and then a positive and the sum of these two is enough to govern all our human relations.

Our Lord sets the record straight and tells us exactly how we are to relate to others. He does not mince words. He tells us what will be our temptation with regards to one another.

Our Lord has spent considerable time condemning the religious leaders for their hypocrisy, the outward appearance of righteousness for the applause of men (cf. 6:1-18). Now He instructs us on how we, as His disciples, can fall into hypocrisy too.

Our Lord gives us three reasons why such unrighteous and unmerciful judgment is sinful: it reveals a...

1.A WRONG VIEW OF GOD (V. 1)
2.A WRONG VIEW OF OTHERS (V. 2)
3.A WRONG VIEW OF OURSELVES (VV. 3-5A)

In dealing with the opposite extreme of an unmerciful judgment, our Lord gives...

4.A RIGHT BALANCE (VV. 5B-6)

It is safe to say that we will only cover the first reason today and conclude our study into this fascinating portion of Scripture, the following Lord'��s Day.

Follow along as we begin this short series that calls upon us to "Stop Criticizing."