Our Savior Lynchburg
Trinity 4 AD 2024
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We like to compare ourselves with our neighbors and this especially happens regarding sin. Well Pete started it. She did something worse to me because we know that deep down that it's better to be the one without sin and so if I can remove my sin or excuse it then I cannot be judged guilty or responsible. I can go free. We even try this before God. We presume that God judges one's faith or lack of faith on a sliding scale and we think that if we point out someone else's worse sin then then God will want to accept us. But this is just a sneaky way of making my brother bear my sin so that he gets God's judgment instead of me. It's a sort of reverse kind of idolatry. I make my sinful brother into my scapegoat and saviour something that he's not equipped to do and Jesus is entirely removed. Putting my sins on my brother will never win my salvation to try to do that is just pride. I can also make the opposite error with my brother's sins though. I can refrain from judging them out of a false piety because I'm afraid to speak up. Afraid I might be called closed-minded or bigoted or prideful that I've forgotten that God's word makes the judgment not me. Or what about when I know that calling out my neighbor's sin will invite conflict? Isn't it better to just keep the peace? Do I really want the hassle and heartache of dealing with this problem? But maybe you want to just want to think about things a little differently. Maybe you just want to think about your brother's sins as just a little spak in his eye. It's just a little sin. How harmful can a tiny spak be so you don't say anything about it? And in this way you begin to think little of not just your neighbor's sins but all sin. So if all my neighbor's sins are spaks then why not mine too? All sins are little, right? But when sin is ignored like a dirty spak in your eye it will faster. It will bring infection and theologically those little, unconfessed and ignored sins often invite greater ones. Ultimately ignoring sin brings eternal death. So we need to acknowledge that everyone is a sinner. This is what Christians preach but that idea taken by itself can go wrong too. If everyone's a sinner then what right do you have to call out my sin? Or in the language of today's text, judge not. These I think are the words from the Bible that our culture most loves. Of all that Jesus says and teaches this is the most understood and misapplied. The world doesn't need Jesus to explain what judge not means. Its meaning is evidence. Don't correct me. Don't call my behavior wrong or bad. Don't make distinctions. Don't rebuke. Don't exhort. Don't tell me I can't do what I want. Judge not summarizes the chief American virtue tolerance. You aren't supposed to care about what people do when the privacy of their own home. You aren't supposed to say that the morality you learn in the Bible is better than the morality your neighbor has by nature in his own heart. You aren't allowed to condemn their sin. You must accept a firm, a proof. The world has made this doctrine of judge not their gospel. It is their good news by which you gain freedom and liberty. This doctrine is kind of American but it is not Christian. Excusing the world's sin is not the gospel. Now this can get misapplied in another way. I can think that if my sins are always planks and that my neighbor's sins are always specks, then I will always have the greater sin. And this excuses me from having to address what my brother is doing wrong. If I can simply point to my own sin as greater, well then I never have standing to address him. Now it might sound like humility but it's not. And so to understand how this goes wrong we need a few terms. Original sin, concupisense, and actual sin. Now all these are actually sinful and worthy of God's judgment, but we need to make a distinction between them. So original sin is the sin that you have inherited from your father Adam. In holy baptism, original sin is forgiven and its guilt is removed. Concupisense is just a big word that means the desire to sin. This desire to sin remains in us even as Christians and is to daily die in the remembrance of our baptism. And yet this desire to sin is actually sin. And then there are actual sins, the things that you do that are sinful, your thoughts, your words, your deeds. And so the confusion about logs and specs comes if I say that sinful desires are planks and sinful actions are specs. So in this way of thinking, concupisense, the desire to sin is a plank. So it will and always by definition be a bigger sin than the so-called "spack" of my brother's actual sins. So my desire to lie then appears as a greater sin than my brother's actual lies. So that means I'm only ever authorized to speak about my own sin, and I'm never able to help my neighbor with the speck that is in his eye. This way of thinking is a backdoor attack on the Ten Commandments because it means until I totally defeat my sinful desire to be unchaste. Well then I can't speak about my neighbor's unchastity. Until I have no more hate in my heart, I cannot admonish my brother for his anger. Until I have no more desire to lie, I cannot correct my neighbor's falsehoods. And so we have a category error, a confusion of desires and actual sins. Now you're probably wondering why I'm making such a big deal about this, and I think in one way we want to understand that this is how the world weaponizes Jesus's words. They say that you have greater sin than I do, so deal with your own sin, and once you're perfect then you can come talk to me. But there's also a danger that we and the church would use the same kind of argument. And there's actually a recent example of this in our own synod. Last year our synod published a copy of Luther's Large Catechism that was bound with a series of essays and contemporary applications. And one of those essays made this category error about logs and specs. Now I will mention that I heavily edited the quote for our younger listeners, but you can get the point. Though some of us are burdened with lost, more often they are the spec in our neighbor's eye rather than the log in our own. Do you hear the switch? The comparison is between our evil desires and the actions of our neighbors. My desires are called a log. My neighbor's actions are called a spec. Now the reason I bring this up is that we need to acknowledge that we're not immune to misusing this passage of scripture about logs and specs. And we need to beware of those who would misapply it. As we live in this sinful world, it's easy to fall into the wrong kind of judgment or to avoid it altogether. We could even go even further and remove all distinction between logs and specs and say that all sins are equal. Well it is true that every sin is worthy of God's wrath forever in hell. Some sins truly are worse. Some sins hurt our neighbor more than others. Some sins hurt ourselves more than others. And we see this especially in how we give different consequences to different sins. So we hear Jesus say "judge not" and we take those words and we run in all sorts of directions. But these words of Jesus can only be understood within their context by faith and with the gospel. In context, Jesus is addressing the Pharisees. They are especially concerned with outward spiritual conduct, especially how other people live their lives. And so Jesus is correcting the Pharisees false teaching and belief. And this becomes clear with the parable that Jesus tells. He says first you must remove the log from your own eye and then you will be able to remove the spec from your brother's eye. It's not about never calling out sin or excusing it or lumping it all together or a way to get out of judging your neighbor's sins. But rather it's an order of operations. First you address your own sins. Then you address the sins of others. But the sinful nature wants to do it the other way around. The sinful nature wants to first and most loudly address the sins of others. And then if there's still time and effort left I might take a peek at my own heart and life. Now our Lord's word choice also tells us that he's directing his words toward Christians. He uses words like your father and your brother. So this passage isn't mainly about how the world is supposed to treat people or even how the how Christians are supposed to treat the world. But it's mainly about how Christians treat each other. Now we also know that judge not is not a blanket exemption from all kinds of judging. Jesus expects Christians to judge. We see this elsewhere when Jesus says to discern and to beware of false teachers. And judging also appears in this text. How else are you to discern that there is a plank in your eye or a speck in your brother's eye unless you make judgments? So this text is about making the right kind of judgments. Judging for the right purpose. It is about judging sin. Now regarding sin there are different ways that we could judge. We could judge with the approach that we want to condemn. To judge for the sake of judging and rendering sentence. Or we can judge with the goal of removing that sin. Now it goes wrong when when we simply try to ignore that sin. But the right use is judgment that seeks to forgive. To remove that sin from your brother. You see both judging judging of all kinds calls out sin. And judges at evil and bad. But the goal of each of these kinds is different. Judgment that seeks to condemn puts the other person down in order to raise yourself up. It only has the goal of showing that you are right and the other person is wrong. It's dawned in a spirit of arrogance. Instead we are to address sin for the purpose of repentance and faith. We want sins exposed not so that we can mock them. But so they get so that they can be forgiven and covered with the shed blood of Christ. So no matter how we characterize sin we must remember what God says about it. You are going to escape God's judgment by condemning others. Nor can you escape God's judgment by excusing others or excusing yourself. Excuse making is not forgiveness. That's why Saint Peter says that judgment is to begin with the house of God. The only way you will be able to judge with right judgment is to first be judged by God. It is truly easier to see the sins of others than to see my own. But your sin and your forgiveness comes first. And then you are equipped to perform spiritual eye surgery. The only way to escape God's judgment is to see that Christ has born God's judgment against you upon the cross. He bears the condemnation you have rightly deserved. You're not going to get out of your sins by pointing out the sins of others. The only way to get rid of them is to trust that Jesus has taken them away in his death. That in your baptism all your sins were washed away. That in the word of absolution you are declared forgiven and absolved that the body and blood of Jesus are given to you to forgive your sins. And with your sins addressed and forgiven you can speak the truth in love to your brother. You can call him to repentant just as God has called you to repent. Because Jesus has died for all and he wants everyone to know this, especially your brother in the Lord's church. In this way you receive the forgiveness of your sins not only for your own benefit as though it's your own private gift. But for the benefit of your neighbor whom you also call to repentance. So call one another to repentance as God has called you to repentance. Call your neighbor to repentance by God's authority and not your own. Call the whole world to repentance because the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin. According to God's word call our culture and our public figures to repent. Call them all to repentance to forsake their sins, to trust in Christ, to trust in the God who made them and loves them and shed his blood to redeem them. Now it might seem scary to go and confront your brother with his sins. But having your sins forgiven and knowing God's judgment of you gives you the courage to do this because you have God's word on your side. Perhaps you are tempted that when you see your neighbor's sin to look with contempt on it. But when you have known the pain of sin yourself, when you have experienced the shame that such sin brings. And when you know the comfort of the forgiveness of your sin from a merciful Father, then your heart also will break at the need of others for this forgiveness. You will look upon your neighbor's sin primarily with pity rather than anger. Ignoring their sin is not charity. Delitting your neighbor's back will not help him. To not call out sin. To leave someone with the spak in his eye is to say that you want that spak to get infected and to make him completely blind. To lead him to fall into the pit of despair where he is judged eternally according to God's righteous judgment. So we correct sin and we call to repentance because it is the most loving and merciful thing to do. Call your neighbor to repentance both for his sake and for the sake of those he is sinning against. And when you have done so, point him also to God's forgiveness. One by the blood shed on the cross. For you know that it is the absolution in Jesus name which gives the strength to amend a sinful life. But remember always that your repentance comes first. That's why when we gather as a congregation that that's our first order of business, the forgiveness of our sins. That's why our service begins with each one of you confessing before Almighty God that you have sinned by your own fault. That you rightly deserve God's temporal and eternal punishment. You don't ignore sins as though they are not important or just because everyone has them. You plead before God for forgiveness not because your neighbors sins are worse but because Christ Jesus has suffered in your place. You don't gain your forgiveness. Jesus does. By the word of absolution, delivering you the benefits of Jesus's death. Having received your father's mercy, you can now be merciful as your father is merciful. You can confront and address your neighbors sin because you know what it's like. You know how humiliating it is to be wrong, to have to admit out loud what you have done. You can encourage your brother. I know how stubborn and full of despair the sinful heart is because I have won too. I know where to find hope and forgiveness and peace and joy and in this way your Lord bids others to receive his mercy through you. We pray in the words of the hymn we just sang. Keep me from saying words that later need recalling. Guard me last idle speech may from my lips be falling but when within my place I must and ought to speak and to my words give grace lest I offend the weak. Lord let me win my foe with kindly words and actions and let me find good friends for counsel and correction. Help me as you have taught to love both great and small and buy your spirits might to live in peace with all in the holy name of Jesus. The peace of God keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.