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May 24, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show

22:06

Ep. 36 - Stop Telling People To Stop Judging

We are often told that it is wrong to "judge." It is even said that the Bible warns against "judging." Both of these claims are false. We should judge. It is good to judge. As long as we judge rightly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Welcome to the CarCast, everyone.
	You've probably noticed that the word judgmental is used quite a bit these days.
	There are people who can't seem to walk out of their house in the morning without finding judgment all around them.
	Everywhere they go, they're telling people, stop judging!
	You're judging! You're being judgmental!
	Stop judging! Judgmental!
	Judgmental! And the terms self-righteous and holier-than-thou are also quite popular or generally are used interchangeably with judgmental and judging and self-righteous, holier-than-thou, you know.
	Now, it is possible to be judgmental and self-righteous, and it is bad to be those things, but the problem is that a lot of people seem to find judgment and self-righteousness everywhere they turn.
	And they paint a picture of American society as this place that's filled with puritanical, straight-laced prudes who are holding everyone else to this really high moral standard.
	As if that's the great problem in our society, right, is the high moral standard that we're all being held to.
	Of course, the truth is exactly the opposite of that.
	There's basically no moral standard.
	The moral standard for most people is, you know, whatever people like to do is good.
	If people like to do it, then it's good and it's right and it's okay.
	That's the moral standard that most people operate by.
	But you say that that's wrong, but wait, these people like doing it.
	So it must be okay. What are you talking about?
	How could it be wrong if people enjoy doing it?
	So no, I don't think that moral standards is that unrealistic moral expectations are our problem.
	But let's start with, what does it actually mean to be truly judgmental and self-righteous?
	What does that mean? Well, a truly judgmental and self-righteous person is somebody without humility, who doesn't see their own flaws and their own weaknesses, And who will tend to put themselves forward as an example of moral perfection.
	That's what a judgmental, self-righteous person will do.
	They judge unfairly, they judge wrongly, they judge with the wrong heart, and they consider themselves to be the paragon of moral virtue and perfection.
	Now, in other words, a judgmental self-righteous person, that's someone who feels superior to other people.
	And we all do have a little bit or maybe a lot of that in us.
	We have some element of that in us.
	We all struggle with that to a certain degree.
	That's called pride. That's part of pride, and pride is the starting point of all sin, and we all have pride in us.
	So we all have, to some degree or another, we all have these kinds of feelings of superiority sometimes.
	But I think for most people, their feelings of superiority are more implicit than explicit.
	In other words, I think most people don't actually literally think to themselves, oh, I'm better than other people.
	I don't think most people think that exactly.
	It's more like an implicit subconscious assumption that they make.
	And they really have to examine their own conscience.
	That's what we have to do. We have to do an examination of conscience to find that within ourselves and then purge it and repent of it.
	But I mean, I could be wrong.
	I just don't think The average person, when they're walking by another person on the sidewalk or they're standing in the supermarket checkout line with someone, the average person isn't going to look at someone else and think, I am better than that person.
	They may sort of think that, but it's buried deep within themselves.
	I think here's an example of a more explicit self-righteousness and a more explicit example of being judgmental that you'll find in your everyday life.
	Gossip. You know, gossip is a self-righteous, judgmental thing most of the time.
	Because the whole point of gossip, what makes it gossip, is that you're all sitting around talking about these negative things about someone else who's not part of the conversation, and you're taking some sick pleasure in discussing the negative aspects of another person's life or personality.
	And why do you find pleasure?
	And you find pleasure in it because it makes you feel better.
	Really gossipy people, the people that are really gossipy, the reason they're gossiping all the time is because it keeps inflating their own ego and their own sense of self-worth that they find in dwelling and delighting in other people's flaws.
	But I think most of the time, that's not really what's meant when people say self-righteous and judgmental.
	They're not talking about gossiping.
	Usually, in common usage, when someone accuses you of being judgmental, what they really mean, nine times out of ten, what they really mean is, you have made me feel uncomfortable about myself because of a certain moral stand you have taken or a criticism you have offered.
	Nine times out of ten, that's what they mean.
	They're calling you judgmental because you made them feel uncomfortable.
	And that's why nowadays it's basically impossible to have any kind of moral discussion or debate at all without being called self-righteous and judgmental because it's going to make people feel uncomfortable.
	It's going to make people look at themselves.
	So anytime you say, this is right, that is wrong, anytime you do that, In the minds of a lot of people, you're automatically being judgmental and self-righteous because everyone who does the wrong thing is now going to feel bad about themselves.
	And because they feel bad about themselves, you're being judgmental.
	And the only way to not be judgmental and to not be self-righteous is to never make anyone feel bad about their life choices.
	I have certainly found anecdotally That this comes up quite a bit.
	It won't surprise you to learn that I get these accusations a lot.
	And I'm sure that there have been plenty of times when I have been self-righteous and judgmental.
	I'm sure I have been guilty of that.
	But I also know that it doesn't really matter how I frame it.
	Talking about speaking specifically about my writing for a minute.
	If I'm writing something Where I'm distinguishing right from wrong, and I'm saying, that's wrong, we shouldn't do that.
	If I call anything immoral whatsoever, I will be accused of being judgmental and self-righteous, no matter how I say it, no matter how I frame it.
	And I know people say, well, it's because of how, it's not what you say, it's how you say.
	No, actually, no, that's not what it is.
	Because it doesn't matter how I say it.
	It really honestly doesn't.
	I could be talking about something and saying, oh, this is wrong over here.
	And I could use myself as an example of the wrong thing.
	And I tried to be very careful about that.
	If I'm talking about a wrong thing, a wrong action, if I'm going to use any specific person by name as an example of the wrong activity, When applicable, I try to use myself.
	So one example is, you know, I talk a lot about our obsession with TV and internet and, you know, all these things.
	And we live our lives revolved around the screens.
	And that's wrong. We shouldn't live that way.
	But anytime I'm talking about that, I always make sure to say, I struggle with this myself.
	I have struggled with this.
	I still struggle with it. It's a struggle for me.
	And I use myself as an example.
	And I try to communicate that, like, this is one of the reasons why, you know, this is how I know what effect this has on people's lives.
	I've been through it. I have experienced it.
	But what I found is it doesn't matter.
	You can use yourself as an example.
	You could make it explicitly clear that you don't think you're better than anyone.
	You're not superior.
	You know that you're not. You're down in the mud with everyone else struggling and sinning and trying to scrape your way through.
	You could make that as clear as possible.
	It doesn't matter.
	You'll still be called judgmental because if they pick up on the scent of judgment, any kind of judgment, even self-judgment, They will call you judgmental.
	I mean, I have written things, I've written articles where the entire thing is about my own flaws.
	I wrote an article, for instance, literally the title of it was, I am Judas, okay?
	And the entire article was about my own sin.
	And you want to know something?
	I was called judgmental and self-righteous for that.
	So there are things sometimes where you just kind of have to throw up your hands and say, all right, oh, I don't know.
	I don't know what I could do now.
	Then if even that's judgmental, well, I don't know.
	But this isn't just me, by the way.
	Of course, I'm not, you know, I... I'm not the only one who's experienced this, of course.
	So many times, I can't tell you how many times I've gotten emails.
	It's almost a daily occurrence, if not multiple times a day, where I get emails from people confiding in me that they would like to be more outspoken, they would like to make a moral stand, but they're deathly afraid of being called self-righteous and judgmental.
	And I understand. I get it.
	You don't want to be written off as judgmental and self-righteous.
	And so people a lot of times will just avoid the conversation.
	What will happen for me often is I'll get an email from someone and they'll tell me about some particular thing that's happening around them with their friends or in their families, some wrong thing that's happening.
	And they want to take a stand and say, no, we shouldn't be doing this or this shouldn't be happening.
	But they don't. They're afraid to because they don't want to be written off as being judgmental.
	And they realize that, you know, no matter how they say it, they're going to be called judgmental.
	Because if they're offering a criticism that makes people feel bad about themselves, well, then the accusation will come.
	But of course, this is all ridiculous.
	A person is not automatically judgmental just because they've discerned right from wrong.
	When a guy says, this is wrong and this is right, that doesn't mean he's claiming to be perfect.
	Unless he does claim to be perfect, in which case, fine, write him off.
	If someone's approaching it that way and they're saying, I'm never wrong and I'm perfect, listen to me.
	If that's how they're approaching it, then yeah, they don't deserve to be listened to.
	But if someone is simply saying, this is wrong and this is right, it doesn't mean they're making any claims about themselves.
	It doesn't even necessarily mean that they're claiming to never do the wrong thing.
	It's just that they're observing something.
	They're making a moral observation, which they're perfectly entitled to do, and which they should do.
	It's like if a person says, a triangle has three sides.
	It doesn't mean that they're claiming to be a geometry expert.
	It doesn't mean that they're claiming that every time they draw a triangle, it's perfectly straight and everything.
	No, that's not what they're claiming.
	They're not making any claims about their own expertise with shapes and triangles.
	They're just observing something that is true.
	And if we happen to live in a society where everybody rejects the definition of a triangle, then it behooves anyone who recognizes the actual definition of a triangle to stand up and say it, even if they're normally really bad at geometry.
	Still, they should stand up and say it.
	Now, we happen to live in a society where a lot of people are very confused about basic questions of morality.
	A lot of people, in fact, reject that objective morality exists.
	And so those of us who recognize objective morality and who understand, at least on a basic level, right from wrong, we all have a duty and a responsibility to stand up and say it, no matter if we are dirty, terrible, awful sinners ourselves.
	That's irrelevant. We would be even greater sinners if we stayed silent.
	We have to stand up and say it.
	It's a responsibility.
	It is not automatically judgmental or self-righteous.
	Not everyone who distinguishes between right and wrong is claiming to be a saint.
	It could be that someone who does that, they realize that they're a sinner, They know that they're a sinner, they acknowledge their own sin, and therefore they take sin personally and they hate it all the more because they have dealt with it and felt its effects.
	Now, contrary to popular belief, the Bible does not actually forbid judging.
	And that's what you'll hear, right? You'll hear, well, you shouldn't—you call yourself a Christian, but you're running around judging.
	The Bible says don't judge.
	The Bible says it right there.
	Stop judging. Yeah, you know what?
	The Bible says stop—if you are, like— Looking with, if you've got these blinders on where you can only see two words at a time in the Bible, then yeah, you could find the phrase, stop judging.
	And then you could take that phrase and remove it from its entire context and say, oh, the Bible says stop judging, right?
	You see, those words appear in the Bible.
	There you go, see? But of course, if you're approaching the Bible that way, the Bible will say anything you want it to say.
	If you're approaching it basically like a word search or something, where you can—as long as you find the words or the letters in the Bible somewhere, and you can arrange them in whatever way and remove them for their context, well, in that case, then the Bible can justify anything you want it to justify.
	But the Bible does not actually, taken in context, Jesus is not telling us as a blanket statement not to judge.
	What he's warning against is judging wrongly.
	He's warning against judgments that are made wrongly and with the wrong heart.
	He's also warning us that even if you judge rightly, even if you make a right judgment, because in John 7, 24, Jesus says, Don't judge by appearance, but judge with right judgment.
	So it's not even just that Jesus is saying, you can judge.
	He's saying, judge with right judgment.
	He's commanding us to judge.
	You should judge, but do it rightly with right judgment.
	But he also tells us, When he talks about how the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you, what he's saying is, if you hold people to a certain standard, even if it's the right standard, even if you're doing it correctly, you better hold yourself to the same standard.
	You better hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold everyone else.
	So if you have this very clear moral sense, and you're very intolerant of sin and wickedness, which is a good way to be, that's how we should be, But you better apply it to yourself.
	And so if you're very hard on other people and not interested in hearing excuses, which again, there's not necessarily anything wrong with being that way, you better be twice as hard on yourself.
	And you better be dismissing your own excuses right away.
	This is also what Jesus gets at in the verse...
	The other verse that's tossed around by the don't judge camp is the verse where Jesus discusses the speck in our brother's eye.
	And the way that this is paraphrased and kind of boiled down most of the time, we've distilled it down to what Jesus is saying is, never worry about your brother's speck because you have a bigger speck.
	Or your brother has a speck, you have a log, so never worry about the speck.
	That's not what Jesus is saying.
	Let's look at the actual verse.
	He 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's a plank in your own eye?
	You hypocrite. First, take the plank out of your own eye, and then—so there's a two-part process here—first step, take the plank out of your own eye.
	Second step, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
	Somehow that last part of the last sentence is left out when people talk about this verse.
	The whole and then part is completely removed.
	But we can't remove that.
	Because what Jesus is saying is, yeah, absolutely help your brother with his speck.
	Don't just leave him there to languish with the speck in his eye.
	Help him with the speck.
	But you can't do that until you worry about the sin in your own life.
	And if there is this big sin or any kind of sin in your life that you are refusing to confront, then you're going to be blinded by that and you won't be able to help anyone else.
	So worry about yourself first and your own sin.
	Judge yourself, your own sin, and then you can help other people in their walk.
	Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
	There better be some fear and trembling when you look at your own sin.
	You should hate your own sin.
	You should detest it.
	You should be disgusted by it.
	You will not be able to help anyone else in their walk and in their faith if you don't have that attitude about your own sin.
	We talk about hate the sin, love the sinner, which is, I think, you know, there's a deep truth to that phrase.
	But what Jesus is telling us is, you better apply that to yourself.
	You better hate your own sin, too, and hate it most of all, because it's a sin that you're guilty of and you're responsible for.
	So, be humble, in other words.
	I mean, we could really boil it down to that.
	Be humble. Don't think too highly of yourself.
	Know that you're a sinner, that you have sinned, that your sins are disgusting and terrible and awful and dark and hideous, and go to war against your own sin.
	Repent of it. And if you're going to stand for what is right in the world, which you should, you better apply it to yourself.
	But if you're doing that, and if that's how you really approach things, then go out and speak the truth and stand for what's right.
	And you can be confident that you're doing it righteously, not self-righteously, because you're not putting yourself forward as the standard for righteousness.
	That's what it means to be self-righteous by definition.
	It is to put yourself forward as the standard for righteousness.
	But if you're looking to God as the standard, and you're holding everyone, including yourself, to that standard, then you're not being self-righteous, and you're not being judgmental.
	If you're saying to people, look at me, do what I am doing, that's self-righteous.
	But if you're saying to everyone, let's all look up there and follow Him, and I'm in the same camp as you, I have to look up there too, let's all look up there, that's not self-righteous.
	That is not judgmental.
	That is correct. That is right.
	That is righteous. And if you approach it that way, and people still refuse to listen, and they still throw around judgmental and self-righteous and all these words, it's only because they don't want to see their own imperfections.
	That's the great irony here, is that they accuse you of thinking you're perfect when really they are the ones who think they are perfect.
	They are the self-righteous ones because they have positioned themselves, not God, as the standard of righteousness.
	They are saying, this is right because it's what I do.
	That is self-righteous.
	That is self-righteous, perfectly illustrated and exemplified, is the person who insists that whatever they do must be right.
	Because they're doing it.
	That is arrogance. That is pride.
	That is self-righteousness.
	That's what that is.
	It turns out, in the end, that most of the time, the people who go around accusing everyone else of being self-righteous, they are the self-righteous ones because they refuse to even consider that they may be doing the wrong thing.
	They won't even consider it.
	That's self-righteousness. So we should pray for them, and we should pray for their own awakening and continue to work on ourselves with fear and trembling, and also continue to stand for what's right and what's true.
	And if we know that we're approaching it the right way and doing it the right way and with the right heart, we don't have to worry about the accusations and the insults when they come.
	Thanks for watching.

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