Why Jesus Warned Believers Against Judging Others
🌿 Why Jesus Warned Believers Against Judging Others
“Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.” — Matthew 7:1-2 (NLT)
Why must we be careful about judging others? Because the verdict you hand down today is the measuring stick heaven will use on you tomorrow. Jesus did not whisper this warning. He placed it at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, and the believers who ignore it are often the ones who feel most certain they are right.
On this page
- What Jesus actually said about judging
- When religious activity becomes a throne
- Peter and Cornelius: God was already at work
- The woman, the stones, and the Judge who looked deeper
- Your neighbour is not only someone who shares your faith
- When the judging is aimed at you
- Stop defending what God has not confirmed
- Three who judged wrongly and one who judged nothing
- Practical application: how to stop judging
- Prayer
⚖️ What Jesus Actually Said About Judging
Read the two verses again slowly. “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged.” Then the reason follows at once: “For you will be treated as you treat others.” Jesus attached a consequence to the habit. He did not say judging is merely unattractive. He said it is a boomerang. The standard you set for other people becomes the standard that is set for you.
That should make every one of us pause. Most of us are far more generous with ourselves than we are with the people around us. We explain our own failures by pointing to pressure, tiredness and bad timing. We explain other people’s failures by pointing to their character. If God were to apply our own scale to us, using the same harshness we use on others, how many of us would stand?
Jesus went on to close the loophole of the person who thinks they are only “helping”:
“And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.” — Matthew 7:3-5 (NLT)
Notice that the word He used for the judge is hypocrite. The problem is not that a speck exists. The problem is a person who cannot see his own log, and who has appointed himself inspector over everyone else’s eyes.
Prophet TB Joshua taught the same restraint in six words:
“Judge not, so that you will not be judged. We should talk to people to be saved and not to die.” — Prophet TB Joshua
The purpose of speaking to a person is to help them live, not to pronounce them dead. Judgment sentences. Mercy speaks life. There is a vast difference between the two, and the church has often confused them.
🏛️ When Religious Activity Becomes a Throne
Many believers have quietly taken a seat they were never given. They have decided that anyone who does not agree with their belief system is wrong, and they have decided it from a position of supposed superiority. Ask them why, and the answer rarely comes from Scripture. It comes from their religious record: I attend church. I pray. I fast. I pay my tithes and offerings.
Every one of those things is good. None of them is a throne. The moment a spiritual discipline becomes a platform from which we look down on others, it has stopped being worship and become a badge. We begin to see ourselves as more pious than the person who opposes us, and we react to opposition from that place of imagined righteousness rather than from the love of Christ.
Prophet TB Joshua cut straight through this:
“The Lord is not so much interested in how many times you go to church, pray and fast a day, how much Christian service you render, how much tithe and offering you pay in the church, the titles and names you bear, as the number of people whose lives you have affected.” — Prophet TB Joshua
Read the list again. Church attendance. Prayer. Fasting. Service. Tithes. Titles and names. Everything we use to measure ourselves is on that list, and the Lord says He is not so much interested in them. What He looks for is the effect your life has had on other people. Have the people around you been lifted, healed, forgiven, fed and encouraged? Or have they been judged, ranked and dismissed?
Religion is very good at producing people who are right. Christ is concerned with producing people who are like Him. The two are not the same, and Jesus reserved His sharpest words not for sinners but for those who were certain of their own righteousness.
🪖 Peter and Cornelius: God Was Already at Work
Even Peter held these misconceptions. He was one of the three closest to Jesus, he had seen the resurrection, and he had preached at Pentecost. Yet he still carried a settled belief that Gentiles stood outside the reach of God. It took a direct confrontation from the Lord in Acts 10 to expose it.
Peter had no idea that, in a coastal city called Caesarea, a man was already living a life that pleased God. His name was Cornelius, a Roman army officer, a Gentile, and an outsider by every standard Peter had inherited. Yet Scripture describes him this way:
“He was a devout, God-fearing man, as was everyone in his household. He gave generously to the poor and prayed regularly to God.” — Acts 10:2 (NLT)
Two qualities stand out in that description: he prayed regularly, and he gave to the poor. He was not a Jew, he was not part of the synagogue, and nobody in Jerusalem knew his name. But heaven knew it. An angel told him, “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God” (Acts 10:4, NLT).
Connect that to the quote we just read. The Lord looks at how many lives you have affected. Cornelius gave to the poor and prayed for others, and God counted those things as righteousness. He made Cornelius suitable to receive the Holy Spirit while he was still outside the fold Peter would have approved of.
When Peter finally walked into that house, his first words were a confession:
“You know it is against our laws for a Jewish man to enter a Gentile home like this or to associate with you. But God has shown me that I should no longer think of anyone as impure or unclean.” — Acts 10:28 (NLT)
And a few verses later:
“I see very clearly that God shows no favoritism. In every nation he accepts those who fear him and do what is right.” — Acts 10:34-35 (NLT)
Peter had to unlearn a lifetime of judgment in a single afternoon. The Lord had to confront him because Peter could not have reached that conclusion on his own.
Why this matters for the rest of the Gentile world
Paul wrote about the very same reversal in his letter to the Romans:
“What does all this mean? Even though the Gentiles were not trying to follow God’s standards, they were made right with God. And it was by faith that this took place. But the people of Israel, who tried so hard to get right with God by keeping the law, never succeeded. Why not? Because they were trying to get right with God by keeping the law instead of by trusting in him. They stumbled over the great rock in their path. God warned them of this in the Scriptures when he said, ‘I am placing a stone in Jerusalem that makes people stumble, a rock that makes them fall. But anyone who trusts in him will never be disgraced.’” — Romans 9:30-33 (NLT)
Read the irony. The people who worked hardest at religion missed it, and the people who were not even trying to follow the standard were made right through faith. The stone that made the religious stumble was Christ Himself, because He refused to fit their system.
That is a sobering word for anyone who has made a rulebook out of their faith. Paul goes on to the foundation of it all in his letter to the Ephesians:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.” — Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV)
So that no one can boast. If salvation is a gift, then nobody has the right to stand over another person with a ledger. There are many unlikely people who will be made right with God by faith, and some of them look nothing like us. We are not the ones who decide who qualifies. That authority was never delegated to us.
🪨 The Woman, the Stones, and the Judge Who Looked Deeper
Think about the day the so-called pious people brought a woman to Jesus. The scene in John 8 is one of the clearest pictures of judgment in the Bible, and it is easy to miss what is really happening.
“Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” — John 8:4-5 (NLT)
Look at the argument. They were not inventing a charge. The woman was guilty, and the law of Moses did call for her death. By every measure of their religion, condemnation and instant judgment were the right response. They stood with stones in their hands and Scripture in their mouths, convinced that they were defending God.
Then Jesus did something nobody expected. He knelt, wrote on the ground, and then stood and spoke a single sentence:
“All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” — John 8:7 (NLT)
One by one, beginning with the oldest, they walked away. And Jesus turned to the woman:
“Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?” … “Neither do I,” Jesus said. “Go and sin no more.” — John 8:10-11 (NLT)
Pause on what happened there. The crowd judged her by the weight of her sin, using the law. Jesus judged the same situation and arrived at a different verdict, mercy with a charge to change. He did not excuse the sin. He said, go and sin no more. But He did not begin with a stone.
That is the hinge of this whole message. The fact that a person is wrong by our standards does not mean the case is closed in God’s eyes. His eyes of mercy may see, and judge, very differently from ours. Prophet TB Joshua explained why our own verdicts so often miss:
“When you base your judgement only on what is seen, heard and on what the circumstances look like, you have not looked deep enough to the heart.” — Prophet TB Joshua
The Pharisees looked at the evidence. Jesus looked at the heart. Samuel learned the same lesson when God corrected him over Jesse’s sons: “People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, NLT). If the Lord says that about people He knows perfectly, what makes us think we can finish the case from the outside?
🏫 When the Judging Is Aimed at You
I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this. As a young high school student I attended The Synagogue, Church Of All Nations (SCOAN), in the years before Emmanuel TV carried the ministry into millions of homes. Many of my classmates would gather in circles and condemn the church. My attendance at what they called a “satanic” church was incredible to them. It was clear to them that I had been brainwashed.
Yet they could not explain one thing. My character was impeccable, and I was at the top of my class. They had decided that nothing good could come from SCOAN, and the evidence in front of them said otherwise. They kept the verdict and ignored the evidence.
That experience taught me something about the way people judge. A verdict that was formed before the investigation will not change because of the facts. This is exactly what happened to Nathanael when he was first told about Jesus: “Nazareth! Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46). The judgment came from where the person lived, not from what he had actually seen.
If you are being judged right now by people who have never walked in your shoes, take comfort. Prophet TB Joshua said:
“Being misjudged is the last stage before supernatural promotion.” — Prophet TB Joshua
Misjudgment is not the end of the story. Joseph was misjudged by his brothers and falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife. David was misjudged by his own brother Eliab. Jesus was misjudged by the religious leaders of His day. Each one of them was exalted later by God.
Incredible things happen beyond our religious standards
And here is the lesson for the person doing the judging. God warned us plainly that He does not think the way we do:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” — Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV)
God works beyond our categories. He can reach a Roman soldier, a woman caught in sin, a tax collector, a Samaritan and a young man sitting in a school yard who was told he was in the wrong church. Any time we say “God cannot be in that,” we are measuring Him by a standard He just told us He does not fit.
🛑 Stop Defending What God Has Not Confirmed
There is one more thing that must be said, and it is uncomfortable for many of us. We must stop defending our pastors and leaders when they are clearly wrong by their own utterances.
Many people judge and condemn others today because their pastors judged and condemned them first. They repeat what they were told from the pulpit without testing it, and in doing so they wrong the people they condemn and they wrong God. Think back to the crowd with stones in John 8. They were in joint agreement, standing shoulder to shoulder, and every one of them was convinced that they were right. They were all wrong.
Unity around a mistake is still a mistake. Agreement does not make a verdict true. Paul commended the believers at Berea because they did not simply swallow what they heard, even from an apostle. They listened eagerly, then “searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth” (Acts 17:11, NLT). Respect for your leaders is right, but it never replaces examining what you are told in the light of God’s Word.
Prophet TB Joshua gave a short instruction that every follower should take seriously:
“Be sure that those in whom you trust are led by God each day.” — Prophet TB Joshua
Note the emphasis on these two phrases: “Be sure” and “each day.”
Be sure means certainty is your responsibility. It is not enough to assume, to inherit a loyalty or to follow the loudest voice. Each day means what you believed yesterday must still agree with God’s Word today, because a leader’s track record does not guarantee today’s utterance. Testing is not rebellion. John wrote, “Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God” (1 John 4:1, NLT).
And the standard for the test is steady, because God’s Word is steady:
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” — Hebrews 13:8 (NLT)
If what a person teaches today is out of line with what Christ has already revealed, then it does not matter how loved or gifted that person is. Check it against the unchanging Word. You are not judging a person when you compare a statement with Scripture. You are being faithful to the One who does not change.
🪞 Three Who Judged Wrongly and One Who Judged Nothing
Scripture gives us a gallery of people who learned what Jesus meant in Matthew 7. Let us look at them.
Jonah: Angry that God was merciful
God sent Jonah to Nineveh, and Jonah ran, not because he feared the city but because he knew God’s character. When Nineveh repented and God relented, Jonah was furious. “I knew that you are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love” (Jonah 4:2, NLT). Jonah had already decided that Nineveh deserved destruction. God asked him a question at the end of the book that Jonah never answered: should I not care about this great city?
Job’s friends: Sure they understood
Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar sat with Job and told him the reason for his suffering. They were certain. They had a theology that said the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer, so Job must have sinned. At the end, God spoke to them with fire:
“I am angry with you and your two friends, for you have not spoken accurately about me, as my servant Job has.” — Job 42:7 (NLT)
Their theology was tidy, and it was wrong. They judged a righteous man from the outside and misrepresented God while doing it.
The Pharisee at the temple
Jesus told one parable specifically for “some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else” (Luke 18:9, NLT). A Pharisee stood and thanked God that he was not like other people, listing his fasting and giving. A tax collector stood at a distance and could not lift his eyes.
“‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’ I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God.” — Luke 18:13-14 (NLT)
Look at what the Pharisee used to judge: the same list Prophet TB Joshua named, fasting and giving. And the tax collector went home right with God without a single religious credential.
Jesus: The only one with the right to judge
And then there is Jesus. He alone was without sin, and He alone had every right to throw the first stone. Yet He knelt in the dust and said, “Neither do I.” James states the logic of it:
“God alone, who made the law, is the Judge. He alone has the power to save or to destroy. So what right do you have to condemn your neighbor?” — James 4:12 (NLT)
And again: “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13, NLT). The One who had the only right to condemn chose to forgive, and then told the woman to change. That is the model.
✅ Practical Application: How to Stop Judging
It is not enough to agree with this teaching. We need to practise it. Here is how.
- Check your own log first. Before you say anything about another person’s life, ask honestly what is in your own. Matthew 7:5 puts self-examination before correction.
- Replace the verdict with a question. Instead of “How could they do that?”, ask “What might God be doing here that I cannot see?” Questions leave room for mercy.
- Measure by fruit and lives, not by affiliation. Prophet TB Joshua said the Lord is interested in the number of lives you have affected. Look at what a person’s life produces before you judge the label attached to it.
- Speak to people so they may live. If correction is genuinely needed, offer it privately, humbly and with the intention of restoring, not of winning an argument.
- Do not carry your pastor’s grudges. If you were taught to condemn a person or a group, test it against the Word. Do not hand on a verdict you never examined.
- Pray for the people you disagree with. Cornelius’ prayers reached heaven. Your prayers for someone you are tempted to judge may reach a depth that your opinion never could.
- Remember your own rescue. Ephesians 2:8-9 says salvation is a gift so that no one can boast. The same grace that reached you can reach the person you are judging.
- Keep a daily check. Be sure, each day, that what you believe and whom you follow agrees with the unchanging Word (Hebrews 13:8).
To keep the contrast clear, here is a simple comparison:
| Judging others | Walking in mercy |
|---|---|
| Looks at the outward evidence | Looks for the heart, as God does |
| Measures people by religious performance | Measures life by the lives it has helped |
| Asks, “How soon can they be condemned?” | Asks, “How can they be saved?” |
| Defends a leader’s utterance automatically | Tests every teaching by the unchanging Word |
| Forgets its own sin | Remembers it was rescued by grace |
| Closes the door on outsiders | Leaves room for God to surprise us |
Ask yourself which column describes how you have spoken this week. If it is the first column, the answer is not shame. It is repentance, and then mercy.
Remember where we began. “The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.” None of us can afford a harsh scale. We will all be standing, one day, in front of the One who knelt in the dust and said, “Neither do I.” Let us become people who offer to others what we are hoping to receive.
🙏 Prayer
Father, thank You for Your mercy that reached me when I did not deserve it. Forgive me for every stone I have picked up, every person I have written off, and every time I used my religious record as a throne. Open my eyes to see people the way You see them. Teach me to examine my own life before I examine anyone else’s, and give me the courage to test every teaching by Your unchanging Word. Make me a person whose life lifts others, like Cornelius, and not one who condemns them. Lord, let me be quick to show mercy, so that I may receive mercy in the day I stand before You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Good Morning 🌄 and PROSPER ✨ today!
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