04/26/2026
04.26 | The Voice 16.17 | Judging Righteous Judgment
As Christians, we are called to living lives of faith, putting our trust in Jesus as Lord, seeking to follow His patterns and ways to His glory and honor (John 14:6, Hebrews 2:10-18, etc.). At one point, Jesus strongly encouraged the Jewish people who were listening to Him to use their powers of discernment to judge righteous judgment based on the situation they had seen in John 7:24.
Yes, Jesus did also warn people regarding judgment in Matthew 7:1-4: judge not lest ye be judged by the same standard. Throughout Matthew 7:1-4, Jesus’ concern remains primarily about our tendency to want to judge other people, especially how we judge other people by what they do but ourselves by the standard of what we intend. God has never given any of us the authority to determine anyone’s standing before Him: we all will stand before the judgment seat of Jesus, and we do best when we allow Him to fulfill that role and be the Lord and Judge of all, and not ourselves (Romans 14:10-12, James 4:11-12). Christians are liberated from the drive or need to judge other people in order to love and encourage them as Jesus would have them do. But determining how we should live and how we should glorify God in Christ through the Spirit is not at all the same thing as judging other people. The righteous judgment we do well to judge involves how to manage life in its manifold difficulties.
We can see how this works in terms of matters of sin. We can all think of many different thoughts, feelings, and behaviors which are clearly sinful and contrary to God’s purposes, and they have come under explicit censure in passages like Galatians 5:19-21: we can think of things like adultery, greed, murder, outbursts of anger, abuse, etc. Yet there are other matters regarding which most will admit present difficulties, but the Bible does not explicitly spell out whether it is to be considered sin or no. When it comes to these matters, there are some who approach some matters of sin not explicitly revealed in the Scriptures as if it were explicitly revealed in the Scriptures, and there are others who approach matters of sin not explicitly revealed in the Scriptures as somehow less sin or matters concerning which we have no right to condemn as sin.
It can be tempting to fall into the trap of a strict “legalism,” either attempting to add additional laws and commandments to the Scriptures, or argue anything not explicitly condemned in Scripture cannot be condemned. Yet we do well to consider Paul in Galatians 5:18-24: while in the midst of elaborating upon the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit, Paul identified “things like these” among the “works of the flesh.” To this end, Paul did not intend for us to understand him as presenting an exhaustive list of all possible sins. Others might be imagined. “Drawing lines” is entirely against the point here.
Human beings like their legalism and their lines. Legalism allows for rationalization of things which go against the intended spirit of a discipline. Lines mean that it can be known just how far one can go before getting in trouble. How often do human beings “ride the line”, so to speak, in their actions and behaviors? Everyone knows that there could be circumstances beyond our control (or within our control) that will lead us to cross the line, but that still does not make us think that we should stop doing so. In such circumstances, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the failure.
As long as we look at these matters in strict terms of line drawing we will not get to that which Paul intends. As Christians we are called upon to make judgments, and to make righteous judgments based upon the witness of the Scriptures regarding what God has done in Christ through the Spirit (cf. Hebrews 5:14). Paul provided a very clear means by which we can ascertain what is right from what is wrong: the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:18-24).
If something correlates to “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, [or] orgies,” we are to avoid them. We have crucified these desires with Christ.
If the thought, feeling, or action engenders “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,” then it is well and good for us so we might better exemplify the fruit of the Spirit.
These examples, and many more in Scripture, empower us to judge righteous judgment. We can identify a given thought, feeling, or practice, and consider it in light of this witness. We can determine whether we can glorify God in Christ in such matters or not.
This is all part of the great and eternal wisdom of God displayed in Christ and revealed in Scripture. Despite what we may have desired, God did not present all revelation in some kind of disembodied, timeless form. God communicated in and through specific people in specific times and contexts: Israel in the ancient Near East; in God in Christ in the province of Judea in the days of Tiberius Caesar; throughout the ancient Mediterranean world of the first century. We do not live in those contexts; we live in the twenty-first century in all kinds of places with differing thought processes and customs.
God did not abandon us to hopeless shoulder shrugging about how to approach life in these different contexts. Instead, He has given us the witness of Scripture and the presence of His Spirit. We can discern from Scripture who God is in Christ; we can turn and view our culture to see how we can best speak a word of life regarding the life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return of Jesus into it. We can try to bring the life of the Kingdom established through all God accomplished in Christ to bear in our time and place. There will be many points of continuity between how Christians today and Christians who have gone on before us would think, feel, and act; the Gospel does not change. But what we must emphasize and what might be brought to bear on what best reflects Jesus versus what accords with the works of the flesh will vary to some degree or another across different places and cultures at the same temporal moment, let alone across time.
Such is why we must be wary of the impulse to impose our determinations about custom upon all Christians at all times. This endeavor has not gone well for Christianity in general, and is not a little responsible for the great variety displayed among various beliefs across the spectrum of “Christendom” writ large. We may think we are just accepting as righteous what is righteousness, and calling out sinfulness as sin. And, to some degree or another, we probably are. Yet we are just as likely to also tell on ourselves regarding our socio-cultural prior values in the process.
To this end, each and every generation of Christians is called upon to judge righteous judgment. We are called to affirm and promote the good news of the life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. We are called to display the fruit of the Spirit and resist the works of the flesh. We are equipped by means of the Spirit and the Scriptures to discern good from evil and to glorify God in our context. We are invited to best determine how we can bring the good news of Jesus to bear in the world in which we are living today. We need to be ready and willing to forthrightly call out matters of sin and transgression even though they may have a lot of cultural popularity today or represent part of the heritage we have inherited from our ancestors. And we must likewise be prepared to commend what is good and right, well displaying the fruit of the Spirit, even if it may come from surprising sources. God remains at work in His creation, and Jesus remains Lord as much today as He was two thousand years ago. May we seek to glorify and honor God in Christ in all things so we might share in the resurrection of life!
Ethan R. Longhenry
