CCC Livestream - The Gospel Shaped Family - Matthew 7:1-6
Live Worship Gathering: 7.19.2026
Preaching: Jason Purdy
I invite you to turn to Matthew 7.
We will look at verses 1-6 this morning.
As we continue our summer sermon series: “The Gospel Shaped Family.”
We are walking through some key passages on marriage, on singleness, on parenting, and on children, as well as some passages addressing key issues that we all deal with in family life - both in our biological families and in our church family.
My prayer is that God would continue to make us and shape us by His grace and through His gospel into a godly church family that is made up of godly gospel shaped families.
One of the greatest obstacles to having healthy and God glorifying relationships with others is having a judgmental spirit.
Perhaps most of us have been in a relationship with someone who made us feel like we were never good enough, that we would never add up, that we could never get it right.
It’s a horrible feeling to be looked down upon by another person and treated as less than.
It’s a horrible feeling to be held to someone else’s standards and yet reminded that you will never be able to achieve them.
A judgmental spirit can devastate your relationships in the church family and in your biological family.
Because every person who has ever lived has felt the sting of someone’s judgmental attitude, our culture today has a very confusing relationship with judging and judgements.
On one hand, the ethic of the day has become tolerance.
We are to tolerate anything and everything and have no judgments because their should be no standard of right and wrong.
There is only how someone feels and offering them the freedom to act in accordance with their feelings.
You may expect in a culture with such an ethic of tolerance that we would see a bunch of healthy and flourishing relationships in families, in work places, and in society at large.
But, instead, we are seeing the opposite.
In the midst of a call for tolerance, we have all become sensitive to another aspect of a culture of tolerance, and that is what is known as cancel culture.
Cancel culture is the idea of the larger culture “cancelling” someone, writing them off, boycotting them, pushing them to the margin of society as soon as they are found to be out of step with a cultural ethic of tolerance.
Are you confused yet?
How could there end up being such condemnation in the midst of an ethic of tolerance?
Here’s how: no human being can escape holding to a standard.
I may be tolerant of your desires until your desire is to kill me and burn my house down. Right?
I live with an internal standard that it is wrong to kill me and burn my house down. I just do.
Call me intolerant if you must.
There must be a better way.
There must be a God-glorifying way.
There must be a gospel empowered way.
Matthew 7 is the third chapter of three in the book of Matthew that is popularly known as the Sermon on the Mount.
And the purpose of the Sermon on the Mount is for Jesus to teach his followers about the ethics of the kingdom of God.
If you have been saved from your sin through repentance and faith, then you have been saved out of the kingdom of darkness, and into the kingdom of light, which is the kingdom of God.
You have been saved into God’s church because the church is the outpost of the kingdom of God on earth.
So, now, here are the ethics of the kingdom, here are the standards of God that we abide by.
Not in order to be saved, for we are saved by grace through faith, but we abide by these by God’s grace making our hearts new to love God and others.
Would you follow along as I read our passage to us?
Matthew 7:1–6 ESV
1 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
6 “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.
1. Beware Of Being Judgmental
When I was a kid, I would have thought that the most popular Bible verse in the world was John 3:16.
But I don’t think that anymore.
I now believe the most popular Bible verse in the world is Matthew 7:1 - Judge not.
It seems to fit right into a culture of tolerance and no absolute standard.
But, just like any other verse in the Bible, we must understand it in relationship to the whole.
If I read the first half of a sentence that said, “I took all of your money.”
I would be angry, until I read the second half of the sentence with it to make it read, “I took all of your money and put it in your bank account.”
Well, what is the context of the verses right around the command, the context of the Sermon on the Mount, the gospel of Matthew, and the rest of the Bible that informs for us what it means to judge not?
We know that it cannot mean that we never discern anything wrong with anyone else or make a judgment in light of a wrong, because in the example Jesus gives for the command to “judge not,” the brother truly does have a speck in his eye that needs to be confronted and removed.
Verse 6 in our chapter tells us to look out for dogs and pigs which are words Jesus is using to warn us about certain types of people, so we are obviously supposed to make a judgment about the negative and dangerous type of people some have proven to be.
So, if judge not does not mean that we never in any case make any judgment about another person or their actions, than what in the world does it mean?
Well, in the context of the book of Matthew, the reader has already seen in chapter 3 that John the Baptist came preaching a message of repentance because the kingdom of God is at hand.
Many people were coming to John the Baptist confessing their sinfulness and being baptized, but when some Pharisees and Sadducees came to see John the Baptist, John calls them a brood of vipers.
That’s wild because the Pharisees and Sadducees were the established religious leaders of that day, so why in the world did John the Baptist call them a brood of vipers?
Well, he goes on to say:
Matthew 3:8–9 ESV
8 Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.
So, John the Baptist commands the Pharisees and Sadducees to repent of sin and not to presume that they are in a right standing with God because they are from Abraham’s blood family.
In other words, the Pharisees and Sadducees refused to confess their own sinfulness, to repent of their own sinfulness, and instead they trusted in their family line to be in the right position before God.
Being unwilling to confess one’s own sinfulness, and pursue an ongoing life of repentance, along with pointing to some external reason why you are right with God is a recipe for a judgmental spirit.
Jesus calls those who sinfully judge hypocrites in verse 5.
He has already warned in the Sermon on the Mount to not be like hypocrites who only do righteous acts if they are being seen by others in order for people to praise them.
And hypocrites only pray in the sight of others in order for other people to see them praying.
And they make their faces look gloomy when they fast to let other people know that they are fasting.
The next time we see the Pharisees is in chapter 9 where they are judging Jesus for eating with people that they judge as unrighteous tax collectors and sinners.
In chapter 11, they judged John the Baptist for not eating and drinking and said he has a demon, but they judged Jesus for eating and drinking calling him a glutton and a drunk.
In chapter 12, they judge Jesus and his disciples unrighteous by doing things on the Sabbath that they judged you are not to do.
When Jesus cast out demons, they judged that He cast out demons by demons, which was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
When the Pharisees ask Jesus to do a sign, instead he tells them to be like Nineveh and repent.
In chapter 15, they judge Jesus’ disciples for not correctly ritually washing their hands before they eat.
The sinful judgmental attitudes of the Pharisees is then clearly called out by Jesus in
Matthew 23:23–25 ESV
23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.
So, based on what we see in the gospel of Matthew, a sinful judgmental spirit is characterized by not being aware of one’s own sinfulness and so not continually confessing and repenting of sin.
It is also characterized by judging oneself to be better or right based on something outward about themselves.
And finally, it is characterized by judging the heart or motives of a person based on something external.
The gospel of John clarifies this characteristic when it says:
John 7:24 ESV
24 Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”
Sinful judgment causes us to be overly critical and looking for a wrong in someone.
Allowing the appearance of something to make a judgment about the heart of the person.
Whereas true love believes all things, meaning we are to have a posture of believing the best about one another in terms of their motives.
At the beginning of this year, we walked through Romans 14 where Paul writes about disputable matters such as food, special days, and other matters of conscience, and he commands us not to be judgmental or critical of others based on those things.
And let me just say: there are all sorts of preferences we all have, we have different personalities, we come from different cultures where how we dress and how we eat and how we… the list of how’s can go on and on, and we are tempted to judge what is different, but is not wrong.
As a baptist, I have to be honest with the fact that worshippers of Jesus in the Bible danced and drank wine.
That’s different than how I grew up. It’s not wrong.
Back to verse 1 and 2: Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
The Scripture makes clear that God is the ultimate authoritative judge.
And God’s word says that we will finally stand before God in judgment and give an account for every idle word spoken.
Listen to this quote I found in a commentary this week:
Jesus taught that a person should expect to be treated by God in a manner similar to the one in which he has treated others. If a person forgives others, he can expect to be forgiven by God. If he refuses to forgive others, he can expect God to withhold his forgiveness. If a person judges others harshly, he can expect harsh judgment from God. However, if he judges others mercifully, he can expect merciful judgment from God.
That doesn’t mean that we earn God’s mercy by being merciful to others, but it does mean that if we have genuinely experienced the mercy and grace of God in forgiveness when we deserved his wrath, how can we not also now be disposed to such mercy and grace toward others?
If you struggle with having a critical judgmental spirit toward others, would you just ask yourself: Is that the kind of spirit that you hope God has about you?
That’s where Jesus is going in this section of the sermon when he says in
Matthew 7:12 ESV
12 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
So, to overcome a critical judgmental spirit you must continually dwell on your great sinfulness and God’s great mercy to you, and then treat others in your motives, thoughts, words, and actions in the way that you would want to be treated.
I have found that I am most tempted to be judgmental in the places that I perceive myself to be strong in.
Here’s what I mean: I perceive myself to be strong in showing kindness to others.
I may be wrong, but I believe I value and pursue kindness with others not perfectly, but genuinely.
So, when I perceive that someone is not being kind to me or I see someone not being kind to someone else, I quickly and easily judge you in my heart as the worst kind of person.
Now, if I perceive that someone is being over indulgent with food and drink, I have all the compassion in the world for them because I perceive that as a weakness in myself.
Do you have a judgmental and critical spirit?
Do you make your spouse feel that they will never measure up?
Do you make your kids feel that way?
Do you speak more words of correction and reproof than you do encouragement and commendation?
That’s not the way God relates with you.
Beware of being judgmental.
2. Confess Your Own Sinfulness
Now that Jesus has commanded us against having a judgmental spirit and placed the command in the theological context as God the ultimate judge, he now gives a humorous example to us that is very instructive toward how not be a sinful judge.
Verse 3: Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?
It’s funny right.
I mean, just imagine hanging out with someone, and you have a big old tree sticking out of your face, and the other person’s eye looks a little red like it got a tiny something in it.
And imagine you with your big old tree sticking out of your face being like: hey man, you need to do something about that.
You may need to go to the doctor or something there is something wrong.
Here, let me get closer and look at that for you.
And as you try to get closer, your tree it smacking the other person in the face and you can’t get close at all.
It’s absurd!
Verse 4: Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is a log in your own eye?’
Verse 5: You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
You see, way too oftentimes, we judge our sinfulness like specks and other people’s sinfulness like big old logs.
Ask yourself: am I more aware of my own sinfulness or am I more aware of the sins of others?
Do I spend more time and energy fighting my own sin or judging the sin in others?
Am I more aware of my spouses sins and weaknesses than my own? Am I more aware of my children’s than my own?
Think about it:
In the book of 1 Timothy, Paul calls himself the chief of sinners.
Do you think Paul called himself the chief of sinners because he was a brilliant mathematician and he had created a formula that proved that he had quantitatively done more sinning than anyone else who ever lived?
No, of course not.
Paul called himself the chief of sinners not because he was sure he had sinned more than anyone else.
He called himself the chief of sinners because he was so much more aware of his great sinfulness than he was of anyone else’s.
Maybe the fact is that your spouse has quantitatively sinned against you more than you have sinned against them.
But for you, your sin is still the log and theirs is still the speck. Why?
Because an insurmountable debt of one amount does not negate an insurmountable debt of another amount.
What Jesus is teaching us through this picture is that you must always first see yourself as a sinner before you consider yourself sinned against by someone else.
This is what keeps us from sinful judgments.
We own our part first.
And be careful when you are tempted to think that you would never do the thing that that other person did.
John Owen famously said that the seed of every sin is in every heart.
That means that apart from God’s great mercy and grace toward you could and would sin every possible sin to the fullest extent given the right circumstances and opportunities.
Maybe in the midst of an argument with your spouse, you feel like they are 99% to blame and you are only one percent to blame, well then confess and own up to your 1%.
First, take the log out of your own eye.
I want you to think about this: you cannot have a right relationship with God without first confessing your sin to Him, receiving forgiveness from him, and genuinely trying by the grace of God and the power of the holy Spirit to fight against sin and live with a heart of continual repentance.
How then can you expect to have a right relationship with others if you never confess sin to them, tell them “I was wrong,” I sinned against you, please forgive me, I desire to change in this area?
I don’t mean you should be the kind of person that is so insecure that you just walk around saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry” to everyone.
But, if you never say to those in your life that you are closest to: I sinned, I was wrong, please forgive me, then you have judged yourself and others wrongly.
Confess your own sinfulness.
3. Gently Confront Others With The Goal Of Restoration
Notice, Jesus’ command is that once you first take the log out of your own eye, you can now see clearly the get the speck out of your brother’s eye.
Later on in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is going to instruct us on why and how we are to confront a brother or sister in Christ.
In Matthew 18, Jesus tells the parable of the lost sheep where when one sheep goes astray, the man leaves his 99 and goes after the one wayward sheep to bring him back into the fold.
Jesus then moves right into how we should confront one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.
So, the why behind any confrontation must be because of the heart of God to keep us close and restore us when we wander.
We have experienced the grace of God to be brought near to him, and we desire others to stay near him as well.
We can make sure we have that kind of heart motive by first making sure we are confronting for God’s glory, for the other person’s good, being first willing to confess our own sins, and then being willing to do it in the way Christ commands.
You do those things, you can now see clearly to remove the speck.
So how do you go about it?
Matthew 18:15–20 ESV
15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. 18 Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19 Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
Consider the wisdom of Jesus’ instructions.
A judgmental spirit would be happy to talk about the sins of a person to others.
A godly spirit goes to the person alone, and does not involve anyone else at first.
If he agrees with your confronting, he confesses and repents and he is reconciled with you and God.
But if not, you take one or two others, this keeps us from being judgmental, because maybe we are wrong in our judgment, and bringing one or two godly people in will help evaluate if your judgment is correct.
If he refuses even them, tell it to the church.
Why tell it to the church? Because once two or three have all affirmed the ongoing unrepentant sin of an individual and confirmed they have made a right judgment, the church will all pray and call the wayward back into the fold through confession and repentance, because that is who we are: a confessing and repenting people.
And only after the person refuses the pleas of the entire church, does the church then come to a place of judging them not a true believer, an outsider, why? Because true believers confess sin and repent due to the great mercy and grace they have received in the gospel.
Consider how many steps Jesus gives us to keep us from sinful judgment:
Believe in your heart that God is the ultimate judge, not you.
First, confess your own sinfulness to God and others.
You can now see to gently confront your brother.
If that does not succeed, bring in a few others to make sure you a rendering right judgment.
If that does not succeed, allow the whole church to know in order to ensure a right judgment.
And in the midst of all of that, you must pray and ask God to give you help, wisdom, and discernment.
Consider what Jesus will say right after the passage today:
Matthew 7:7 ESV
7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
Jesus is gracious to give us many steps to take before and during a confrontation to guard ourselves from sinful judgment.
And will you consider also that if Jesus commands you to gently confront others, you must always keep your heart open to the fact that there will be times where a brother and sister will need to confront you.
Are you ready and open to that?
Gently confront others with the goal of restoration.
4. Judge Rightly Those Who Live Wickedly
Verse 6: Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.
Now, what in the world does that mean? And why does Jesus say it here?
I believe the bottom line of what Jesus is saying is the command to not be judgmental must be understood in light of the command to not be naive.
It is the recognition of a Holy God who is the ultimate Judge yet offers mercy that breaks the power that pride and a judgmental spirit has over us.
It is the truth of God and His gospel that compel us to confess our sins to others and in humility seek to humbly restore other brothers and sisters.
It is the offer of the gospel that brings life and reconciliation between God and man and between man and man.
So, we hold that out to one another in love and humility.
But, in doing so, we need to understand that there are certain people that we are not to hold out the holy truth of the gospel and offer of reconciliation to, and that is dogs who turn to attack you, and pigs who trample what is holy underfoot.
Not having a judgmental spirit does not mean we are naive to wicked and evil people who have proven themselves to be so irreverent and so dangerous that to offer the gospel and a reconciled relationship would do nothing but bring more violence and irreverence from them.
In the ancient world, most dogs were considered dangerous because they may attack you.
And pigs were an unclean animal symbolizing irreverence.
And Jesus instructs us not to hold out what is holy to that kind of person.
In the context, holding out what is holy means offering gospel reconciliation by confessing your own sin to them, gently confronting them in their sin, calling them to repentance, and offering a right relationship to them.
Now, in no way does this mean that we are not to share the gospel with the lost, of course we are.
But, Jesus is warning us that there are some people who prove themselves unable to have peace with God or peace with you held out to them without them being so irreverent or so dangerous, that you should remove yourself from that person.
In the gospels, we see that person can be a religious Pharisee who holds you to standards that he himself does not live up to, yet there is no grace and mercy when you break the standard.
We also see that person can be a false teacher who uses the Bible and spiritual language to justify their own irreverence and violence while always condemning you.
If a spouse has proven to continually be bitterly violent and scary, you don’t need to keep apologizing to them and offering them peaceful relationship, you need to remove yourself from them and get help.
When Jesus commanded his disciples that if a community would not receive them and their message, shake the dust of your feet as a sign of judgment toward them and move on.
We see in acts that the disciples did this when crowds got violent.
This does not mean we ever give up on anyone or condemn them from our hearts.
But, it does mean there are times to pray but not pursue in that season, only if a person has proven by their words and actions a pattern of irreverent violence toward the offer of grace, mercy, and reconciliation in the gospel.
Once again, what is the next verse, verse 7, pray, ask.
If they are too dangerous to pursue, pray fro them, ask for them, leave it in the hands of God the ultimate judge and the only one who can remove the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.
It is a miserable existance to live with a judgmental spirit.
It is a miserable experience to live in a home or a church with those who have judgmental spirits.
It is also dangerous to live in a church or home with those who trample under offers of the gospel and reconcilitation and respond with violence.
The hope, healing, and change is found in God, our ultimate God, who while we were sinners deserving condemnation, sent His son Jesus to take on the judgment of sin that we deserved onto himself, though he never sinned.
He had neither a log or a speck, but was willing to be nailed to a tree and crowned with a splintered crown in order to take the full weight of our condemnation onto himself so that we could be forgiven and reconciled to God.
And when we believe in this gospel through repentance and faith, God gives us a new heart to learn to love Him and love others.
He doesn’t give us all the same culture, and the same conscience, so we believe all things, and we don’t judge one another for every difference.
We stay more focused on fighting our own sin than we do looking for sin in others.
We live a life of confession and repentance.
We gently confront when necessary.
And we pray and trust God alone when someone proves to be irreverent and dangerous.
Do you personally know Jesus?
Do you need to repent of a judgmental spirit?
Let’s pray.
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