Matthew 7:1-6, “Let God be God”, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Matthew chapter 7 verses 1 to 6, hear the word of the Lord. Judge not that you be not judged for with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged and with a measure you use it will be measured to you.

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? 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?

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.

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.

May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his Holy Word. Flannery O 'Connor was my favorite fiction writer, partly because she was an excellent writer, partly because she was a

Southerner from Georgia, and she wrote about Southern culture and religion. Also, she was religious, a traditional

Catholic, and so a critic of modernity. That's the modern culture. She wrote a wonderful short story entitled

Parker's Back. It begins, Parker's wife was sitting on the front porch floor, snapping beans.

Parker was sitting on the step some distance away, watching her sullenly. She was plain, plain.

The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion, and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two ice picks.

Parker understood why he had married her. He couldn't have got her any other way, but he couldn't understand why he stayed with her now.

She was pregnant, and pregnant women were not his favorite kind. Nevertheless, he stayed as if she had him conjured.

He was puzzled and ashamed of himself. Parker's wife, Sarah Ruth, was the daughter of what

Flannery O 'Connor calls a straight gospel preacher, but from a family so strict that they believed even the churches were idolatrous.

So Parker and Sarah Ruth were married by a lady clerk at the county office who led the vows, quote, from behind the iron grill of a stand -up desk, and when she finished, she said with a flourish, $3 .50

until death do you part, and yanked some forms out of a machine. Sarah Ruth is always sniffing up sin.

Since, she did not smoke or dip, drink whiskey, use bad language, or paint her face. All Parker heard at home was

Sarah Ruth reminding him of what the judgment seat of God would be like for him if he didn't soon change his ways.

He tried to subdue her by suggesting that his woman boss was after him, telling Sarah Ruth that his woman boss had once told him,

I hired you for your brains, leaving out the part where she added at the end, so why don't you use them?

That wasn't working on Sarah Ruth. Anyway, every time she would just respond that he was tempting sin and that he would have to answer at the judgment seat of God.

Miserable with her, we wonder why in the world did he marry her in the first place? Until we learned that Parker's mother, in an attempt to save him from a life of increasing drinking and carousing and fighting, tried to drag him to a revival meeting so he'd get saved, and he didn't think he needed saving from anything, so he lied about his age in order to get into the

Navy and away from his mother. In the Navy, he adds tattoo after tattoo, and he gets out finally and goes back to the country and meets

Sarah Ruth. From the beginning, she condemned his many tattoos, which she criticized for being, quote, vanity of vanities.

He eventually gets in in his head, out of desperation, to get a tattoo that he is convinced she will like, an image of God, of Jesus.

Looking at the samples of the tattoo artist has, Parker chooses a stern, otherworld -looking

Christ in Byzantine iconic style with eerie all -seeing eyes to cover his entire back

The tattoo is so elaborate, it takes two days to put it on, and once it's done, he finally makes his way back home convinced that finally

Sarah Ruth will love it, that image of Christ, and so love him.

But when he shows her the tattoo, she at first says, It ain't nobody I know.

Then he explains, It's Christ. It's God. And to that, Sarah Ruth screamed,

Idolatry! Inflaming yourself with idols under every green tree. I could put up with lies and vanity, but I don't want no idolater in this house.

And she grabbed a broom and began to thrash him across the shoulders with it. He being too stunned to resist, just took it until she nearly knocked him senseless, beating the tattoo, causing welts and bleeding to form on the face of the tattooed

Christ. And the story ends. She stamped the broom two or three times on the floor and went to the window and shook it out to get the taint of him off it.

Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan tree and her eyes hardened still more.

There he was, leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.

Sarah Ruth had gotten it into her head that to be a Christian was to be the judge.

And so in the end, she beats Christ, the image on her husband's back, not intended to be an idol, but a gift to her of something that he thought, in his ignorance, that she would love.

But she doesn't know Christ or love. And so she beats him, both

Parker and Christ. A lot of people have got the idea that to be a Christian is to sniff up sin like a hound dog sniffs a scent, track it down, intent on finding where sin is, and then digging it out, dragging it up.

Even if they can't get others to be right before God, they'll so frighten and intimidate them by their denouncing them that they'll get them to at least look right, at least behave right, at least in front of them, not realizing that that's not really their job.

God does not call us to be judges. He can do that well enough without our help.

Here in this passage, we see that Jesus tells us to leave God's job up to God.

Let God be God. Often those who like to talk about the most, about the final judgment, like Sarah Ruth, are those who forget who the final judge is.

It's not them. It's not that judgment is wrong. It's just not your job.

I've only seen a trial once. I've been in court, official court, a legal court, seen a real trial once, but the one time

I did see a trial, I witnessed a judge interrupt someone who was offering a conclusion, who was coming to the judgment, and the judge said, that's for me to decide.

Judges do not like being told what the conclusion is. They don't like other people in the court doing the judging for them.

They want the lawyers and the witnesses to give the evidence, to cite the law, lay out the facts, and leave the final judgment up to them.

Judges are jealous of their judging, and God, as the ultimate judge, is the same way.

Our judging usurps the role of God. To be a critical fault finder, coming to conclusions, coming to condemnations about the final destiny of people, is to presume arrogantly what the day of judgment will reveal.

That my judgment is as good as God's. Basically, that I am God, is to usurp the prerogative of the divine judge.

It is, in fact, to try to play God. So what Jesus is telling us here is to stop playing God, and let

God be God. Now, does this mean we are simply to close a blind eye to the faults of others, to pretend we don't see sin, even if when it's being committed right in front of us?

No, that's not what he means. This is a favorite verse in our day, Matthew chapter 7, verse 1,

Judge not. Some have said that we've gone from most people's favorite verse about a generation ago, being John 3, 16, to now being

Matthew chapter 7, verse 1, and now it's used to cover for any sin, to fend off criticism really for anything.

If anyone dares to object to our sin, we just shoot back, Judge not. A popular Christian musician gets in a new affair, divorces his wife, so he can marry his lover, and what will almost automatically be the first verse someone quotes to anyone who dares criticize that person, says that he's in sin,

Judge not. And if Angelus, like Jimmy Swagger, remember him, is caught with a prostitute twice, guess what?

Instead of holding him accountable, we're supposed to say, Judge not. No matter what someone does these days, along will come someone to tell us, you know,

Judge not. Who are you? But that's a misuse of this command.

When God has judged something, we can tell people what God's judgment already is. Now, first, we know that that's not what

Jesus intended from this very passage, from these six verses. In verse 1, we're not supposed to judge, right?

Judge not. But in verses 2 to 5, we're told to know what is a speck and what is a log.

Those verses make no sense if you don't know the difference between the speck and a log. In verse 6, the

Lord Jesus tells us not to give holy things to dogs. Don't cast your pearls to the pigs.

Well, you're gonna have to judge who is a dog and who's a pig, aren't you, to obey that? He wasn't talking about keeping our jewelry away from the livestock, okay?

That's not what he means. The pigs or the dogs in that passage are our kinds of people. How do you know who they are?

In verse 15, later this chapter, we're commanded to beware of false prophets. And we're told we will know them by their fruit.

That means we're supposed to discern what kinds of fruit. We've got to be able to tell the difference. What's good fruit?

What's bad fruit? What kind of fruit are they producing? Jesus forbids judging here, but requires discernment.

There's a difference between judging and discerning. We're supposed to discern the difference between specks and planks.

What's good fruit and bad fruit? Are they a dog or a pig or a false prophet? You have to be able to tell the difference.

We should know that adultery is bad. Okay, that's a law. Someone has it. They're doing that. And so when someone commits it, that is bad fruit.

We say that. We're not judging. We're just repeating God's judgment. We should know what good biblical doctrine is, at least the essentials of the faith, so that if someone comes to our door, you know, they knock and there they are.

They have tracts. They've got a translation of the Bible. It's kind of weird. They say that Jesus is not really

God. Jesus is just the first created being, the first one created, or they maybe say that, okay,

Jesus is God, but he was once a man and now he evolved to be God. And you can do the same thing, that we can evolve to become like God.

We should know that when someone teaches things like that, that's false doctrine. You should be able to discern that.

There's nothing wrong with saying point blank that that's wrong. That's false doctrine. That's bad. After all, in order to obey the command not to cast pearls to pigs and watch out for false prophets, we must be able to recognize, to discern, a pig, a dog, a false prophet.

And in order to do that, we must exercise discernment. Now, one of our goals in Sunday schooling for this sermon is so that you will grow in discernment, to be able to just say, judge not, every time someone says something is wrong, is therefore wrong.

That makes what Jesus says here in verses at least two to six, makes it empty. How are you supposed to obey it?

It's really a cop -out. Okay, that's what people are often saying when they use judge not. They're using often as a cop -out, a way to avoid our responsibilities that I have to think and discern biblically.

We can discern between good and bad actions and teachings. We can be fruit inspectors.

But to do that, we need to be able to see clearly the difference between the things the Bible condemns and the things we just don't like.

It just kind of grates us the wrong way. It irritates us. We need to know the difference between our opinions and God's word.

In the early 90s, there grew up a custom that I absolutely hated. It just irritated me, rubbed me the wrong way at the time, and I thought it was sure a sign of something ominous.

People who did this were bad. It was a custom that some saw as a sure sign of gang activity, of crime, of degeneracy.

Los Angeles Police Department Chief Daryl Gates said that this custom should make anyone who practiced it, you just see someone with this, a criminal suspect.

I guess the police are supposed to pull him over, investigate, search him if he had this.

I wanted it cracked down on. I wanted it obliterated from the face of the earth. It was that horrible custom.

You all know what I'm talking about. Wearing your baseball cap backwards. Really? Wear your baseball cap backwards.

Can you believe it? Now, what was that for? Is it to keep the sun off your neck so you don't become a redneck?

What did you do that for? It's the bill that's supposed to go over your eyes. You don't put it over your neck. It's just horrible. But as much as I disliked it, that's just me and Daryl Gates.

There's no scripture that tells guys not to wear their caps backwards. And I don't have a right just to make one up.

It's because I don't like it. God wrote scripture. Not me.

I don't get to rewrite it to fit my taste. And this goes for all kinds of issues.

Like guys wearing earrings. I mean, I don't get that. Anyone wearing rings, other than they're on their earlobes or their fingers.

Okay, our studs are like, what are you doing that for? To me, that's weird. It's just beyond me.

And I'm kind of, I'm actually kind of with Sarah Ruth on the tattoos. Sorry, I'm not going to mention who might have tattoos here.

But I'm kind of with her on the tattoos. Jeans with tears intentionally put in them. I know.

I don't get that. Why do you do that for? Hair dyed in colors that aren't natural.

Okay, that's just why you blue hair. Okay, that's kind of weird. Sagging pants. It just strikes me as the most impractical and frankly, it's just dumb to me.

And on and on I could go. Maybe your music is it to my liking. Everyone knows it's got to be only be

Christian music. And only old -timey, not just any Christian music, only old -timey gospel music with banjos, no drums.

Drums are demonic, don't you know? Are they? I guess. That's my, some people's feeling. We actually had some guy come in here once.

And then left. He just saw the setup. Said we got drums. And we played that pagan, worldly, fleshly music.

Or maybe I can really be snobbish and insist that any intelligent, cultured person educated, cultivated person listens to JS Bach.

Not to that atrocious folk stuff. And on and on judging not just things but people.

And not really for, but all for doing or teaching something that's against God's word.

But that's only contrary to my taste because I don't like it. Therefore, it must be sinful.

But guess what? You know, I'm not God and neither are you. So a violation of our taste is not a violation necessarily of God's will.

My taste can be violated all the time. And it still not be a sin. Because I'm not

God. That's news to you. And you cannot find one scripture to condemn any of those things that I mentioned.

So that being the case, we cannot say, you mustn't do that. Or judge you for it.

You're carnal because you did that. You're sin because you did that. You're worldly because of that. No, that's wrong.

I'm the one that's sinning now. If you do that, if you dress like that, you are a sinner. No, we can't say that. We don't have that right.

We are not to judge. We don't get to say what is a sin and what is not. That is

God's job. Our job is to let God be God. We're not to judge because judging usurps

God's place. When we try to take God's place, He will judge us for that. Right?

That's what He says. Judge not lest you be judged. And with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged by God.

The implication there, God's going to judge you for trying to take His place. With the measurement you use,

God will measure to you. God's going to do it back to you. If we try to take

God's place by judging, God will judge us for that. If we went around like Sarah Ruth, sniffing out sin from everyone, then

God will sniff out sin on us. Only He'll do it perfectly. He knows where it all is.

Of course, some will say, well, then I'd rather not judge at all. That's the case. So I'll get judged back.

Just turn a blind eye. That way I don't have to worry about falling into the sin of judgmentalism. But you would then fail to see who are the dogs, who are the pigs, what are the specks, what are the logs.

You fail to see and discern who are the false prophets. The commandment to judge not is not a requirement to just turn a blind eye, to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous, to give to others the benefit of the doubt, to understand that others might not understand why their behavior could be so sinful.

Like Sarah Ruth didn't. She totally refused to sympathize with her husband Parker. So maybe she was technically right that that icon of Christ could be an idol.

Some would use it that way. In fact, that's what often those are used for. In one way, I kind of agree with her that the image of Parker's back can be an idol.

Icons are often idols, but Parker didn't see it that way. That's not what he intended. In the story, he got the tattoo because he really wanted to please her.

He really did love her. And she with her ice pick eyes totally devoid of love in the name of Christ beat

Christ. If she were a real person, even though she speaks of the judgment of God on other people all the time, she would face a judgment measured out to her as severe as the beating she let loose on Parker's back.

There are three reasons not to judge here. Usurpation, condemnation, and obliteration.

First, it's usurpation, which we've just looked at. To judge is to take it unto ourselves the right to designate something as right or wrong or to condemn someone as guilty or not guilty that God has not said was wrong or is not guilty or not guilty.

It's to take God's place. It's the usurpation of God's role. Now, I might wish the

Bible said thou shall not wear your baseball cap backwards, but it doesn't. So, whatever.

You can if you want, and I don't have a right to imagine that it does. Second, to judge here is to pronounce condemnation on people.

It's to come to the final conclusion about people, as though we're wise enough to understand what the verdict on this person will be at the final judgment.

We have in logic what's called a syllogism. It begins with a major premise, which is a sweeping principle, then a minor premise about a specific thing or person, then a conclusion.

So if we said, you know, all boys love baseball, that's a major premise. Not true, but whatever, let's pretend it is.

All boys love baseball. That's a major premise. Then there's a minor premise. Joe is a boy. Okay, the conclusion is simple, right?

Therefore, Joe loves baseball. The conclusion is foregone. So sometimes we, like Sarah Ruth, think that we have the conclusion to make it when it comes to people and to sin and their final destiny.

So when it comes to matters of sin, we can say that the Bible says all liars go to hell.

The Bible says that in Revelation chapter 21 verse 8, chapter 22 verse 14, that outside of God's kingdom are everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

So all liars go to hell is a major premise. Now, perhaps then we know of someone who lies and is unrepentant,

Mr. X. So we can say Mr. X is a liar. That's minor premise.

Now the conclusion should seem automatic, shouldn't it? Let's put it together. It's easy.

It's as easy as Joe loves baseball, right? Isn't it? We think we can pronounce, now based on that, condemnation.

But we don't have the right to draw that conclusion. We could say, you know,

Mr. X, you know, all liars go to hell and you're a liar. Even then we're probably starting to sound a lot like Sarah Ruth, aren't we?

But we shouldn't cross the line to the conclusion. Therefore, condemnation.

That's for the judge. That's for God alone. We are to let

God be God. We let God finish that syllogism and pronounce condemnation because we may find that although Mr.

X is a liar now and all liars go to hell, that God the judge has placed all of Mr. X's lies on Christ on the cross, that the father punished the son as if he were

Mr. X, the liar. And he took Christ's perfect truth -telling and attributed it to Mr.

X. Mr. X doesn't know it yet. He hasn't experienced it yet. That's why he keeps lying.

But if the father has done that, then Mr. X will experience the Holy Spirit's convicting, give him a new heart that repents and believes, makes him aware of his sin.

He confesses his sin. He's acquitted of a sin. He's empowered then. He has the Holy Spirit in his life.

He's empowered then to live differently. And he stops lying. He will no longer be a liar.

And if we had judged him and finished that syllogism, and then that man we concluded, we condemned wrongly was going to hell.

He is now our brother. Third, obliteration.

Judgmentalism obliterates Christian community. Beginning in verse 3. Why do you see the speck and then your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?

Notice the way they're relating here. There's a community. There's brothers, there's sisters. They're seeing each other's eyes.

The judge usurping God's position is quick to notice the little problems with everyone else. The speck. Judgmentalism creates a culture of suspicion where you suspect the worst of your brothers and sisters.

You know, they're up to no good. I know they are. And that obliterates community. Who wants to be in a community where they're constantly suspected?

And maybe the speck is real. The judgmental person sees the speck in his brother's eye.

Notice he's a brother again. There's supposed to be a community there, a Christian family. And that speck may really be there.

The judgmental person might actually be right. But he's a log protruding out of his own eye. It's a ridiculous picture, isn't it?

But it gets to a spiritual point. It's a ridiculous picture because it's really ridiculous to go around being a speck inspector with a log in your eye.

You have a major issue in your life and you're dealing with minor issues in other people's lives. So the log keeps him from being able to see clearly.

And Jesus tells him in verse 5, take the log out of your own eye first. Do that first before you can help get the specks out of other people.

Speck inspectors need to have their logs removed first. So for all his love of judging, they love to judge.

They love to find specks. They love to go through your life finding little problems. He actually lacks the ability to discern accurately.

He's the last person you want poking around in your eye or in your life. The irony is that the judgmental person is the least able to remove specks.

He may most want to do it, but he's the least able to do it. Sarah Ruth was so judgmental.

She even separated herself from all the churches seeing them as all as idolatrous. They all had failed.

She could go to everyone and find some error and she knew you couldn't be a part of them. So she had no Christian community.

Her attitude had obliterated it. Now, although she's a fictional person, there's a lot of Sarah Ruths out there in this culture.

It gives people a thrill here often to sit back and declare that this person is in sin or that preacher is a heretic or that church or that denomination is apostate and we need to separate from them.

Some people just love that kind of thing. And sometimes that is necessary. There are heretics we need to denounce and expose.

There are apostate churches and denominations we need to separate from. But be careful that you don't become a speck inspector with a log in your eye.

Totally unqualified to practice discernment. Just this past summer, a so -called discernment book trying to discern and finding errors in all kinds of people, a discernment book entitled

Shepherds for Sale reached the number 12 spot on the New York Times bestseller list. It criticized several prominent evangelical teachers claiming that they had sold out to leftist politics.

They were for sale. They had been bought off to spout political things. It was speck inspecting.

Sarah Ruth would have loved it. This is Sarah Ruth's kind of book. But I know one of the people the author was finding specks in and I knew that the author, she, a female author, was wrong.

Several other people listed long lists of factual errors she had made. Must be finding errors in other people.

She made a lot of mistakes herself. She, like Sarah Ruth, had a log in her own eye and so wasn't able to be a good speck inspector.

Even though her major point is some Christian leaders give in to the pressure to support bad causes.

Yeah, that's true. She should get the same judgment she meted out to others, which was harsh.

But notice at the end of verse 5, we really do have a duty to help our brothers and sisters take the specks out of their eye.

So you don't read this to say, well, you know, the speck inspector, this guy with a log in his eye is trying to take a speck.

He shouldn't even be doing that. No, Jesus says, no, you can do that. You can help take specks out of eyes.

But first take the log out of your own eye and then, and there's the purpose, then you will be able to see clearly to take speck out of your brother's eye.

We exist to help each other take specks out of each other's eyes. But if we're judgmental, we can't do that.

And you want it done delicately, right? You ever had anyone take a speck or something out of your eye? You want that very, you want someone with a good touch and you want it, who's very gentle.

You don't want someone like Sarah Ruth with a broom that's going to thrash you. If we're judgmental, we can't do that.

You don't want a judgmental person poking around in your life. First of all, the sin of judgmentalism is the log in their eye.

And with that, nobody's going to want our help. Want the judgmental person's help in removing specks.

Who wants a Sarah Ruth meddling in your life? Do you want someone like Sarah Ruth giving you advice? Would you feel comfortable going to Sarah Ruth for counseling?

Really? No, nobody does. Judgmentalism is poison to the church because it elevates, it elevates ourselves, my, my feelings, my, my opinions as individuals over everyone else.

So it cuts me off from everyone else. I am the final judge. And so I sit in judgment over everyone and I separate myself from everyone who's different from me.

Like Sarah Ruth with her ice pick eyes peering out with her eyes hardened all the more to the people she had just beat.

It plays into our fatal tendency to exaggerate the faults of others and minimize the gravity of our own.

It cuts us off from our brothers and sisters in Christ. So obliterating community. Because we assume, a judgmental person assumes that others' faults, their errors, their sins, that's typical of who they are.

That's who they are. They're like that. Well, our faults, well, that's exceptional.

It's not, that wasn't me. Sure, I said that. I made that false accusation. I was angry, but that wasn't really me.

I just got carried away at the time. They get angry because they have a temper problem. I get angry because I was provoked.

I was having a bad day. That's not really me. At the beginning of verse 5, the

Lord Jesus calls such people, speaking directly to them and to us, hypocrites. Again, they're actors.

They're acting like something they are not, like actors on stage, pretending to be a role of a kind of person they're not really.

They're trying to pretend like they have it all together. They're trying to pretend like they are log and speck free.

But they really have this huge beam protruding from their eye. And then they walk around acting like it's not there.

The cure then is to first take the log out of our eye. It's not as many imagine today for us all just to ignore logs and specks.

Let's just pretend none of us have any logs or specks. No. To be completely undiscerning, never critical, never willing to approach someone about their sin.

We need to be as critical of ourselves as we often are of others and to be as generous to others as we always are to ourselves.

We need to realize that sometimes others fail because they were provoked. They were having a bad day.

And then often our sin isn't an exception. It's who we really are.

That's the way we are. That's our true selves. And so we ask others to help us.

Please help with this log I have or with a speck I have. We admit we need their help.

So this demands of us authenticity, community, openness, and awareness of, you know, our own feelings and our willingness to trust each other that once we put our mask away, they won't judgmentally reject us.

But we'll realize that you've got your specks. I've got mine.

And Christ paid for them all. We let God be God and each other be used by him to do some delicate spectotomies.

Finally, we let God be God by not judging who will and must accept the gospel, the holy things.

In verse 6, we are not to give dogs holy things. No pearls for pigs.

Now both these animals, dogs and pigs, were considered unclean by the Jews. There was an audience Jesus was talking to here.

The dogs aren't the well -groomed pets we have today. We think of dogs, okay, we give them good baths, we let them stay inside, keep them clean.

Here in their day, they would be outdoors, probably half wild, they're roaming around, they're scavengers, they're going through our trash, trying to find bones, that kind of thing, just roaming around.

Pigs will eat almost anything. And so if you tried to give them pearls, imagine giving pearls. We threw out pearls to a pig.

The pig would think, because it didn't know, these are peas or maybe nuts of some kind. Try to eat them because a pig doesn't know what pearls are, doesn't know they're expensive jewelry.

Does it care about jewelry? Pig only cares about filling its stomach. So you throw the things out to them and the thing is thinking, oh, this is going to be delicious.

It's going to be good. I'm going to love this. And then it munches on the pearl. This is not edible. They would be frustrated and so trample the pearls and attack you for frustrating them.

So here they are, dogs and pigs. They're a picture of people who are by nature unholy.

People who don't care, like pigs don't care about pearls. These are people who don't care about holy things, about spiritual things, about the gospel.

They have no appetite for the things of God. And so if you try to give it to them, maybe force it on them.

You know, we're going to have halftime. Stop playing basketball. I'm going to tell you the gospel, right? We're trying to force it on them.

Sometimes you've got to say, you know, if you're going to act like a pig and you're not going to respect this, we're not going to bring you here anymore.

But they might at first think it's something the gospel, the word of God. They might first think it's something they really want.

Perhaps it's entertainment or it's a way to get rich, have your best life now.

Right? Sometimes Christians try to dress the word of God up as something the pigs really want. And then they when they find out it's the word of God, they're not so interested.

Or maybe it's a way to make a name for themselves. You could be a preacher of it. You could be like Sarah Ruth's father.

Or maybe the church is a place to socialize. That's what you think it's for. So you come for that or to find a girl or a boyfriend.

But when they realize that this is the kingdom of God, that it's about submitting to the Lord, it's about the word of God, having an appetite for that, seeking first his kingdom.

That they don't care about. It's like a pig wouldn't care about pearls. And they will turn viciously against you.

Why don't you frustrate me with the stuff where I didn't want this? Like Sarah Ruth, if you try to offer her Christ, she will exclaim, he ain't nobody

I know. And proceed to beat you with a broom. How do we know when someone is a dog or a pig to not give them pearls?

Well, their receptivity. Do they receive the word? Later in this gospel, when the disciples encountered resistance or hostility, they were supposed to shake the dust off their shoes.

Remember that verse? It's a sign of total detachment from those people who have rejected them.

They didn't care about the kingdom of God. They didn't care about the word of God. So we separate ourselves completely from you. Maybe even the dust that comes from your town be separated from my shoes.

Then they would go their way to reach others more open to the gospel. Receptivity is the key. When we keep banging our head against the wall of some people's resistance, maybe force feed them with it when they don't want it.

We are once again failing to let God be God. And giving pearls to pigs, we try to make them into something that God is not making them as though it's up to us.

So we can force it. We can make this pig like pearls eventually.

We can't. Our calling is simply to proclaim the message. We can't change their hearts with all our nagging, our conjoling, our manipulation, our vain repetitions, our threatenings about the judgment seat of God, like Sarah Ruth.

Only God can do that. So the question now is about your receptivity. How do you receive the word of God?

Are you eager for it? Do you love it? Well, let the

Holy Spirit judge you. Only God is the judge. He can take a dog or a pig and declare him or her to be clean, make him clean, make him into a a person, a human being.

He can save a Parker or even a Sarah Ruth. Let him do that today.

Only God is the judge and he has already judged all the sins of his people on Christ on the cross.

That's what we celebrated in the Lord's Supper. We could try to play God and pretend we haven't sinned so much.

We could try to acquit ourselves, but that is hopeless. Our only hope is that the

Father in his mercy judge Christ on the cross for our sins.

And then judge us as innocent as Christ. And he will do that if you trust him, if you let