Seven-Day Practical Faith Blog: Grading Each Other's Sins

Grading each other's sins is a sport much older than World Cup soccer.

I'm not talking about theological gradation of sin. For example, Catholics and some Protestants divide sins into mortal (inexcusable) and venial (forgivable), while other Protestants measure all sin equally as separation from God's will. I'm not arguing theology here.

Instead, I'm talking about the practice of how I measure your sins against my sins. My sins only get a yellow card, to use soccer jargon, and your sins are worthy of a red card. And my sins might not even merit a yellow card, in my mind.

I admit I do this. I believe practically all of us do this. And it's a huge problem in the practice of faith today.

In our judgment, we determine which sins are worse than others, and - spoiler - I believe you have selected the worst sins, whereas mine may not even be worthy of a mention.

I've seen Christians look at a list of sins in the New Testament and cherry pick the one in the middle that bothers them the most as most heinous and worthy of opposition. They gloss over the sins before and after that one. Again, I'm not talking about theology; I mean, they select the sin they think they would never do and declare it the worst. The sins they themselves do or might do? Well, they're comfortable with those.

When I say "they" in this instance, I also mean me, you, and practically everybody.

In fact, the louder we clamor for someone else to get a red card, the more we seem to want to cover up what we're doing wrong.

I'll give another sports example. Knicks fans got angry in the recent Game 3 of the NBA Finals when the Spurs' Victor Wenbanyama roughly tossed the Knicks' Jalen Brunson to the floor. They thought Wenbanyama should receive a flagrant foul. As a Spurs fan, I didn't think it was flagrant. But when one of the Knicks roughed up a Spur, I thought the refs should come down hard. In other words, it's OK when our team does it, but not when your team does it.

I believe we each take the same approach with sin.

Jesus realized our lack of honest perspective when he instructed us in Matthew 7:1-5 (NIV):

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

“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 is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."

The truth is, we may never extract all the planks from our own eyes so we can become worthy to judge others.

Look, I struggle with this issue the same as you. What I must constantly remind myself is Jesus is the only one well-suited to judge people. My job isn't to hand out yellow and red cards; my job is to eradicate my own planks.

Sure, we need to preach and teach about sins people should avoid. But we should be preaching and proclaiming the error of all sins, including and especially the ones in which we ourselves partake and know so intimately.

I delve more deeply into this issue in my book, "From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone." One chapter is called "Releasing Our Sins and Our Stones." This habit of judging others harshly is a comfort zone. How can we overcome this habit by entering Jesus's trust zone? Read the book to find out! It's available at CecilTaylorMinistries dot com, as well as major booksellers.