THE AFTERWORD | Matthew Season 4 - Week 2

WestGate Church Teaching

A while ago, the Barna Group did an extensive research project where they asked non-religious people why they rejected Christianity. What came back were three adjectives. Non-religious people perceived Christians overwhelmingly as 1. judgmental (87 percent of respondents), 2. hypocritical (85 percent) and 3. anti-homosexual (91 percent). Eeesh. Jay Kim stops by to talk about the fairly well-known command of Jesus “do not judge” in Matthew 7. We talk about this text, the (hilarious?) image Jesus uses to illustrate His point, and what Jesus means (and doesn’t mean). And we talk about why it’s critical that Christians arrest the all-too-human tendency to treat people with contempt and condemnation, because this does real damage, not just to them, but also to us - because it puts us in the place of God and distorts the message of Jesus - that the God who *could* condemn has chosen to forgive us and gave Himself up as a sin offering.