Wounded Healer or Wounding Judge?

Wounded Healer or Wounding Judge?
Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved.

How often do Christians wrongly judge one another? All too often. Self-righteousness manifests itself in believers across all levels of Christian maturity. I suspect that even the most spiritual among us still sin in this way on occasion. We know from Scripture that by doing so we are in danger of being judged ourselves. This is bad enough, but what of the person being judged? Someone may feel as though they are dying emotionally and spiritually and instead of imparting the healing love of Christ we kill them a little more.

Among religious people of any belief system it has been said that only Christians “shoot their own wounded”. To be sure this is an overstatement but it is sometimes all too accurate in the Church. Our ego-driven, and patently false, sense of righteousness leads to the condemnation of others. We usually think of this sin as being one against God and that is certainly true but, as stated, it is also destructive to those being judged. Whether it is withholding fellowship for non-biblical reasons or openly accusing another believer without justification the result is much the same: unnecessary pain for a fellow child of God.

Much needed restoration can be limited or even destroyed when we attack someone who may not be so much in sin as in weakness or infirmity. The wounds this life brings can often lead to behaviors which might appear more sinful than they are. As an omniscient and just Judge, only God knows where weaknesses end and sin begins. We dare not presume on that exalted knowledge or, more importantly, on the Exalted One Himself.

Even if the one judged truly is in a sinful state the accuser cannot know the whole story behind it. Again it is an issue of not understanding, and perhaps not wanting to understand, how much pain a person may have endured in life through no fault of their own. That pain is fully known and taken into consideration in God’s eyes and heart alone. We can and should only confront a fellow Christian when love for that person is strongly present. Otherwise that which we presume to say about the person’s character may only hurt and destroy them, and that surely is not the will of God.