[4] Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
[10] You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. [11] It is written:
“ ‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord,
‘every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will acknowledge God.’ ”
[12] So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.
Observation:
As an example of believers passing judgement against other believers when they shouldn’t, Paul uses the fact that some believed certain meat was unclean and shouldn’t be eaten, while some believed otherwise. He rebukes believers on both sides of the subject for making this a divisive issue. Far from being something like believing or not in the holiness of God, division over something like what could be eaten was not appropriate. It was the little stuff.
The Apostle Paul was not talking about false teaching here. He was not talking about adding to or removing from the Word of God. He was rebuking believers over them turning small things into big things and causing division within God’s people.
Application:
As Christians our salvation is sealed because we accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior, we know He died to atone for our sins, that He was risen, and that He will come again. But even with our salvation sealed, we will be judged. When we meet Him face to face, God will judge how we acted in this life, how we treated others, especially other believers, and how we used the resources He gave us. Did we live for Him or for our own selfish desires?
While we all need to exercise good discernment with respect to false teaching, God’s Word, and God’s will, we are not perfect. Only Jesus was perfect. With respect to the small stuff, there is no way any of us will get it all perfectly right. For each of us, God will probably say.. you got that right, yep, got that right too and no way, you were way off on that one, almost but not quite right on that one.. The message is that, even if it is our place to judge others, which its not, we would make plenty of mistakes in our judgements. We need to stay clear of passing judgement on others, leave that to God, and worry about ourselves.
The best we can do is listen to God through His Word, follow the leading of the Holy Spirit within each of us to help control our selfish desires, and follow Jesus closely to become more and more like Him.
Prayer:
Lord You are holy and I love You. Help me stay focused on You and Your will. Keep me well grounded in Your Word and lead me with Your Spirit to not pass judgement on other brothers and sisters when I don’t agree with them about the small stuff.