The double standard of Christianity

This past Sunday I was fortunate enough to preach a sermon on John 8 and 1 Corinthians 5.

To make the connection, we were wrestling with being judgmental, tolerance vs. Gospel living, and exploring whether there was a double standard in Christianity, and what exactly that meant for us.

So we started with John 8 (previously explored in the post "Chick-fil-a and what it Really means") and the story of the adulterous woman being brought before Jesus and how he responded... his deep, profound, life changing response that I believe is to shape all of our encounters as Christians.  We then took a hard look at 1 Corinthians 5 where Paul writes to the church at Corinth seeming to Judge them and ends with a very, very important statement:  "¹² What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?"

statement How do you (we) rationalize not being judgmental (judge not lest ye be judged) and examining the 2x4 in our own eye before gouging at the spec in our brothers And "are you not to judge those inside?"?

Well, there are 2 main points:
number 1:  When Jesus made the statement "whoever is without sin, cast the first stone" the rest of the crowd left, leaving only Jesus and the woman.  What must be noted here is that the crowd left because they all had sin.  Jesus didn't.  So by Jesus' own statement, He could have, in fact, cast the first stone.  But he didn't.  See, the crowd wanted to condemn the woman but couldn't.  Jesus could have condemned the woman, bud didn't.
number 2:  Paul's statement "What business is it of min to judge those outside the church?"

Bingo.
Ever take your kid to practice and some other kid on the team is acting the complete fool?  What do you do?  nothing.  maybe roll your eyes, make a comment under your breath to your spouse.  But then at that same practice, your child does something small, approaching whatever the other kid was doing.  Now what do you do?  You grab them up, sit them down, talk to them, time-out, whatever.  The child's response?  "why did I get in trouble and not them?" "they were doing the same thing, how come you're yelling at me?"
We all know the answer... because they weren't your child - they weren't yours to discipline.  But yours was.

Check out the sermon and share your thoughts - what do you think?

http://highlandviewchurch.org/zVideo/2012/2012-09-30sermon.htm