To Admonish Does Not Mean To Judge. Get It Straight.

September 13, 2019

From today’s reading…

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,

as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another,

singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs

with gratitude in your hearts to God.”

Today we see Paul telling the Colossians to “admonish one another” while Jesus tells us in Luke 6 today “Stop judging and you will not be judged.”

Allow me to admonish you for equating admonishment with judging.

When you shake your finger at me and yell “JUDGE NOT LEST YE BE JUDGED!!” you are projecting and deflecting, while also showing your lack of vocabularityness, but I digress.

You are holding onto your favorite sins like Linus holds onto his stinky, dusty blanket. You won’t “judge” me on my sin because you don’t want me “judging” you for yours.

In a way you are right. We should not judge one another for the sins we commit, but we should admonish one another, i.e. hold each other accountable, to a higher standard.

When we see one another sinning we are called to address, i.e. admonish, one another. We do not condemn one another to Hell because we are not God, but neither do we turn a blind eye to the sins we see.

In my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training my instructors and even my peers give me pointers when they see me performing a technique incorrectly.

They don’t yell at me and say “YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE EVERY MATCH FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE AND YOU’RE A WORTHLESS HUMAN BEING FOR EVEN TRYING! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE COMING IN HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE? LOSER!”

Because we love and want to support one another we admonish one another in our training.

And since we do not know the entirety of everyone’s life in our school we don’t pass judgement on each other as humans based on one mistake they make in one class.

But it is logical to conclude that if I insist on doing the first five or 10 steps wrong in every move that is taught every day that I probably will lose every Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition I enter. But it is not a guarantee.

Maybe I’ll fight someone more stubborn than me. Maybe I’ll fight someone who is injured or lazy or sloppy or hungover. Maybe I’ll fight someone much smaller and less-experienced.

So even a stubborn student can eventually win a match, and a sinful person can eventually find God.

We just need to let the word of God live in us, which is the only way to…

Stay the course.Keep the faith.Endure.