One of the seemingly easiest ways to excuse our sins is to judge others.  It is not wrong to exercise judgment but we must start with ourselves.  Only too frequently we are guilty of the sins we think we see in others but that is not necessarily always the case.  We need prayer and love if we are to perform “eye surgery” on our brothers and sisters.  We must judge them the way we want them to judge us.

Lightfoot said, “Cast out the little sin that is in thy hand: to which he answered, cast out the great sin that is in thine.  So they could not reprove because they were all sinners.”  Thus we see how great a calamity was cast upon Christendom by Calvin because he revived that antinomian spirit that said that we all sin all the time because we are only a sinner saved by grace and can never rise beyond that low-level of spirituality this side of heaven.  But Jesus commanded “Sin not,” and He knows full well how to help us live blameless before God.

We know that sacred things are liable to be abused by profane persons.  It should really come as no surprise, then, when they use and misuse the sacred text to attack us in order to inflict pain or intimidate us into being silent at the very time we should not be.  God does not give permission to the Christian to be silent; He has commanded us to be watchmen, holy watchmen, alert and sounding the alarm for the enemy of our soul is near at hand.

–Pastor Ward Clinton