Principles of Judging Part 6

The second thing we are supposed to judge over are our own families.

Husbands, be husbands! Be the heads of your household, and do not delegate or relegate this responsibility to anyone, no matter the reason. Now there are some who take the passage in Ephesians, wherein the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church to mean that they are masters, rulers, dictators, and their wives and subsequent children are serfs or servants. Those who hold to such a belief seem to have disregarded the following verses wherein we are admonished to love our wives, just as Christ loved the Church. Christ is not a dictator, He does not treat us as slaves, He neither whips us nor abuses us but rather He shed His blood, and died on a cross that He might save us from the sin and darkness we were dead in. We must love our wives with the same love that Christ has shown us, and when such a love is evident, it will neither be burdensome or difficult for our wives to submit in everything. I mention this because I’ve heard enough horror stories in my time, of verbal and physical abuse doled out on a daily basis, because the husband forgot the passage about how he ought to love his wife, but consistently remembered the one about the wife submitting to him.

So what are we responsible for judging in our own families?

The most important thing that we are responsible for judging over our families is the education they receive in regards to their spiritual upbringing. Know what your children are learning, and filter out the things that will surely be harmful to them. The world is at war with the family, Satan is on the prowl, and they are doing everything they can to downplay and make light of the paramount importance of a stable and healthy family unit. It is because many are not fulfilling their biblical obligations in regard to their family, and not judging what is good from what is evil, and monitoring that which their children receive into their hearts that I fear for the next generation. Everywhere you turn evil is presented as wholesome, acceptable, and even normal, and the target of these constant bombardments of vileness, is not those with graying temples and achy joints, it is the young, the innocent, the blank slates upon which they attempt to write before the parents get a chance.

Ephesians 6:1-4, “Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’, which is the first commandment with promise: ‘that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.’ And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.”

Bring your children up, in the training and admonition of the Lord. Don’t expect someone else to do it for you, don’t think the schoolteachers or tutors, or anyone else has your child’s best interest at heart, put in the time, make the effort, and bring your children up in the training and admonition of the Lord.

I would not be here today; I would not be writing these lines if my grandfather hadn’t taken the time each and every day, to fulfill this passage in Ephesians. I grew up in a Communist country, wherein the school curriculum taught you that there was no God, and anyone who believed in a God was just an illiterate throwback, someone who had not evolved mentally, someone worthy of contempt and disdain.

If my grandfather would not have daily trained me in the Lord, if he had not daily spoken to me of Christ and the cross, I would have succumbed, I would have believed what I was being taught in school, and most likely would have wandered far from the truth of God’s Word.

‘Yeah, but this is not a Communist country, and our kids aren’t being taught that kind of stuff!’

Are you sure? Have you checked your children’s curriculum lately, have you asked what it is that the teachers say about such topics as Jesus or the Bible?

What is happening today is more insidious than what was happening in Communism, because at least in Communism they were upfront about it, everyone knew it, and parents took steps to bring their children up in the training of the Lord in spite of what the government was doing. Here and now, it is more tacit, more discreet, wherein children aren’t outright taught that there is no God and that their parents are fools, but rather that everything their parents believe to be wrong and sinful and evil is actually good and wholesome and acceptable. Different approach, same finality!

Make the time to bring your children up in the training and admonition of the Lord; it will be the greatest investment you will ever make.

Proverbs 22:6, “Train up your child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

The third thing that we are supposed to judge over is the church.

Going back to the passage in Corinthians that I mentioned during the last post, Paul, although not physically present, already judged what had been going on in the church of Corinth, and commanded such a one to be turned over, or delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Whether we like it or not, whether we submit to their authority or not, God did appoint spiritual heads over His church, He appointed shepherds, and they are responsible to judge rightly and justly in spiritual matters. I realize this will not sit well with some, because we all want to be the judge, we all want to make our feelings known, and compel the body of believers to act based on our feelings or emotions rather than on the Word of God. In the world we have the rule of law, and judges must adhere to it, regardless of how emotionally fueled a pleading might be. In the church, we have God’s rule of law which we must adhere to when it comes to sin in the camp.

1 Timothy 5:20, “Those who are sinning rebuke in the presence of all, that the rest also may fear.”

But who was Timothy of all people to rebuke those who are sinning? In short, a young man appointed by Paul the Apostle of Christ to do just that.

‘But that doesn’t seem fair, embarrassing someone openly like that, that’s just not done nowadays, you could get sued.’

And therein we have the root cause of why there is so much sin in the church, why we are polluted from within and from without. We judge things within the house of God through the prism of political correctness, we keep silent when sin is evident because it wouldn’t be nice to expose it, or we’re afraid of getting sued, and so the sin mutates and grows unhindered.

If you don’t want to be called out and rebuked for sinning, don’t sin!

Novel idea I know, but practical in its simplicity. Do we not realize that we mock God when we sin willfully and the only thing we fear is being found out by other church members? Do we not realize that one day we will stand before the judgment seat of Christ and answer for our wickedness? Better that the sin be rebuked and that the individual repent, than sin be coddled and the individual go to eternal judgment. Like many things however, we have also twisted the true meaning of love, and so, we call it love when we tolerate sin, we call it love when we close our eyes to the cancer that is metastasizing throughout the body killing it off one member at a time.

Hebrews 13:17, “Obey those who rule over you, and be submissive, for they watch out for your souls, as those who must give account. Let them do so with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you.”

If you’re in a place where all that’s being done to you is you having your wool sheered, yet no one watches out for your soul, then move on, leave, you have no allegiance to the place, and your soul is being starved. If however you are in a place where you are being taught the Word of God, and the one who leads, or rules over you is watching out for your soul, biblically pointing the way to Jesus, showing you the way you must go and you rebel against it because it’s stifling to the flesh, then you’re in rebellion and no good can come of it.

Those that watch over your soul will give account, and the true men of God, and I believe there are still some around, do the work of God with this knowledge at the forefront of their minds.

I know that one day I will give account to God for the sermons I’ve preached, the articles I’ve written, the teachings I’ve posted, and the doctrines I presented. This is why I strive and agonize over everything I write, I preach the unadulterated word of God, and I present a simple gospel focused on Jesus rather than myself, because I know that one day I will have to answer to the One who already knows all the answers. For the life of me I still can’t understand those who purposefully twist the Word of God to fit their own agenda, and who preach a different gospel than that which is clearly outlined in the Bible. Do they not know that one day they will give account?

1 Peter 5:1-4, “The elders who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that will be revealed: Shepherd the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by constraint but willingly, not for dishonest gain but eagerly; nor as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock; and when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that does not fade away.”

True men of God do not labor for dishonest gain, they do not lord over those entrusted to them, they labor so that when the Chief Shepherd appears they might receive the crown of glory that does not fade away. Laboring for anything less than the crown is foolishness and vanity, it is pitiable and tragic. If we labor for the crown, we won’t have huge churches, the world won’t love us, men will despise us, our ministries will remain relatively small, even those over who we shepherd will rebel from time to time, but all these things will seem irrelevant when He will appear, and with a great sound of a trumpet gather together His elect from one end of heaven to the other that we might each, in part, receive our just reward.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.