I was praying for my friends and their children. I found myself making assumptions about where they were in life. There is a good chance I was spot on but I need to be a bit more careful in thinking I know how God is dealing with people.
What brought this into focus was a passage of scripture I recite daily, I Corinthians 13. It is about love, how it is defined, how it operates, what it looks like. What jumped out at me this morning was the last phrase of verse 4.
(1Co 13:4 NAS77) Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant,It occurred to me that my view of the spiritual needs of people I had not seen in years, based on second hand information, was little less than arrogant. It quickly become a matter of judging, in the bad sense.
Judging is necessary in life. We must make decisions. We never have all the information. We must give it our best shot. That is judging. The Biblical condemnation is toward the kind of judgement based on arrogance. The KJV translates it “puffed up”. That might have the idea of looking down on others instead of looking for the best.
Pray with love.
homo unius libri
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