Recently I wrote of my own past struggles with self-condemnation during my 30 years as a follower of Christ. In this piece I address an unfortunate “side-effect” of this problem: the condemnation of others. 

One of the many drawbacks of a self-condemnatory spirit masquerading as the voice of God in a believer’s life is its power to tempt us to condemn others as well. I believe it is impossible to internally punish yourself without finding yourself punishing people in your life who, like you, have their own moral failings. Sometimes that spirit goes on to manifest itself in a judgmental verbal assault on individuals who we have no right to judge.

This is a problem since we know that Judgment of persons is reserved but to God.

Most Biblical Christians hopefully have the intellectual understanding to know that we have the right to judge wrong actions, but never the people who are doing the acting. Very few of us are long in the faith before someone shares with us the biblically-inspired statement that we are to “hate the sin but love the sinner” (in fact many of us knew this saying long before we came to Christ). This principle seems very reasonable, so reasonable in fact that we may assume that it is an easy thing to practice in our daily lives. Actually, for many, it is not difficult to do so. This is not, however, the case with we who have mistaken the condemning voice of a punitive conscience for the genuine conviction of the Holy Spirit.

It is almost impossible to harshly judge ourselves without also harshly judging our fellow human beings, including both believers and non-believers. Whether it is moral debauchery outside the church, or a host of problems within, we who have internalized a self-condemnatory spirit find it so very easy to self-righteously criticize everybody else!

It is this fact which I think explains many of the criticisms the world has for Biblical Christianity today. Too many who claim the name of Christ have a practical theology born from a fearful need to try to atone for the many sins with which our overly strict conscious have saddled us. We have forgotten, or never understood, that there really is “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Rather than knowing a loving heavenly Father who corrects us in love for our own eternal good we more often know the voice of the accuser inside us (sometimes aided and abetted, I suspect, by the accuser outside, the Enemy of our souls.) We accept the hard judgment of ourselves that accompany these moral accusations and then we unconsciously transfer those judgments to everyone around us.

Today there are enough Christians doing this to make many people outside the Faith want nothing to do with a belief system we have distorted. We have distorted it in accepting a moral compass driven by fear, and efforts at self-atonement, rather than by the saving and sanctifying grace of God. It is only in learning to accept that grace (and truly repenting of our fruitless self-atoning efforts) that will free us from both wrongly judging ourselves and, just as importantly, judging others.

This process begins with an awareness of our previously unconscious slavery to our still fallen human consciences. It continues as we begin to reject the influence of a faulty conscience in favor of one influenced more and more by the gentle guidance of the Spirit. We are told in Scripture that it is the kindness of God that leads us towards repentance (Romans 2:4). When we come to know this is true for ourselves we will be able to realize that it is true for everyone else as well, and stop doing more spiritual harm than good