"Judge Not Lest You Be Judged." That's essentially the theme of these two verses. James is echoing his elder brother, the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 7:1 where he says the same thing, "Judge not lest you be judged." We will see that as we work through the passage. Judge not lest you be judged. It's interesting, he has just finished convicting us of our own sin of divisiveness and causing conflict, showing us that our hearts are the problem, urging us to repentance and humility. So he's convicted us of sin, he's called us in a strong way in verses 7 to 10, the previous section, to lowliness. "Submit yourselves to God. Mourn over your sin. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord." He's said that and now he comes back and says essentially: "and stop judging one another." He understands that the temptation of the human heart, even the redeemed heart, because those of us who have been born again by the power of God's Spirit through the glory of the Gospel, we still have an old natureand the sin of pride. So he knows that as he's talked about these issues and that our tendency is to think not so much about our tendency to cause conflict but others, and that we have the tendency to look at other people and how they fail, and we have a tendency to talk about them in ways that demean them, damage them, and we have a tendency to talk to them in ways that are demeaning, and he's going to say in characteristic Jamesian style, "Judge not lest you be judged," and he's going to smack us right in the mouth in these two verses.
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