Welcome to Form Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute. And joining me is Dr. Michael

Barber, who is a professor of scripture here at the Augustine Institute. And we're continuing our

Bible study on the Gospel of Matthew. So open up your Bible to Matthew Chapter 7. So we want to,

there's a lot in Chapter 7, Michael, that we could, to cover here. And so let's dive in because I really, I love the ending of Matthew 7.

Right.

So I don't want to get to, we've got to go more quickly, I think, through the first half of chapter 7.

I was going to say the first three words of chapter 7 are the most important.

I'm just kidding.

Don't judge me by my pattern and schedule here. Oh, the first words are judge not,

lest you be judged. All right. So Jesus is explaining here a very important principle,

and that is, as he goes on to say, by the judgment which you judge, you shall be judged. And so Jesus is

telling us that we really have to reserve judgment on other people, right? We cannot know what's

going on in another person's heart. And then Jesus adds a very important principle.

He says, why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but not notice the beam that

is in your own eye? Or will you say, or how will you say to your brother, let me cast out the

speck from your eye and behold, the beam is in your own eye. It's a really funny image, right?

Yeah. The speck and you got this big beam coming out of your eye socket. And the amazing thing

here that's important is you can't recognize your own sin. Jesus is teaching us a very important

lesson here. Because our sin is so fundamental to our own self, our own way of looking at things, and really at the heart of sin is our own selfishness. That's right. We put ourselves in our own ego at the center of the plot of our own story, but also the story of the world. And so our self-centeredness looks normally centered to us. That's right. You know, we just don't And so Jesus is teaching us something very profound here, and it's something that we'll expand

on when we get to Matthew 18.

And that is that in order to see clearly, we need other people.

The implication in all of this is the need for spiritual friendship, the need for the church,

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