Things I Wish My Family Knew

A Letter About a Phrase I Want You to Stop Believing

I have been sitting with Acts 5 for years now — the account of Ananias and Sapphira. You know the story. A married couple sells a piece of property, brings part of the proceeds to the apostles, and pretends they are giving the whole. Peter confronts them. They drop dead, one after the other, in the same room. Luke records, with what feels almost like understatement, that “great fear came upon all who heard of these things” (Acts 5:5, 11).

My first reaction to this passage was the reaction I suppose that many readers have. The severity bothered me. Two people, one sin — a sin involving money, not violence or sexual immorality or open apostasy — and the judgment is immediate physical death. Where is the warning? Where is the chance to repent? Where is the gentleness we are taught to expect from the God of the New Covenant? The story sits in the early pages of the church’s birth like a hard stone. And the hardest part is that Luke does not editorialize. He does not soften it. He simply tells us what happened — and then, with a straight face, notes that the church grew in numbers and power immediately afterward (Acts 5:12–16). Now I will grant you, “Come to our church — lie about your tithe and you may not survive the service” is unlikely the marketing strategy being taught at the church-growth seminars. It is not the formula of the seeker-sensitive movement. And yet there it is, in black and white: the church the Spirit was building grew because of the judgment, not in spite of it. That should give us pause. It gave me pause.

So this morning I sat with it. I wondered what it meant for the church then, and what it means for the church now, and — most uncomfortably — what it means for me. And as I worked through it, I began to see what I think God wants His people to see in that passage. It is not what I first thought.

The judgment in Acts 5 is part of a pattern. Achan in Joshua 7 hides the devoted thing in his tent, and Israel cannot stand before its enemies until the hidden thing is removed. Ananias in Acts 5 hides the same kind of thing in his heart, and the same architectural law applies. Paul tells the Corinthians that some of them have grown weak, sick, and even died because they were approaching the Lord’s Table while harboring contradictions in the body (1 Cor. 11:30). Three thresholds in Scripture. Three judgments. One pattern: the holiness of God’s dwelling place is non-negotiable, and the body cannot advance while the hidden thing is protected.

What surprised me, working through this, is the conclusion the texts themselves point toward. The judgment in each of those passages is not God’s anger breaking through. It is God’s fatherhood breaking through. Paul says it directly: “When we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world” (1 Cor. 11:32). The discipline of God upon His people is not punishment in the judicial sense — Christ has borne that already. It is chastisement in the paternal sense. It is the painful, severe, sometimes terrifying work of a Father who has determined never to lose His children, and who will, if necessary, sicken them, humble them, even take them home early, rather than allow them to drift into the final ruin that awaits the world.

In other words: the judgment of God on those He loves is one of the most protective things in the universe. The hand that strikes is the hand that will not let go. The pain is the medicine. The medicine is, in some cases, the only thing that prevents the disease from killing the patient.

That conclusion has been quietly working on me. And as it has worked on me, I have noticed something: it sits in direct contradiction to one of the most repeated phrases of our cultural moment. A phrase that has so saturated the air you breathe that you may not even hear it anymore. It is everywhere — in the songs, in the social posts, in the way friends talk to friends, in the way people defend choices they half-suspect they shouldn’t be making.

The phrase is “Don’t judge me.”

Sometimes it is spoken with edge. Sometimes it is laughed off. Sometimes it is whispered. But it always carries the same weight: what I am doing is mine, my own, no one’s business but mine, and the worst thing you could possibly do is form an opinion about it.

I want to push back on this. Not because I want to scold the people who say it — many of whom I love — but because the phrase itself is a lie about how the world works, about how love works, and about how God works. And lies, when believed long enough, do real damage.

So let me say something that will sound jarring at first, and then I will spend the rest of this letter explaining what I mean.

Judgment, rightly understood, is one of the kindest things in the universe.

If that is true of God’s judgment — and I have come to believe it is — then it must also shape, in a smaller and more careful way, how those who love each other are meant to deal with each other. The God whose judgment is protective is the God whose people are called to imitate Him. Imperfectly. Humbly. With logs removed before specks are addressed. But really.

That is what this letter is about.

The Confused Quotation

You have probably heard the verse people reach for when they want to weaponize “don’t judge me.” It comes from Jesus: “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matt. 7:1). It is one of the most quoted verses in the Bible. It is also one of the most misquoted.

Because here is what Jesus said next, in the same paragraph: “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matt. 7:5). Notice the structure. He is not telling you never to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. He is telling you to deal with your own log first, so that you can do the speck-removing well. The whole point assumes that brotherly correction is a real thing that real Christians do for each other. What Jesus forbids is the hypocrite’s judgment — the judgment of someone with a log in his own eye who has somehow noticed only your speck. He does not forbid judgment itself. He demands that judgment be honest, self-aware, and merciful.

The same Jesus who said “Judge not” also said “Judge with right judgment” (John 7:24). He commanded both. The first forbids the proud judgment of the self-righteous. The second commands the loving judgment of the discerning.

When the world quotes “judge not” at you, it is using a Bible verse to mean the opposite of what the Bible actually teaches. That should bother you. It bothers me.

What the World Means by “Don’t Judge Me”

Strip the phrase down and listen to what it actually claims. It claims that the moral evaluation of human action is itself an offense. It claims that the worst thing you can do to someone is think something true about their behavior. It claims that consequences are wrong, accountability is cruel, and discernment is hate.

Now, I want you to notice something. No one actually believes this. Try it. Tell the person who says “don’t judge me” that you have decided to embezzle from their employer, to cheat on them with their spouse, to lie to them, to drive drunk through their neighborhood. Watch how quickly the “don’t judge me” doctrine evaporates. Watch how quickly that same person becomes a moral philosopher, complete with arguments and consequences and demands.

The phrase is never sincere. It is always selective. It always means don’t judge me about this particular thing I want to keep doing. It is not a principle. It is a shield, deployed in specific moments, to ward off the discomfort of being seen accurately by someone who loves you. And underneath that discomfort is something deeper still: the refusal to change. Because being seen accurately is only painful when the thing being seen is something we are not willing to give up. When a friend points out that I have been generous, or patient, or kind, I do not say “don’t judge me” — I receive it gladly, even though that too is a judgment. The phrase only emerges when the seeing is bringing pressure on something I have already decided, in advance, that I will keep doing no matter what. “Don’t judge me” is therefore not really a request to be left unseen. It is a request to be left unchanged. It is the soul’s way of saying, I have made my peace with this thing, and I do not want your love, your truth, or your God to disturb that peace.

And that is the heart of the problem. Because being seen accurately by someone who loves you is one of the most precious gifts a human being can receive. The phrase “don’t judge me” is a request to be loved without being seen — to be approved of without being known. It is a request that no one who actually loves you can grant.

A Father Who Doesn’t Judge

Let me put this in terms that hit closer to home. Imagine I refused, as your father, to ever exercise judgment about your lives. Imagine I watched you make a decision I knew would damage you, and I said nothing. Imagine I saw a relationship dragging you toward harm and I shrugged. Imagine I noticed a pattern in you — a habit, an addiction, a self-deception — and decided that out of respect for your autonomy I would never name it.

Would that be love?

It would not. It would be the abdication of love. It would be the cowardice of a father who valued his own comfort over his child’s wellbeing. It would be a man who had decided that being liked by you mattered more than being useful to you. And in the end, you would know it. You would feel the absence of the loving correction that should have been there. You would understand, eventually, that I had not loved you enough to risk your displeasure.

I have to confess to you here, plainly, that I have failed at this more often than I want to admit. Although you probably remember that I often said it was not my role to be your friend — that I was your father, and that the two roles were not the same — I have not always lived up to the weight of the role I claimed. The principle was right; the practice has been mixed. Being your father, then and now, was always meant to mean more than being your friend, not less. It meant being willing to say things a friend would not have the standing or the courage to say. And in many seasons I have fallen short of that calling, in three particular ways I want to name for you.

Sometimes the failure has been cowardice — a quiet calculation that the relationship was fragile enough, the distance between us already wide enough, that a hard word might be the thing that finally broke something I could not afford to break. With adult children scattered across the country, not living life together anymore as we did when you were younger and at home, the temptation to keep every conversation pleasant has been real. I have told myself, more times than I can count, that now is not the moment, that the relationship comes first, that I will say something later. Often the later never came. That was cowardice dressed as patience, and I am sorry for it.

Sometimes the failure has been apathy — the simple weariness of an aging man who would rather rest in the easy version of fatherhood than do the harder work of the real version. There have been seasons when I saw something I should have named, and I let it pass because naming it would have cost me energy I did not feel I had. That, too, was a failure of love. You deserved more attention than the tired version of me was willing to give.

And sometimes the failure has been the failure Jesus warned about most directly — the log in my own eye. I have, at times, been so aware of my own failures in a particular area that I felt I had no standing to speak to yours. That is not humility. That is a misreading of what humility actually requires. Humility does not silence the father; it qualifies the father, makes him gentler, more careful, more willing to acknowledge his own struggle as part of the conversation. The honest word from a father who knows his own log is more useful, not less, than the word from a father who has forgotten he has one. My silence in those moments was not the noble silence of self-awareness. It was the easier silence of a man who did not want to do the harder work of saying “I have struggled with this myself, and that is exactly why I want to talk to you about it.”

So I say this part not as a man who has done it well, but as a man who has done it badly enough to know what the cost is. I have tried, imperfectly, to be a good father. Where I have judged you wrongly, I am genuinely sorry. Where I have failed to judge when I should have — out of fear, fatigue, or my own unaddressed log — I am sorrier still. But I will not apologize for judging you at all. To stop judging you would be to stop loving you. The two cannot be separated. And I would rather risk getting it wrong while trying than continue getting it wrong by silence.

The Architecture Behind All of This

There is a deeper structure here, and I want you to see it because it changes everything.

In the Bible, judgment is not the opposite of love. Judgment is one of the operations of love. Hebrews 12 says it as plainly as it can be said:

“The Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives… If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.” — Hebrews 12:6, 8

Read that twice. The author is making a negative argument that should land like a hammer in this culture: the absence of discipline is not evidence of God’s favor; it is evidence of God’s non-relationship. The unchastened life is not the favored life. It is the orphaned life. The believer who feels the weight of God’s correcting hand is, by that very weight, being assured of his sonship.

Judgment, in the hand of one who loves you, is a sign that you belong to him.

The Father judges His children precisely because they are His children. He does not judge the world’s children that way — He lets them go their own way, and the going-their-own-way ends in their final ruin. He judges His children, paternally, severely sometimes, painfully often, but always for their good, that they may share his holiness (Heb. 12:10).

This is what I came to see in Ananias and Sapphira. The severity of the judgment in Acts 5 is not the severity of God’s wrath against unbelievers. It is the severity of God’s love for His infant church. He would not allow the body He had just birthed at Pentecost to be corrupted at the threshold by the leaven of pretended holiness. The cost was the lives of two of its members. By the way, Scripture is silent as to the destination of Ananias and Sapphira. If they were regenerate, truly born again of the Holy Spirit, nothing that happened as recounted would derail them from being in Heaven with Christ. The benefit was the preservation of the whole. Hard arithmetic. Real mercy. The kind of mercy that, looked at honestly, is more terrifying than the alternative — because the alternative is a God who shrugs and lets His people drift into something worse than physical death.

The same logic operates between human beings who love each other. A friend who never tells you a hard truth is not your friend; he is your audience. A spouse who never names what is going wrong is not protecting the marriage; she is letting it die quietly. A parent who never judges is not respecting the child; she is abandoning the child to whatever the world will eventually teach by force what the parent refused to teach by love.

The phrase “don’t judge me” is a request to be left alone in a way that, if granted, would be the cruelest thing the people who love you could do to you.

What “Right Judgment” Actually Looks Like

I want to be careful here, because the phrase “don’t judge me” did not come out of nowhere. It came out of real wounds inflicted by real hypocrites — people who did judge proudly, harshly, selectively, and self-righteously. The reaction is wrong, but it is a reaction to something. So let me distinguish carefully.

Wrong judgment is what Jesus condemned. It is the proud judgment of the man with a log in his eye. It is judgment that enjoys the failure of the other. It is judgment that uses the failure as a platform for self-elevation. It is judgment that pronounces eternal verdicts (you are worthless, you are beyond hope, you are not one of us) when only God can pronounce eternal verdicts. It is judgment without humility, without self-examination, without love. It is the judgment of the Pharisee in Luke 18 who thanks God he is not like other men. That judgment is forbidden, and rightly so.

Right judgment is what Jesus commanded. It is the judgment of the friend who notices you drifting and says, “I love you, and I am worried about what I see.” It is the judgment of the parent who says, “This relationship is not good for you, and here is why.” It is the judgment of a good Christian friend who says, “Brother, the path you are on ends badly. Let me show you a different one.” It is the judgment of the believer who looks honestly at his own life and says, “There is something here that needs to die.” It is judgment with humility, with self-examination, with love. It is the judgment of Nathan to David when confronted with his sinful relationship with Bathsheba: “You are the man” — direct, unflinching, devastating, and ultimately the means of David’s restoration.

The first kind of judgment damages. The second kind of judgment heals. The phrase “don’t judge me” tries to abolish both. The Christian must learn to refuse the first and welcome the second — to refuse it in oneself when it appears as pride, and to welcome it from others when it comes as love.

The Hardest Part: Welcoming Judgment

Here is what I most want you to take from this letter. The hardest discipline of the Christian life is not learning to judge well; it is learning to receive judgment well. Almost no one learns to receive it as a gift.

But Proverbs is full of this teaching, and it is worth memorizing it whole:

“Whoever heeds reproof is honored.” (Prov. 13:18)

“Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.” (Prov. 12:1)

“The ear that listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise.” (Prov. 15:31)

“Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” (Prov. 27:5–6)

That last one is the one I most want you to carry. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy. The world has reversed this. The world calls the kisses love and the wounds abuse. Scripture knows better. The friend who wounds you with the truth is doing you a greater service than the flatterer who buries you under affirmations. The flatterer is closing his eyes to your danger because confronting it would cost him something. The friend who wounds you is paying that cost on your behalf.

When someone who loves you offers you a real word of correction, your reflex will be to defend yourself. Don’t. Pause. Breathe. Consider that they may be seeing something you cannot see. Consider that they may be paying the cost of your friendship by saying what no one else has the courage to say. Consider that the reflex of self-defense is, in itself, a clue that something is being protected which probably should not be protected. Then, with as much honesty as you can muster, ask yourself: what if they are right?

Most of the time, they are at least partly right. The mature response is to receive what is true, set aside what is not, and thank them for caring enough to risk the conversation. That response, repeated over a lifetime, is one of the chief means by which God grows His children into the people He wants them to be.

The Father Who Will Not Lose You

I want to close where I started — back at Acts 5, and through it, at the cross.

The reason judgment can be protective rather than destructive in the Christian life is that the destructive judgment has already been borne. Christ took the wrath that condemns. What remains for those who belong to Him is not punishment but its echo — the loving discipline of a Father who has determined, at infinite cost to Himself, never to lose His children. Ananias and Sapphira fell at the threshold of the church not because God was angry with His people but because He refused to let them drift. The same Spirit who slew the deceivers in Acts 5:5 and 5:10 is the Spirit whose shadow heals the sick in Acts 5:15. They are not two different operations of God. They are one operation, viewed from two sides. The hand that strikes is the hand that heals. The judgment that purifies is the love that protects.

When God judges you — when He brings something into your life that exposes a hidden sin, that breaks a pattern of self-deception, that humbles a pride you had not noticed, that closes a door you were trying to walk through — He is not condemning you. He is protecting you. He is doing the painful work that prevents the catastrophic work. He is sickening the patient to save the patient. He is, as the Puritan Thomas Watson put it, sending “a sun-shine shower, warmth with wetness, wetness with the warmth of His love, to make us fruitful and humble.”

The same logic should govern the way we treat each other. When someone who loves you names something painful — a parent, a spouse, a friend, an elder, a brother in Christ who has earned the right to speak — they are doing for you, in a smaller and more fallible way, what God has done for them. They are speaking the truth in love so that the truth, painful for a moment, can do its protective work over a lifetime. The mature Christian disciple is the one who learns, slowly and against every fleshly instinct, to receive these words as gifts. Not because the words are pleasant — they rarely are — but because the love behind them is real, and the protection they are aiming at is greater than the comfort they are disturbing.

So when you hear “don’t judge me” this week — I want you to recognize the lie buried in it. The lie is that being unseen is the same as being loved. The lie is that the absence of correction is the presence of grace. The lie is that the people who refuse to judge you are the ones who care most.

The truth is the opposite. The people who do judge you — humbly, carefully, lovingly, with logs removed and specks in view — are the people who actually love you. The God who judges you, paternally and protectively, is the God who has already determined never to let you go. The wounds of a friend are faithful. The kisses of an enemy are profuse.

Welcome the wounds. Be wary of the kisses.

And learn, as I am still learning, to give and receive judgment as one of the kindest things human beings can do for each other in a world full of people who would rather be flattered into the grave than loved into life.

Iam Kerr