“Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.”

Luke 6:37-39

The latter part of these verses is often used to talk about money and little else. I think that is a pity. Look at the flow of the passage, and you will see that this is talking about all of life. At the heart of the kingdom of God is the grace of God. The coming of the kingdom meant we get what we don’t deserve. We live everyday in a relationship with God where the measure of our blessing is Jesus and not ourselves. That is what grace is.

Yet, at the same time, the more we give the kingdom of God to our brother, the more of the kingdom we have ourselves. Moreover, if we withhold the kingdom from our brother, we withhold it from ourselves.

This passage begins with saying Don’t judge and you won’t be judged. Don’t condemn and you won’t be condemned. Does this mean that we ignore right and wrong in people’s lives? Does this mean anything goes? If we read the entirety of Jesus’ message, we will see that He never taught such a thing. However, these words warn that we should not trap our brother in a system where he gets what he deserves. Rather we should both give and expect grace. We should expect God to love our brother when he does not deserve it. We should expect God to forgive our brother when he does not deserve it. Furthermore, it is grace that sets our brother free not condemnation. The result is that when we can see God’s grace for our brother, we can see it for ourselves.

Jesus goes on to talk about forgiveness. The same principle applies. If we don’t give the gift of forgiveness, we will have trouble receiving the gift of forgiveness. Here we see that our relationship with God is very much related to our relationship with each other. If God has forgiven someone, and we don’t, who do we have a problem with? we not only have a problem with our brother, we also have a problem with God.

We see this in the ministry of Jesus and the coming of the kingdom of God. Grace was breaking forth in the Person of Jesus Christ. One of the worst things you could do was stand in the way of grace. Jesus had more rebukes for those who stood in the way of grace than He did for the worst sinners of the day. Grace was coming, but it was coming with a warning. If you stood in the way of what God was doing, you could get flattened. That is a lot what this passage is about.

Finally, we get to the passage we hear so much about. “Give and it shall be given to you.” This is not just about money. If we participate in God’s grace towards our brother, it opens the door for greater grace in our own lives. Not only that, it opens the door for true happiness. The more selfish we are the more unhappy we will be even if we have everything. Yet, giving people are happy people no matter what. Participation in God’s grace towards another human being fills our hearts in a way nothing else can.