mercy

Mercy triumphs over judgment. James 2:13

One of the issues of our day is Fake News. Now, there’s nothing new about fake news. It’s just exposed in our day that your fake news is interfering with my fake news. So the realization that there’s fake news out there becomes unavoidable.

Fake news annoys people because we want to believe that our positions and decisions are based on facts rather than hype and spin. When we’re forced to admit that any news we hear or see is possibly, even likely, to be fake at some level, it makes us uncomfortable. And that’s exactly why our judgments of each other are so dangerous.

Our judgments of others is based on fake news; incomplete information; spin and assumption based on biases that fit in with our preconceptions. We don’t know all the facts; we make assumptions about why people are behaving the way they are with unreliable and sketchy data. Therefore the one we judge can’t even get a fair trial in our minds or hearts/attitudes.

So it’s no wonder Jesus drew His followers’ attention away from judgment and toward love. You might think Love and Judgment don’t have much to do with each other, but they are close opposites, so they have more to do with each other than we might think. (more…)