Reflective Questions for Personal Devotion and Communal Fellowship –
Sermon – ‘The Judgment: There is Only One’
When you hear the word ‘judgment’, what do you first think and feel?
How has the concept of the ‘judgment of God’ affected your experience of God and your experience of yourself?
Have there ever been times when you felt judged by someone else? By yourself?
Have you ever felt judged by God? What does God say to you in those moments?
What does being judged, by God or others (or yourself!), feel like? Did it feel right? Wrong? Helpful? Harmful?
Pastor Peter calls back to the early Church, pre-Augustin, which thought that God’s judgment was one with His love— as opposed to an Augustinian division between mercy and justice. What do you think of this understanding / re-understanding of God’s judgment?
What are the ways that we humans, and our laws and cultures, judge and ‘do justice’? What would Jesus—The Light and The Judgment— say about them?
Jesus Christ is the judgment of God, and when you and everyone else are reconciled with God— in love—it is justice. How does this judgment differ from the judgment of the world? How does it affect your soul, body, life, and sense of self?
Judas and Paul both were men who ‘judged the judgment’, and yet Jesus pursued them. Have you ever ‘judged the judgment’? How did God reach you in this experience?
Written by Ben Harney
For use by The Sanctuary and Relentless Love communities; to be paired with Pastor
Peter Hiett’s autumn sermon series; and used for solitary devotion or in small
groups/fellowship.