His job - not ours

Don’t speak evil against each other, dear brothers and sisters. If you criticize and judge each other, then you are criticizing and judging God’s law. But your job is to obey the law, not to judge whether it applies to you. God alone, who gave the law, is the Judge. He alone has the power to save or to destroy. So what right do you have to judge your neighbor? (James 4:11-12)

He alone - those two words put all our criticism of each other's faith, or lack of it, into perspective, don't they? We have no right to judge whether the other person is 'following Christ' as they should. We are admonished to pray for one another, bear one another's burdens, and to ask God to fill each of us with all wisdom and knowledge. 

Are we guilty of judging whether a particular point in scripture is to be obeyed or not? If we exclude some portions, or even approach it with 'that applied then, but it doesn't now' kind of attitude, we might just be crossing over into territory that belongs to God alone. We don't have any right to exclude ourselves from complete and total obedience to the Word of God. 

Don't speak evil against each other - not meddling here - just repeating what God has already said! We find ourselves in very dangerous waters whenever we take on the position of 'judging another's faith', aren't we? We might not know their heart, but God does. What we do know is that we observe actions that cause us to question the depth of their faith, and that causes us to wonder if they are drawing close to Jesus or not.

When encountering those moments where we 'see' something in their behavior that suggests they aren't pressing into Jesus and his Word, we can pray. We can encourage. We can be an example. We cannot criticize them or attempt to bring conviction into their lives through our words or actions. Leave that up to God. He does a much better job with that than we ever will anyway. Just sayin!