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I. THERE IS IN US A CAPACITY OF JUDGING OURSELVES. We can overlook our own acts and feelings; we can pronounce sentence upon them. It would be no mercy, but a great degradation, if we were excused from this jurisdiction.

II. THE LORD WILL NOT EXCUSE US FROM IT. He takes the office which we abdicate. He judges when we will not judge.

III. THIS CAPACITY IS BLUNTED BY CENSORIOUSNESS.

1. The besetting sin of the Corinthians was that of judging others. They were ever determining that this man was not so wise or so spiritual as themselves. And on this very account they could not judge themselves; the faculty lost its edge; it exhausted itself in unprofitable, unlawful efforts. It was ever busy looking outward for motes; the consciousness of the beam within became continually less alive.

2. Most of us are agreed that we live in a critical rather than in a creative age. Politicians, artists, religious men, all: alike are critics; some censors of their predecessors as well as of their contemporaries. And just as it was with the Corinthians, we have lost to a very great degree the power of judging ourselves.

IV. HOW IT MAY BE RESTORED (ver. 32).

1. Much is said in pulpits about the blessed effects of God's discipline upon men. Some of the very best are constrained to say, "Suffering has brought forth an amount of evil in us which we did not know there was in us before." And thanks be to God it did! Now you know Him and yourselves a little better than you did before, For it is this revelation of what is dark in us which drives us to His Light. God's judgments are not mere punishments, but are meant to awaken in us that slumbering faculty without which we are not truly men, because we are not truly showing forth the image of God. He comes amongst us that our criticism may be turned to a more practical and glorious service, that we may not "be condemned with the world."

2. What is the condemnation from which this judgment rescues us? The world, considered as apart from God, is condemned to a very hopeless kind of darkness. Its members cannot see any light which should guide their own footsteps, for they confess no light but what proceeds from themselves. All God's chastisements, therefore, are to purge the Church of its worldly elements, not by making if, censorious and exclusive (for there are essentially worldly elements), but by making each man see in himself all the evil which he has detected in his brother.

(F. D. Maurice, M.A.)

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KJV: For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.

WEB: For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep.