Every beauty pageant has contestants, and judges to determine the winners. Yet everyone is in a beauty pageant whether they sign up for it or not, and are beauty pageant judges whether they apply for this position or not. For there are social and cultural benefits to attractiveness, and those who fit the right template have advantages, both men and women. Is anyone unaware of this? Yet there is one who is qualified to judge beauty, and that is the one who made it to begin with. Only his judgment is righteous and true. Everyone else should make a deliberate effort to resign from the position of beauty pageant judge. 

Do you understand that there are different levels of spiritual development? I have called you from one degree of glory to another. Do you find it hard not to be judgmental toward those whom you regard as being less spiritually advanced than yourself? Beware when you think you stand. Shouldn’t you become less judgmental the more you mature? If maturity increases with age, perhaps you should refrain from judgment toward those who are no more advanced than you were at the same age. This is based on simple logic and it is only a small step from here to realizing that you are not in a position to judge someone else’s servant at all, and I am capable of doing a quick work in them.

Are you easily threatened? If someone challenges the validity of the Bible in one point that you cannot respond to, is your faith ruined? I want you to be stronger than that. I want you to know that your eternal destiny doesn’t depend on your ability to defend every verse in the Bible and the actions of every believer since it was written. You may lose the intellectual respect of your critics and false friends. Don’t be dismayed by what they think. Your eternal destiny doesn’t depend on their opinion of you either. Have I not promised to hold you in the palm of my hand where neither life nor death nor things above or below or principalities or powers shall harm you? Fear not, for not even a hair of your head will perish. 

In the beginning there was one commandment concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then there were ten, written by my own hand on stone tablets. This expanded to a large number still followed by observant Jews today. In my own teaching I reversed the expansion and said that all the law and the prophets were contained in two commandments, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and your neighbor as yourself. This contraction took another step at the end of my ministry when I introduced a new commandment, that my followers would love one another as I have loved them. So the commandments have come full circle and in the end there is only one. How is this a new commandment? How does it differ from the composite summary of all that has gone before?