That Your Love May Abound in Judgment

Everybody who knows her says the same word about her, and the word is warm.

She notices when somebody at the back of a room is not being spoken to, and she goes over. She has driven people to appointments she barely knows. Her number is in more phones than she is aware of, and she has never once been able to end a conversation that somebody needed to keep having.

This is not a fault and I want that clear from the start.

But there is a pattern now, and it has run four times in six years, and it goes the same way each time. Somebody arrives with a great deal of need and a great deal of charm. She gives everything. It escalates. The demands become strange. And it ends with her exhausted, financially worse off twice, and once genuinely frightened.

After the last one, somebody she respects used the word discernment, and told her, kindly, that she needs some.

And she has resisted it ever since. Not out of pride.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She thinks that becoming discerning would mean becoming somebody who assesses people at the door, and she would rather be hurt again than become that.

Read what Paul prayed over a church he loved

There is an opening prayer in Philippians, written to a congregation the writer is unusually fond of, and it asks for a specific thing.

And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment.Philippians 1:9

That your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment.

Read the grammar. Judgment is not a rival to the love. It is the direction the love grows in. He does not pray that they would love less and discern more. He prays that the loving would increase, and that the increase would carry knowledge and discernment inside it.

Which means the thing you have been refusing is not a substitute for your warmth. It is what your warmth is supposed to grow into, and a love that has not grown into it is not purer. It is younger.

Your discernment is love's growth rather than love's opposite, and Philippians 1:9 prays for both in one sentence over a church he was fond of. That is what the word actually asks for, not a correction I am handing you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who grows judgment inside a warm woman without cooling her.

Four times is information

Now the plain thing, and I will say it as somebody who is on your side and does not want a fifth.

The four are not a coincidence and they are not bad luck. There is a pattern of person who reads you accurately within about ten minutes, and there always will be, and your goodness is what makes you legible to them.

And the harm was not only yours. Twice you had nothing left for people who were quietly, undramatically in need, because the loud need had taken all of it, and undramatic people do not compete.

That is what love without judgment costs. Not just you. The others.

And nothing about growing wiser has ever cooled a heart He made warm. Scripture prays for love abounding and discernment together in one breath, and the Holy Spirit is not asking a generous woman to become suspicious.

What it actually looks like

Here is the practical piece, and it is smaller and warmer than you fear.

It is not screening people at the door. It is noticing the shape of a thing early and saying one honest sentence in the middle of it rather than three years in.

I can do this much and not that much. I am not able to lend money. I will come on Thursday and I cannot come on Sunday too.

Those sentences are not coldness. They are what a person with judgment sounds like, and everybody genuinely in need can hear them without being wounded, and that is the point. The four could not.

I am not giving you a test that identifies which people will harm you. There is no such test, and anybody who sells you one is selling you suspicion. I am telling you what Paul prayed and what one honest sentence does.

You are able to say one honest sentence and remain entirely warm, and the two were never in competition. Philippians 1:9 prays that love would abound in knowledge and in all judgment, and the Holy Spirit is the One who puts a true sentence in a kind woman's mouth.