NOTES for Co1 4:5
Paul speaks about the need to refrain from judging and evaluating a person. Obviously, here he means the same thing that Jesus Himself meant when He called His followers not to judge their neighbors. True servants of Christ are distinguished precisely by refraining from judgment and evaluation of their neighbors.
The issue, of course, is not the evaluation of specific actions or results of activity, without which no interaction with people is possible, but the evaluation of the person himself. Often we transfer the evaluation of a specific action of a person or of his spiritual state to the person as such, considering that he is exactly what he is at the given moment.
Meanwhile, people are capable of change, and the source of all change is the spiritual "I" of the person, the very thing that in the Bible is called the heart and that only God sees to the end, to the final depth. Therefore only He can evaluate a person adequately. We can adequately evaluate only specific words, actions, and results. But even in this case it is important not to use such evaluations to determine a person's place in one's own world, in the world of one's relationships.
In the end, God gives everyone an evaluation, and it is not at all important to Him what we think about one another. Not because we and our opinions are indifferent to Him, but because almost always our mutual evaluations are quite far from the reality that is open to Him. That is why Paul does not attach special importance to people's opinion of him and his ministry, and advises others to do the same. But in that case it hardly makes sense to demand from those around us that they take our opinions about them into account. At least when it is a matter of evaluating the person himself, and not his actions.
However, even when the matter concerns actions, it is important to keep in mind the motives that moved the person, and sometimes they are not at all easy to understand. And all the more, it is not worth determining a person's place in one's own world on the basis of his words, actions, or passing states, spiritual or psychological. Otherwise every person will inevitably now please us and now not, now seem close and understandable, now alien and distant, now we will consider him a friend, and now an enemy.
Meanwhile, in essence this very person may well be none of the things he seems to us to be. Of course, his states, words, and actions can and inevitably will affect the possibility of interaction with him, but such interaction is only a function conditioned by the situation. But to give a final evaluation to a person based on the ways and forms of his functioning is at least rash.
For it is often the case that spiritually empty people turn out to be extremely active and "correct," so that it may seem they are the very model of Christian life. But often such activists, having exhausted their strength and lost their former enthusiasm, prove bankrupt precisely spiritually, lacking within themselves that life of the Kingdom which gives meaning to all activity. Therefore the apostle advises not to judge and not to give evaluations until the day of the Savior's return and the triumph of the Kingdom: for only then will it become clear who has walked his path how, and who is truly worth what.