Every Christian can be empowered by the Holy Spirit through a revelation of Jesus Christ and how He causes us to respond in love and compassion towards others. To live a life in the Spirit will always cause us to bear fruits of love and blessing and never of judgemental behaviour.
The Bible is of great benefit to us and can be applied to our lives in many ways. It helps us grow more spiritually mature by being a tool for teaching and correction. It strengthens our souls and spirits by assuring us of God's steadfast love. And though the Bible can be used in many ways, it can also be misused in many ways as well.
Many people see the Bible as a great magnifying glass to look into the lives of other people in order to highlight their sins and struggles, while neglecting to hold their own hearts up to the same level of microscopic inspection. The saddest part is that such people think that this glorifies God, as if judgemental behaviour and legalism were facets of the fruit of the Spirit. But God never included cold critical attitudes towards others as one of the fruits of the Spirit.
In fact, Galatians 5:22 makes it clear that the fruit of the Spirit is love. When we receive the Spirit of God, we act in compassion and love towards others. That's not to say that we don't speak the truth in love through rebuke and correction, but if you really look into the various ways that the contemporary "Bible basher" rebukes and corrects, it's very obvious that many of them do not do it with love as a motivation.
Often sometimes, we Christians can force verses down people's throats as a means to prove ourselves or even feed our ego, and as a result there is division and strife, and a lot of people thoroughly turned off the Christian faith. God has never desired disunity and broken relationships. In fact, God longs to restore people's relationships with Him and towards each other.
Does the Holy Spirit help us weigh and understand God's Word more? Most definitely, He does! But we are mistaken if we think that just because we know scriptures and can use them to point out people's mistakes, that this necessarily equates to moving in the Spirit. The Bible, in it's fullest essence speaks only of the acceptance we now have in Christ because of what God has done to bring us back to Him.
God takes sin seriously and there is an avenue to call out sin. But moments we do so must always be built in the context of relationship and on the foundation of love. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. All these things will bring forth only the motivation to speak and act in love towards others, not acerbic judgement motivated more by self-righteousness than seeing a brother or sister in Christ lovingly restored.
