Romans 14:4
Romans 14:44Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
JWs treat as a warning against judging fellow Witnesses on matters of conscience — but in practice, the Watchtower's elder-led judicial committees stand as the authorised exception to Paul's rule, examining the brother's spiritual standing through observable behaviour as the basis for reproof or removal.
Paul's question — "Who are you to judge the servant of another?" — is the apostolic limit on community judgment. The brother's standing before God is not the elders' to verify week by week through performance metrics; it is between him and his Lord. And Paul adds the load-bearing promise: "he will be made to stand, for Jehovah can make him stand" (NWT 2013) — the perseverance is divine, not procedural. The community's role after a fall is restoration in gentleness (), burden-bearing (), and mutual confession () — not surveillance and graded reinstatement. Use this verse to expose the structural critique: the public-reproof comment-restoration system replaces the Lord's keeping with the elders' grading.
The NWT 2013 inserts "Jehovah" at the end of the verse — "for Jehovah can make him stand" — where the underlying Greek reads ho kurios ("the Lord"). In context, the Lord here is Christ (the preceding verses speak of the Lord under whom the believer stands or falls — Christ the master, not the Father directly). The insertion of "Jehovah" obscures Paul's Christological point: Christ is the master who keeps his servants standing. The doctrinal cost is small here because the verse functions primarily for the church-discipline argument, not for deity, but the insertion is a NWT pattern worth noting.