HYPOCRITES IN THE CHURCH

MATTHEW 23:1–36

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces

(Matthew 23:13)

One criticism frequently aimed at the Church is that it is an organization full of hypocrites. No one would deny that hypocrisy is indeed a sin, but it is important to understand what specific kind of sin it is.

The Greek word from which hypocrisy comes refers to the play-acting involved in the theater. A good actor was a “hypocrite,” but in time, the word came to describe people who are guilty of intentional forms of deception.

More specifically, a hypocrite is someone who publicly and indignantly denounces certain sins, while secretly he does them himself. A hypocrite pretends either to be more righteous or less sinful than he really is. In this sense, we do see a lot of hypocrisy in the Church.

Where hypocrisy comes from

The Christian Church is the only institution in the world that declares itself to be a group of people who are sinners. You would think, then, that no one would accuse us of hypocrisy, since we have already announced our condition to the world.

Once we are in the Church, however, we realize that we are called to stop sinning and conform to the law of God. We are not supposed to scandalize the Church by wicked behavior. Because God’s standards are so high and so holy, though, believers do fall short of them.

The two forms of hypocrisy

We can do one of two things. We can take God’s law and try to bring it down to our standards. That is the case today. We are in an unprecedented age of easy-believism, where obedience is not a priority. The dream now is how God is going to make me rich and happy, not how I am going to serve Him by giving my life to Him. This is one form of hypocrisy, since we are operating deceitfully about who God is and what He has called us to do.

The other form of hypocrisy is to pretend to live at a higher level of obedience than we actually do. There is so much pressure to achieve a certain level of godliness, that if we haven’t achieved it, we may pretend that we have. Either form of hypocrisy is sin which believers must guard against.

CORAM DEO

Now in prayer and throughout the day, ask God to search your heart, revealing hypocrisy in any form. Freely acknowledge your guilt, asking God to forgive you of religious pretense.

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