SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY HYPOCRITICAL PEOPLE

Let's be authentic! I'm as anxious as you are about digging into what it means to be real people, but experience tells me that we can't start examining authenticity until we've confronted hypocrisy. We won't take seriously the practices of a sincere faith until we see the danger of insincerity. And believe me, there is a lot of pretense out there. All of us know people who wear masks; acting like they're something they're not. But if we're not careful, hypocrisy is an easy act to put on ourselves.

It would be massively hypocritical and truly inauthentic of me to race into this subject without stopping to disclose my own battles with hypocrisy. While, by God's grace, there is nothing "behind the curtain" that would make you want to throw this book in the fireplace, I have had seasons in my life since high school where my "public" outpaced my "private" and led inevitably to relational fall-out and bitter tears. Like Peter after his 3-peat denial "went out and wept bitterly," I have felt the sting of being for Christ and others far less than I desired to be. I have lost my cool with treasured staff. I have struggled to forgive when extended family has hurt me, and I have neglected my wife and kids for brief periods when the demands of opportunity out-shouted personal sanity. I have seen a few things a man of God should not look at and handled pressure in ways that protected self instead of honoring others. I have even had some seasons where my neglect of the disciplines included here has ravaged my soul, requiring me to crawl back for fresh mercy and renewed pursuit. What I have never done, by God's grace, is refuse His discipline, or harden my heart to His calls for humility, confession, and reconciliation, both vertically (with Him) and horizontally (with others).

Nothing will shred your soul faster than acceptance of hypocrisy, so let's deal head-on with the matter of this authentic opposite. We can't read Matthew 23 attentively without feeling just a little uncomfortable, because Jesus didn't mince words when it came to hypocrisy. He went hard after it. The language of this passage is unparalleled in all of the words that came from the mouth of Jesus Christ.

The first verses are a backdrop for everything that happens: "Then Jesus said to the crowds and to His disciples, 'The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat ...'" (v. 1–2). In other words, Jesus recognized that the current religious leaders had inherited Moses' authority. They were supposed to be guardians of the Law, not re-shapers of God's instruction. They had no license to revise or rewrite what God said.

Once Jesus acknowledged the leaders' position, He cautioned about thoughtless obedience: "... so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice" (v. 3). The Pharisees could quote Scripture with the best of them; but their personal lives were a contradiction, not to be imitated. "They tie up heavy burdens (One translation says, 'They bind up'), hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger" (v. 4). Picture someone filling a large backpack with rocks, tying odd but heavy stuff all over the outside of the pack, and then instructing you to pick it up and carry it joyfully while they stand back and watch you stagger down the road.

"They do all their deeds to be seen by others" (v. 5). The Pharisees were famous for putting on a good show in public while they exempted themselves from their own rules in private. Failure of integrity at the leadership level leads to a casual and even arrogant attitude toward integrity at other levels. If the leaders can get away with this stuff, why not the rest of us? Unchallenged, sham-living at the top results in sham-living all the way to the bottom!

"For they make their phylacteries ..." (v. 5). Devout Jewish people wore special headbands with a little box attached that looked like a headlamp. Inside were small scrolls with meticulously copied portions of Scripture. Their outfits were ostentatious, showing all who saw them they were set apart and special. "I love the Bible so much I'm wearing it!"

Over the centuries, the Israelites transformed Deuteronomy 6:8 from a vivid command into a hollow reenactment of God's truth. The entire context was about God's law and the fact that it was supposed to be the subject of continual meditation, conversation, and obedience:

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Instead of being as signs or as frontlets (as in, always immediately accessible to you), snippets of God's laws had become trinkets worn for show. The symbols had replaced what they were intended to symbolize. Today's version might be, I love God's Word—I own fifteen Bibles—but no, I don't actually read any of them.

Jesus continued in Matthew 23:6–7, "... and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others." Their role as teachers had become all about them and the prestige that went with the position rather than their responsibility before God! Jesus shifted the emphasis back where it belonged. "But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers" (v. 8). The messenger is nothing; the message is everything. "And call no man your father on earth ..." No religious leader is to be called father. How clear is that? Don't call people "father" for "... you have one Father who is in heaven" (v. 9).

"Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted" (vv. 10–12). Now as Jesus was saying these things (remember from verse one) to the crowds and to His disciples, the scribes and the Pharisees were listening in. And their mouths were falling open. Then Jesus turned His attention toward them directly and used the strongest language of denunciation in the entire New Testament to address Himself to the subject of hypocrisy.

Jesus said, "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees ..." He will repeat that word woe seven times in the verses that follow. The Greek, ouai, is not so much a word but a heart cry of anger, pain, and denunciation....