What Made Jesus Mad?Muestra

Jesus wasn’t just uncomfortable with hypocrisy. Hypocrisy made Jesus angry. What I find so difficult about this issue is that I’m 100 percent certain people don’t set out to be hypocrites. Neither did these dirty-cup, whitewashed-tomb contemporaries of Jesus. It never happens on purpose. 

It is the nature of sin in our lives that always leads us to hide. When Adam and Eve first brought sin into this world, the first thing they did was hide: They “heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” (Genesis 3:8) 

Hypocrisy is about hiding. How we appear on the outside is hugely irrelevant to what’s on the inside. 

The church has always been full of hypocrites. It always will be full of hypocrites, because the church is full of people, and all people are hypocrites to some degree. Trust me, I’m a hypocrite. It’s better to just admit it up front. The problem with lying to myself about my own sinful, dirty cup – the problem with trusting in myself that I am righteous – is that I can’t ever get better if I am not honest with myself. If you are not honest with yourself, you are stuck right where you are. If you’re not honest with yourself, it’s a lid to your growth. He already knows all the dirty and dead junk inside your heart and has zero interest in how you seem on the outside. 

Where is God challenging you to take off your mask and deal with junk on the inside? How have you tried to create a person on the outside who masks what’s going on inside?