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There is a word that plays a surprisingly important role in my life these days, and that word is hypocrite.
Nobody likes to think of themselves or anybody they like as a hypocrite, but in conversations about Christianity this word seems to come up all the time.
For example, If you are a person who does not particularly like Christianity and thinks it’s a bunch of baloney, there is a really good chance that when you talk about Christians, or talk about church, or talk about people like me, you say something like this--“Those people are a bunch of hypocrites.”
And what you might mean when you say that is that people like me are phonies--that Christians might love to look a certain way at church, but then when we go home, not only are we just as rotten as anybody else, in some ways we might be even more so.
And you know what? I think that in some ways you are absolutely right.
In some ways, Christians might be the most hypocritical people alive on planet earth today. There is very often a HUGE gap between the kind of things Christians like to say and the kind of lives Christians actually live.
And I'll tell you what I wish. I wish that I could give you some kind of grand and obvious argument showing how that’s actually not true. But I can't.
The claim that Christians talk about this perfect God who rescues people from sin and calls those people to live holy and transformed lives is true.
And the claim that Christians fail at that, and sometimes miserably fail at that... is also true.
So today I want to tell you what it’s like for me to be a hypocrite.
First off, to understand me as a hypocrite you have to understand that all the stuff I say about God and how great He is and how He is our only hope... I absolutely believe that stuff. I live for it, and I would die for it.
But here’s my problem. God is perfect and the life that He has called me to is amazing, but most days I do not feel very amazing.
To the contrary, I am and always have been a very normal person.
I am passionate about following Jesus, but I also get tired, sad, and depressed just as much or more than other people, and in the midst of all that I don't think I ever really represent Jesus in the world as well as I want to. So, as a result, even on my very best of days I am, in some way or other, a hypocrite.
And worse still, I’m not the only one. Every passionate Christian I know is like that, and every Christian in the Bible was like that.
For example, there was a guy in the Bible named Paul who was so amazing that almost half of the New Testament is either about him or written by him, but this is what he said about himself regarding this same problem:
In the Book of Romans, Chapter 7 in the Bible, Paul says,
"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. "
I have this memory from years ago of being young and struggling with life and going to a church where people were kind of hypocrites sometimes, and really wanting to know what Christianity was really about.
And I remember one night reading that passage, and feeling like in two sentences that this whole thing that we call Christianity just came to life for me, because it felt like those were the two most honest sentences I had ever read.
Here was a Christian IN THE BIBLE, and instead of pretending like they were better than they actually were, here they were struggling with the very honest reality of hypocrisy.
There are a lot of words in the Bible, but these two sentences opened my eyes like no other.
The passage goes on for a little while talking about the complexity and complication of being a Christian hypocrite, and then it ends with these words. It says,
"What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
Because here is the thing about Jesus that changes everything. Regardless of what we are, Jesus is no hypocrite. He was perfect, and honest, and amazing, and He still is.
The honest truth is that we are all hypocrites. And Jesus is our only hope. But, man, is he a good one.
