Articles
What Hypocrisy Is Not
It is not uncommon for a Christian to struggle with a particular obligation before God. God’s expectations often run counter to our natural inclinations. For example, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you …” (Mt 6:44) are not easy directives to implement.
Now couple this with the warning of Scripture against hypocrisy. Jesus calls out the Pharisees repeatedly as hypocrites (Mt 6:5, 16; Lk 12:1). He especially scorches them in Mt 23:1-36, culminating in this dire warning: “Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell?” (23:33).
Now here is where we tend to trip ourselves up. We equate acting out of duty, when our feelings are not totally onboard, with hypocrisy. And then we talk ourselves out of doing the right thing with the “noble” excuse: “I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”
But hypocrisy is deliberate deception, the attempt to appear to others to be more godly than one really is. It is a display of piousness in search of praise. This is something quite different from going against the grain of my own feelings and treating my enemy well because I want to please Christ.
When we do what is right, we often find that our feelings will gradually become aligned with God’s higher expectations. We are not to be slaves to our emotions. Rather, we are to train them to respond appropriately to the situation at hand.
