With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
How many times have we heard unbelievers reject Christianity because there were “too many hypocrites in the church?” And the standard response has been that, regardless of the behavior of Christians, our decision determines where we spend eternity — point and counterpoint. I’ve yet to hear anyone acknowledge the fact that hypocrisy is a serious issue in the church.
Rather than keeping a salvation tally sheet (13 Heaven - 42 Hell), shouldn’t we who claim Christ begin to examine our own behavior 24/7? A professor friend of mine said that, over the years, many of his students would come back to class from their part-time jobs as waiters and report that “Christians” were among the worst patrons.
They would ceremoniously pray over their meals, then proceed to be demanding, arrogant, loud, abrasive, rude — and lousy tippers!
In the parable of the sheep and goats, Jesus tells about judgement day, where the criterion was not whether your halo was on straight, but rather how you treated those around you. Not your church attendance record, your faithfulness to the choir, your passing out of tracts (witnessing?) or your prayer journal. How did you care for those you encounter every day — family, friends, so-called friends, strangers, enemies?
Are we really who we claim to be? Hypocrisy means that we deceive others by our demeanor, when our actions speak otherwise. What truly sets us apart from the world is not our Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free card, but rather our persona of peace and compassion that emanates from a truly changed heart.
Our example is Jesus Christ, who demonstrated a genuine love for everyone, but a general distrust for the religious right, who didn’t love everyone. His relationship to his heavenly Father was the pattern for our relationship with the same Father. And both of them saw the future flower bursting forth from the worst of weeds.
The Apostle James writes that true religion is “to look after orphans and widows in their distress.” Accordingly, the whole of religion centers around marriage and family — the core relationships that set us apart from the lower creation. The church has the mandate to heal person-to-person problems — not to become part of the problem. You can’t throw programs at ugliness. You must meet it, individually, with love and understanding.
I believe that good and evil will not coexist forever. Evil will certainly remain strong during my lifetime and many generations to come. But God’s love is stronger. He is not willing that any shall perish, the Bible says. We must not give up on loving. We must be determined to give religion a new name. We must show the world that we are becoming like the one who taught us to love. Only then will the word hypocrisy be listed as an archaism in the dictionary.
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