What makes a hypocrite?
May 28th, 2008 by Nathan White
It is certainly tough to admit, but there is no doubt that the Christian faith has its hypocrites –even in the most pure of gospel preaching churches. Just as there was one evil Judas in the midst of eleven other righteous men, our churches, both small and great, would probably being doing extremely well if there were only one false convert per every twelve that profess faith. Certainly, some denominations and creeds breed more hypocrites than others, but make no mistake about it, all denominations, all churches, and all confessions are somewhat plagued by this sad reality.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I hate to even think about or discuss hypocrisy. We are certainly all still trapped in this body of sin, so from time to time we manifest hypocrisy to our confession –and that just hurts. But I’ve been thinking about the issue of hypocrisy lately, particularly because I’ve been reading the Puritans, who spoke a great deal on the matter.
Specifically, how can we identify if we are a hypocrite to true religion? Or, what warning signs can we look out for as evidence that we are heading down a path of hypocrisy? There is no doubt that hypocrites are extremely hard to spot, and that hypocrites themselves are often deceived from realizing that they are in fact a false convert (see Judas at the last supper or Simon the sorcerer for an example of this). But nevertheless, there are some things we can watch out for, and I’d like to mention a few of these things today.
Evidence that might suggest a heart of hypocrisy to the Christian Confession:
Lack of prayer, particularly private prayer
Prayer is the essence of true faith: reliance on, worship of, and glorifying in, God the Father through the merits of Jesus Christ. All professors pray when times are hard, before our meals, etc., but what will your private closet testify concerning you? Don’t be deceived by telling yourself that you really are one who prays when your closet-time would testify otherwise. This is probably one of the clearest indicators of hypocrisy.
Lack of continual repentance
We all stumble in many ways. Without confessing and forsaking our sins on a regular basis, our communion with God and the sensitivity of our conscience is severed. If you don’t live in a constant state of repentance, than you’ve probably forgotten your former cleansing, unless you’ve believed in vain.
Lack of worship, particularly private, but public as well
We have been saved to worship; the scriptures are clear in this regard. A lack of worship –through prayer, singing, meditating, serving, and obedience to other duties, both in private and with God’s people, is a clear indication of an unbelieving heart. Honoring the Lord’s Day/Sabbath is certainly at the foundation of this: regular, dedicated worship, and resting from our normal duties do to so.
Little love, humility, patience, kindness, etc., towards others
This might be a little obvious, but hypocrites are sometimes convinced that they can treat family members and other close ones any way they like just because they have an emotional or firm intellectual conviction of faith. How is your attitude at home when there are no outsiders around? What are you inclinations and habits in regards to how you treat others closest to you?
Little or no stance for truth in the face of error
Just as love characterizes the true believer, love and devotion to Christ will lead him to stand-up for, defend, and essentially fight for truth and Christ’s honor in the face of error. Don’t be mistaken, fighting for truth without an attitude of love and humility certainly defeats the purpose, just the same as loving without fighting for truth is also more harmful than helpful. But the true believer will not stand by indifferent to false doctrine.
Use of Free time
The true believer knows how precious time is, and that they have been put on this earth to redeem every moment of it. Again, how do you look like in private in this regard? When you’re left all to yourself, with no obligations to do anything, what do you gravitate towards in spending your spare time? It will testify of your devotion.
Use of Money
Just as your spare time goes to what you’re truly devoted to, how you spend your money testifies to what you’re devoted to. These things are simple and objective! Don’t complicate it by making excuses! Examine your life!
No victory over sin/no care to have victory over sin
This might be coupled with repentance above, but Romans 6 clearly testifies that the one who has died with Christ by faith has real victory over sin. Yes, we are saved from sin in THIS life, as we are saved from sin in the next. Clearly, this message is largely ignored in these times by the watering down/perverting of the gospel. But true believers progress in their sanctification and obtain victory over sin (and care about how their doing!). Hypocrites could care less as long as they are outwardly moral and have no scandalous sins that cause others to doubt their profession.
Secret Sins
“Who you are in private is WHO you really are”.
Love for the world
Pride. Love of self. Love of physical appearance. Love/devotion to material things. Love for sensual pleasures such as sex, food, excitements, distractions, etc. Where is your love for Christ, if indeed you claim He has saved you from the worst of all imaginable miseries?
The lack of proclaiming the gospel
The modern decision-oriented movement has made ‘witnessing’ into nothing more than inviting people to church. That’s not true witnessing; that’s not true evangelism; that’s not a gospel proclamation: it’s rather a cop-out. True believers impress Christ upon the consciences of unbelievers –and though it takes practice, and is often hard to do, they are always thinking/praying/looking for opportunities to do so. Hypocrites, however, are content with cop-outs and just plain silence for fear of offending others.
Lack of faith during trials
Hypocrites get angry towards God when things go wrong. They lack faith when the world falls apart around them and enter into behavior not congruent with the Christian faith. etc.
Lastly, and probably the biggest one:A lack of LOVE FOR CHRIST; lack of Christ-centerdness in religion
Love for His word as it comes from His mouth. Love for His Person and Work. Love for His gifts. Love for His image on others. Love for what He loves. There is a Christ-centeredness in scripture that is often overlooked and forgotten with all of our theology and books, with all of our easy-believism and shallowness, and with all of our distractions and cultural-Christianity. But Christ is all. He is the scriptures, He is the faith, He is our hope, He is our righteousness, He is the focus of our reading, our prayers, our witnessing, our worship, our devotion, our obedience, our singing, our partaking in the sacraments, etc. He is all and is the ultimate end of all things. The hypocrite has no regards for Christ outside of the lip-service necessary to profess faith in Him. Believers will be known by their love for Him, and centering all things in Him.
Conclusion:
These are just a few simple examples that I hope have been beneficial to you. Another big one, in concordance with this blog theme, is failure to disciple others –particularly husbands towards their wives and children, leaders in the church towards young or immature believers, etc. We’re all called to Shepherd; anything else is selfish and contradictory to Christ.
Certainly more ‘evidences’ could be listed, but I hope that these cut your conscience up as much as it did mine in writing this. Nobody is perfect, and you nor anyone else should suspect anything close to perfection (hence the life-long, constant repentance). So just as soon as you examine yourself in these matters, look to Christ who is our complete righteousness. Don’t dwell on yourself too long, and certainly don’t use these as a club to beat over the heads of others who you might ’suspect’ as being a false convert. Christ is a gracious and loving Master, and He welcomes even the worst of sinners.
“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” - 2 Cor 13
Nathan
I think a good sign for a hypocrite is not admitting we are one. We wouldn’t truly be repentant if we didn’t acknowledge our own hypocrisy in our lives.
Great post.
Thanks for these words of admonition and encouragement Nathan. This is an area that I must continually work on and make sure I am sensitive to. Draw near to God and He will draw near to us. When we do this hypocrisy tends furthur away.
You might scoff, but I really think the people who really live authentic and sincere Christian lives are the Amish. They are simple, humble and modest and care nothing for the world, and they look after each other while living a life of work, frequent prayer and austerity. It’s almost monastic. They didn’t even speak out with anger or revenge after a gunman murdered five of their children in a classroom.
Not everyone stays, of course, but from what I’ve encountered, hypocrisy is generally not a label I can attach to the Amish folk.
James,
I totaly disagree. I think that if there’s any group of people that are hypocrites, its the Amish. I’ve been at amish country. They are legalists in the true sense of the word. They only emphasize the external and not the internal. Recently, it has been made known that there has been a lot of immmorality behind the scenes there.
You cannot tell a hypocrite from how he “looks” or “acts.” Hypocrites don’t look like hypocrites. They look humble, they look spiritual, they look godly. Holiness has nothing to do with the way you dress, look, manner of living, or what kind of standards one has.
“Holiness has nothing to do with the way you dress, look, manner of living, or what kind of standards one has.”
So dressing in skimpy clothing or overly expensive clothing is “worldly” and not Christian, yet dressing simply is “all for show”?
Who lives up to your standard of being a Christian? John Calvin because of his correct theology? He also was not known as the “Pope of Geneva” for no reason: the man clearly had some questionable interior issues going on (lust for power, etc.)
If everyone’s a hypocrite and no behavior cannot be declared hypocrisy, this doesn’t seem like a very helpful post.
In all fairness, I live in Amish country. I believe that the separateness that they employ is a wrong understanding of the call to be not like the world. It is a typical man centered legalism that all men are prone towards coming out of a zeal for holiness–not necessarily a zeal for God Himself. It is a form of works righteousness. They do have a zeal for a holiness, but this zeal has become a god. Do not get me wrong. There is a sense in which I am envious of them. By shutting themselves up they do not have to deal with the problems of this world. But is that a dependence on God or is it a man manufactured self sufficiency—much like the monastics of old?
And yes, Calvin “may” have had some problems. But I think his reaction was to the wantonness of a Geneva in transition from Catholicism. He may well have been overbearing, but I think that we may be judging him a little rashly if we compare him with a pope in holiness—(which they weren’t at that time.) Remember also that the referring to him as a pope was made by his enemies, not those tending towards holiness.
James, there is much about the Amish life that I am envious of. I’ve often thought that Christians need to be more mindful of where they settle for the sake of creating a visible community where the world can see our love for one another, and where we truly co-operate in the care of our families and homes, not just worshiping together with the occasional fellowship. No, I’m not talking about creating and “pagan free” neighborhood. But it would nice if we lived close enough together whereby fellowship on our front porches (anyone have those anymore?) would be visible, and we would be intentional in drawing our unconverted neighbors to be welcome witnesses to our being “one so that the world may know that the Father sent the Son”.
However, the Amish community has gone too far in rejecting and separating from the outside world. I’ve spent time in true Amish areas off the beaten path (not the commercialized ones), and they would rarely look at you. The women would ALWAYS look away. None of this seemed all that humble to me. They’ve legislated the appearence of humilty but have rejected the substance. How can you spread the gospel that way?
Anyway, back to the post. Nathan, thank you for this fantastic reminder. I saved your post as a document and plan to interject some of this into our family alter time. And yes, Nathan, it did a samurai routine on my conscience as well.
I think we are talking about 2 seperate types of hypocrisy. Outward and inward. We can label this or that outwardly, and rightly so, but its the hypocrisy of the heart is what we suffer from the worst, yet it often receives the least attention.
“How can you spread the gospel that way?”
I know of one and have heard of several more people tell that once they became truly saved within the Amish faith, they felt they had to leave that faith (Amish) for it was not a true faith (works righteousness).
James,
“Holiness has nothing to do with the way you dress, look, manner of living, or what kind of standards one has.”
What I meant was this: Just because someone wears a certain article of clothing or chooses a certain style of living doesn’t mean that they are not hypocrites. Neither does it mean they are holy.
Hank–
Good to hear from you again, brother; hope all is well. I agree with your words.
James–
Why would you berate people here with such things as “Who lives up to your standard of being a Christian? John Calvin”? I can assure you this: whatever *the* standard of holiness is, it sure isn’t your attitude.
Nevertheless, we are talking about inward holiness, not just an outward appearance holiness. The Pharisees were the certainly the outwardly holy people of their day, but inwardly they were ravenous wolves. I agree with the others here that from what I’ve read/seen about Amish, they are big on outward holiness in what is often self-righteousness. IMO, often times the most outwardly religious/strict/counter-cultural religious zealots are so because their theology teaches them that they must *work* to *obtain* salvation by merit (see the Mormons for an example). When salvation is based upon works, you’d be amazed what people will do outwardly to try to prove to themselves, others, and God, that they have made themselves righteous. See the Monks for another example of this.
Wherever there are moral or spiritual norms, there will be hypocrisy. I don’t think it’s errant to say that no one completely lives up to the values they profess, even if they agree with and value those ideals. I’m not saying I like it or that we should trivialize it, but it seems to be the way things are, even among those whom you might consider “real believers”. Perhaps that plank in our own eye as mentioned by St. Paul is always going to be there, and hence, we must judge the specks of others in that light.
In terms of this faith vs. works issue, the more I read of it the less I understand it. Are people who are not normally disposed to a life of virtue supposed to simply act out on every base impulse until Christ cures them of their spiritual afflictions? If there remains a man of sin (and St. Paul acknowledges that this the case), I would think there must be some effort, some “striving”, in overcoming that in something other than a passive manner. One may not earn their salvation, but we are also told to “work out our salvation in fear and trembling” which I think implies that the there is a road towards sanctification. There will be a duration in our lives where the interior dispositions and the outward face we show to others are not going to be in sync.
If, however, you are deeming hypocrisy to be the type of self-glorifying show as seen in some televangelists who profit by appearing to be holy, that’s another story altogether!
Nathan, dear brother:
Thank you for penning these challenging words! They were much needed in my own life. God has used you to challenge me to the quick. Thanks for following God’s leading to write what He placed on your heart.
I’ve used this post on Pilgrim Scribblings. Trust that is O.K.
Keep writing the truth!
Your brother,
David Fisher
David–
You are very kind; thank you for the encouragement. O how I struggle with many of these things, and can only find comfort in looking to the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ. What a blessed Savior we have, huh? I’m thankful that maybe my convictions have blessed you and your readers. Press on my friend,
Nathan