Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ.
The question is real simple and you only can answer it for yourself because God already knows so you want to be honest here. Are you a hypocrite? Are there things in your life that are hypocritical? But the reality of your life doesn't really match what's really on the inside.
And if you are, you're welcome to good company because we're all hypocritical in a way. My prayer for you is the same as it is for me. I would love us to start something where we can become authentic, just authentic. Hey, none of us have arrived yet. None of us are there.
It's OK. It's a journey for every one of us. It's a journey. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry, a fellowship Bible church located in Metairie, Louisiana.
Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again, he shows us how God's word meets our world. Starting in verse 16 and all the way through 22. Another characteristic of hypocrisy is squirming my way out of any promise I don't want to keep.
Squirming my way out of any promise I don't want to keep. The Pharisees turned this into an art. Watch what Jesus says. Woe to you. And what great words here. Blind guides. Now, I want you to stop for a moment.
Just think of those two words. What does a guy do? You see, you're going to be a guy. You're going to be a guy to the Grand Canyon.
You're going to be a guy wherever you're the guy. And you just happen to be blind. You see that the one thing you can't be if you're blind is likely a guy. Blind people need to be guided. He says, you're blind and you're a guide. He says, woe to you blind guides who say, whoever swears by the temple, that is nothing. Whoever swears by the gold of the temple is obligated.
This gets funny as you go on. What a Pharisee could do is if you say, are you really sure? Look, I'm telling you, I swear by the temple.
That means nothing. See, I didn't say I swear by the gold in the temple. If you swear by the gold in the temple, you're obligated. But I didn't say that. I just said I swear by the temple.
They invented all of these different phrases of swearing. I swear by the temple. I'm telling you the truth. Then I could get out of what I said. Watch what Jesus does with this. He said, you fools and blind men, which is more important, the gold or the temple that sanctified the gold? How about the gold? Think about forget spiritually.
What about logically? How could it be that you would say if you swear by the gold in the temple, you're obligated. But if you only swear by the temple, you're not. The gold is in the temple.
And what makes the gold special is the temple sanctifies it or sets it apart. He says, and whoever swears by the altar, that is nothing. But whoever swears by the offering on it, he is obligated. He said, you blind men, which is more important, the offering or the altar that sanctifies the offering? Therefore, whoever swears by the altar swears both by the altar and everything on it.
He says, and whoever swears by the temple swears by the temple and by him who dwells within it. Come on. See, what are they doing? What does a hypocrite do? What a hypocrite really does is they squirm out of any promise that they've made.
If it doesn't go the way they'd like it. Now, we would never do that, would we? No Christian has ever stood before God and people and committed their life to another individual and then reneged on it. No Christian would have ever done that, right? No, we do that kind of thing all the time. You see, we do that kind of thing all the time. Remember the vows?
Remember what they're called? Vows. That was the vow you made for the rest of my life.
Well, it's two years and six months. It's not going my way and I'm out. You see, it's not the unpardonable sin, but it is hypocrisy. You see, that's why authenticity is so important.
It's authentic. That you're real about what it is you say. Jesus says, whoever swears by heaven swears by both the throne of God and by him who sits on it. Apparently, a third example I didn't go into. They had a whole system of swearing about things and things they had no idea of keeping at all. You know, someone once said that promises are like babies.
They're easy to make, but they're hard to deliver. And I think we live in a culture where we don't have to do those kind of things. You see, hypocrisy runs in all. All of us are prone to these kind of things one way or another in our lives.
He moves on then to the next one. This one probably applies to a lot of us, making a big deal out of little things and ignoring the things of great importance. He says, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites. You tie the mint, the dill and the cumin. And have neglected the weightier provisions of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.
But these are the things that should be done without neglecting the others. The Pharisee had a little herb garden. You know, just one of those little things probably like we had, just a couple of little plants. But he was so religious, you see. He wanted to tell you, look, when I get a little mint leaf, I cut ten percent of it off and give it to God.
Or if I have ten mint leaves, I take nine for me and I give one to God. That's how right I am before God. Jesus said, wait a minute, what about justice?
What about mercy? What about faithfulness? What about the big things? Where are you when it comes to the big things of your life?
They ignored them. Micah, chapter six and verse eight in the Old Testament, love this verse. What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly before your God? Jesus said, you don't do any of those things. You tithe the mint.
You take some little thing and you tithe it and you make it out to something else. He said you should be concerned about justice or doing what is right. Jesus wasn't saying their micro was wrong. What he was saying is it's wrong if there's no macro.
You see, if there's nothing, if you're not for the most important thing, now we would never do that, would we? That's not us. Over the last 20 years, I don't even know what the number would be, but there's a very large number of churches that have split over music. They've split.
It's astounding when you think about it. They split. I just don't like those songs. I want to go to a place where I like the songs.
Okay. Other churches, by the way, have decided to solve it a different way. If you come to the 8 o'clock, we'll only do traditional hymns.
And if you come at 10, we'll do contemporary. That way you'll get what you want. That's tithing a mint. Didn't Paul tell us in Philippians to consider everybody else in the church as more important than ourselves?
Didn't he tell us that? If everybody else in the church is more important than me, what am I upset about? The only fight we should have is I'd say, you have your music, and you'd say, no, you have your music, and you have your music. We'd end up fighting over that. But that's not what they fight over. We tithe the mint.
I want to have my music. You see, that's what I want. We do the same thing. Jesus says that's hypocritical. You see, that's hypocrisy from his point of view. And we do those kind of things all the time.
He's not done them. In fact, notice what he says then in verse 24. He says, you blind guides, you strain out a net, and you swallow the camel. You've got to love that. You know, and that's what we do as people.
Now, see, you say, would I never do that? You live in a country where you freely come, assemble, and worship. And so you're all in the room, and you're here worshiping.
And we have, in this church, we have both heat and air conditioning. And this is a place where you come congregationally to meet with God. I hope you understand that, to meet with God. That's what corporate worship is. You meet God.
By the way, that's why I never do understand, by the way, why anyone comes late on a consistent basis. You're meeting God. You're worshiping God. You see, that's what you're doing. You come to meet him. And you know what? Inevitably, someone can say to me, not today they won't. You know, I think it was just a little too warm in there.
I think it was just a little too cold in there. You met God, and you're worried about 72 versus 75. That's tithing a mint. You see, you miss the whole point of what you're here for. Hypocrisy touches all of us, not just some of us.
We do things just like this. Well, he moves on in verse 25 then. It says, one other thing about a hypocrite is their faith is all for show. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites. You clean out the inside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup of the dish.
Said the outside, it may become clean also. You see, all they cared about was how they looked at people. Look how religious that man is. Earlier in Matthew 6, Jesus says, whenever they fasted, they put charcoal on their face and eyes. So it looked like they were just so emaciated.
So that you would say, how do you do that? Oh, I love the Lord so much, look at me. Jesus hated that stuff.
He just hated it. See, it's an interesting thing when you think about what it is they're actually doing here. Now, once again, we wouldn't do that, would we?
I think we would. See, I think sometimes we say things like, you know what, I'm a teacher. I'm a teacher. I teach in a small group or I teach in the learning center or I teach people on Thursday nights somewhere, whatever it is, I'm a teacher. Or, you know what, I've been to four mission trips around the world.
I went to four mission trips around the world. But I'm addicted to pornography. You see, I gossip every chance I get.
I can't wait to tell a bad story about someone else in this church. Or I'm full of envy and greed for what other people have. You see, you know what that is? That's hypocrisy. That's not my words. That's the words of Jesus Christ. That's hypocrisy of what we're doing.
We all face this kind of thing. It's not something just for the scribes and the Pharisees. We want our faith to show. Jesus said, look, clean up the inside. The outside will take care of itself.
That's the way this works. Then he says in verse 27, very much related to it, woe to you scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites. He said, you're like whitewashed tombstones, which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they're full of dead men's bones and uncleanness.
So you two outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you're full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. One of the things that they would do once a year in Israel is in their graveyards or sometimes just where the stone is on the front of a cave cut out of a stone, there were different ways people were buried. Once a year you would go to the gravestone and you would whitewash it. You would take whitewash and you would clean it all up and whitewash to make it look really, really nice.
Jesus is not condemning that, but he is utilizing it. Here was this point. You could go to your headstone once a month of someone you've loved that departed and make it look perfect, like the day it was there the first day they died. It can look perfect, but you know what? Behind that or under it, they're dead. That's just a dead corpse decomposing.
That's what it is. You can do anything to the tombstone you want, but you can't change the fact they're dead inside. Jesus uses that analogy to describe a hypocrite, whitewashed tombstones. They look great on the outside, but inside they're spiritually dead.
They have no life whatsoever. That's what Jesus Christ is saying here of how this works for them. Then he goes on and he says to them, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites. He says, for you build tombs of the prophets and adorn monuments of the righteous and say if we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would have been partners with them in the shedding of blood of the prophets.
We would not have been partners with them. Jesus is going to go after them here in a very unique way. Any time they had a tomb or someone from a prophet, they would celebrate it and decorate it. They would be the kind of guys that would say, you know, Isaiah was a wonderful, wonderful man. He was a great prophet of Israel. Now, by the way, the people of the day of Isaiah sawed him in half with a wooden saw. See, and they said, we'd never do that. We venerate Isaiah.
No, they don't. That's what Jesus is saying. Just as the generation of hypocrites executed Isaiah, this generation of hypocrites is going to crucify Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
See, they're going to do exactly the same thing. They hate what he stands for. Hypocrites hate the truth.
They hate grace. All those kind of things, and that's what Jesus is saying here. He says, so you testify against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. He says, fill up then the measure of guilt, he said, of their fathers. He said, you serpents, you brood of vipers. How are you going to escape the sentence of hell? Wow, that verse. He calls them serpents and vipers, and he tells them exactly an extremely important point. Hypocrisy will always bring the judgment of God.
Always. He said, how will you escape the sentence of hell? That's what they were like. He says, he warns us from that. Then he goes on and says this. Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes. Some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in the synagogues and persecute from city to city. That's the whole story of the early church.
That's what they did. It was the Jews chasing down every one of these men they could and persecuting them. He said, so that upon you may fall the guilt of the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. There's a lot of scholars trying to figure out who this Zechariah is.
We're not really sure. He's the son of Bariah. Jesus knows who he is. The reason is there's over 20 different Zechariahs in the Bible.
It's a really common name. So what Zechariah was, the point that Jesus was making is you guys are murderers in your heart, from Abel, Genesis, to Zechariah, the end. The whole span of the Old Testament, it's always been the same.
You've murdered the people of God, those who are righteous, and nothing's gonna change here. That's why he says that. And then he says to this. He says, truly I say to you, all these things will come upon you in this generation. That's his prophecy. It's an amazing statement on his part. He's prophetic here.
What he is telling him is this. You're gonna crucify me. And God's gonna deal with you. And Israel is not gonna be in Babylon for 70 years.
It's gonna be taken out of the land in AD 70 by the Romans, and you'll be dispersed all over the world for 2,000 years. That's what he's telling him. He said, and by the way, you wonder, what's the motive? Why is Jesus telling him all these different things? Now you see the motive in verse 37. He says, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her.
And how often I wanted to gather your children to gather the way a hen, he says, gathers her chicks under her wings. Jesus is an equal opportunity lover. For God so loved the world. He loves the Pharisee. You see, he loves the scribe. He says, I wanna gather you together.
But notice the last words of verse 37. And you were unwilling. I wanted to. I wanted to. But you wouldn't let me.
Because you wouldn't believe. He says, behold, your house is left to you desolate. And it's been desolate for a long, long time. I say to you, from now on you will not see me until you say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the second coming of Christ. You see, that's what hypocrisy means to the Lord. That's what he's talking about. There is nothing in the New Testament that gets Jesus more upset than hypocrisy.
You see, it's funny. Jesus contracts all kinds of people who are sinning overtly. And he's nothing but gentle and kind with them. He offers them the grace of God. But the hypocrite, Jesus goes after the hypocrisy because the hypocrisy stops other people from entering into a relationship with Christ. Hypocrisy is contagious. Religiosity is part of who we are.
Jesus says, we've got to deal with it. In other words, whatever we are, we have to be least one thing. We just have to be authentic.
That's what he's saying. Just be authentic. Just be who you are. Don't try to be somebody else. The hypocrite wants to make salvation as complicated as possible. Take advantage of people for their own personal gain. The hypocrite wants to squirm out of any promise they can that they don't want to keep. They want to make a big deal out of little things and ignore the most important things in life. They want their faith to show. They want to look good to others no matter what the cost is. And they pretend that they're better than other people even when all the evidence is contrary to that. That's hypocrisy. That's what happens to us all.
The question is real simple. And you only can answer for yourself because God already knows so you want to be honest here. Are you a hypocrite? Are there things in your life that are hypocritical that the reality of your life doesn't really match what's really on the inside?
And if you are, you're welcome to good company because we're all hypocritical in a way. And my prayer for you is the same as it is for me. I would love us to start something where we can become authentic.
Just authentic. Hey, none of us have arrived yet. None of us are there.
It's okay. It's a journey. For every one of us, it's a journey. You know, it's pretty simple, but all we have to do is speak the truth and love to each other. We just need to be truthful. Ask yourselves the question. Anytime you do anything for the Lord, am I doing this so that other people can see and notice?
Because I'm telling you that's evidence of hypocrisy in your lives. I need to find out what they think. I want to know what they think of everything. We need to become authentic people. And hopefully, we'll be able to make strides in that direction. Let's pray. Father, my prayer request is very, very simple. I just ask each one of us to look in our own heart and ask ourselves the hard question.
Are there elements of hypocrisy in my lives that I want to deal with, that I want out of my life? And if there are, Father, we want to acknowledge and confess those to you. We know you are faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And Father, we want to be authentic in what we really believe. Father, that's the goal for this next year, that we begin to move the needle spiritually in our lives.
We begin to change as people for our good and for your glory. In Christ's name, amen. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online. At that website, you will find a link to our website at oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.
At that website, you will find not only today's broadcast but also many of our previous audio programs as well. At Fellowship in the Word, we are thankful for those who financially support our ministry and make this broadcast possible. We ask all of our listeners to prayerfully consider how you might help this radio ministry continue its broadcast on this radio station by supporting us monthly or with just a one-time gift. Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word 4600 Clearview Parkway in Metairie, Louisiana 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our website fbcnola.org.
That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online. Or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all of this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt, thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word.
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