Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Fight Against Hypocrisy | New Testament | Mark 7

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Hypocrisy is one of the biggest reasons people feel turned off to Christianity. Why is hypocrisy such an issue for Christians? Where does it stem from? Is there any cure for hypocrisy? In today's episode, Keith looks to Mark 7 to discuss the key to fighting hypocrisy. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Mark 7

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I have a friend who's really open to conversations about faith, but who will be the first to tell you that he is not a Christian. Several years ago, this friend and I were waiting to pick our kids up from practice, when out of nowhere, he said he hated how hypocritical Christians are. This sent him on a brief rant about all the ways Christians turn him off to Jesus.

I totally get it. Sometimes the behavior of those who call themselves Christians can be an obstacle keeping some people from Jesus. I said to my friend, the more you talk about how much you dislike hypocrisy, the more you sound like Jesus. Now, he was surprised to hear that, to say the least. He thought his disdain for hypocrisy was a reason to reject Jesus, and I was telling him that his disdain for hypocrisy was making him sound more like Jesus. I'm not sure anyone has taken a more public and forceful stand against hypocrisy than Jesus. And one place we see that play out is Mark Chapter 7 in a discussion that Jesus had with the Pharisees about the Old Testament law. See, for a few centuries before the time of Jesus, some Jewish groups, including the Pharisees, had created laws that governed people's behavior.

While these laws were not found in the scriptures, they were wrongly given scriptural authority. And Jesus called these man-made laws. Or he called them the tradition of the elders or human traditions. These human traditions became a big issue when the Pharisees started prioritizing their own traditions above God's clear commands. In Mark 7.9, Jesus says to the Pharisees, You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. Ouch. The Pharisees accepted the oral law as equally authoritative as the written law.

By Jesus' day, adherence to the unwritten oral tradition, was as important for the Pharisees as was adherence to the Torah itself. The Torah was understood to be policy. Its commandments declared what God decreed, but not always how those decrees were to be fulfilled. So they believed that the Torah was too ambiguous, too vague to govern the Jewish community. That's why they created the oral tradition, because that prescribed in exact detail how the Torah was to be fulfilled in actual circumstances. But in reality, the tradition of the elders tended to shift the focus off the Torah and onto peripheral matters that either hid or distorted the true intent of the law. So the Fifth Commandment says to honor your father and mother.

And of course, that includes helping to take care of them, helping meet their needs when they are no longer able to do it themselves. But the religious leaders had created loopholes that allowed people to keep their money instead of spending it to care for their elderly parents. One theologian said about these Jewish laws, a man goes through the formality of vowing money to God, not that he may actually give it to God, but in order to prevent another person from having it. So they created all these loopholes that allowed them to feel good about themselves and make them look like they were obeying God's commands. Well, really, they were just living for themselves, rejecting God's will, and in this case, keeping their money for themselves. And for this, Jesus calls them hypocrites. Why hypocrites? Well, because they were pretending to be something they weren't. They were pretending to follow God's instructions while they really did what they wanted to do. The word hypocrite

originated in the world of theater. Actors wore masks to play different characters, to take on different roles. So a hypocrite is someone who is playing a part. A hypocrite pretends to be something they aren't. A hypocrite lacks sincerity. Let's take a hypothetical example. Let's take a hypothetical example. Let's say that a consultant came to a church to help the staff develop some ministry skills and handed out some notes for his talk. And let's say hypothetically, Patrick thought the consultant's talk was a little boring, but he didn't want to appear like he wasn't paying attention. That would be rude. No one wants to be thought of as rude, especially if you work in a church. So let's pretend that Patrick held his notes up so that it appeared like he was looking at them. But really, he was doing

email on his phone, which was hidden behind the nose. If that hypothetical example were true, then Patrick would have been acting hypocritically because he would have been pretending to be something that he's not. He would have been pretending to be the kind of person who politely listens and learns from the speaker. Now, hypocrisy can take other forms in our life, but the core ingredient is being fake. We, like the Pharisees, fall into hypocrisy when we focus on the outward performance rather than the inner heart. We fuel hypocrisy when we bribe kids to memorize Bible verses or go to church. We are unintentionally telling them that all that matters is the behavior when the truth is that God cares about their behavior and their heart. He cares about what we do and why we do it.

It's also hypocrisy when we have a higher standard for others than we do ourselves. Just think how often you get frustrated with someone for doing something that you yourself do. Jesus says hypocrisy is doing good things for the wrong reason. The wrong reason is usually our glory instead of God's. Now, Jesus compares hypocrisy to yeast. Yeast spreads in a batch of dough, and hypocrisy spreads in families or workplaces or teams or schools or churches. And because it turns our heart away from God, it is dangerous. So how do we fight against hypocrisy? In one sense, it's super easy. all we need to do is be transparent and honest. Stop pretending. But of course, that's difficult. In order to do that, we have to remember that Jesus came for sinners. When we stop pretending and start being honest about ourselves, we actually draw closer to Jesus. Jesus didn't come for the healthy. He

came for the sick. He came for sinners, not the righteous. Proverbs 2813 says, whoever conceals their sin does not prosper. But the one who confesses and renounces their sins, finds mercy. When we are transparent and honest about our sin, we are actually drawing closer to Jesus, who is called the friend of sinners.