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Showing posts with label Helping the needy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Helping the needy. Show all posts

Monday, October 30, 2023

Are You Acting Like a Hypocrite?

Introduction
I think it’s obvious to everyone who knows us, that my family loves dressing up for Halloween.  Although, if I’m being totally transparent, after so many years of doing it—and with the expectation every year that we must have a great costume because it’s expected—the pressure of having a great costume is a bit stressful every year.  And with 2 kids now grown and out of the house, and Abigail being a full-fledged teenager who may or may not want to be part of the family tradition, some of the joy we had in the past has gone out of

it.

Still, we do love to dress up.  The hardest part is coming up with an idea—something that’s new and different, that we haven’t seen overdone, but also something people will recognize.  And something that’s doable (because we like to make our own costumes as much as possible.

Once we find the right idea, we may even research the characters a little bit to understand them.
A few years ago when we dressed up as Popeye and Olive Oil, we spent several evenings together watching old cartoons of Popeye. And I got curious:  why did Popeye love spinach so much? I found out the original cartoon’s creator wanted to encourage kids to eat healthier.  So, he made spinach the miraculous source of Popeye's super-stregnth. It worked. Some data shows kids consumption of spinach increased by as ⅓ at the cartoon’s most popular period.

Of course, we all know the characters we dress up as during Halloween are just make-believe. No matter how much we delve into it, when we take off the masks we become ourselves again.
Halloween is just pretend.

But what we do during Halloween—pretending to be someone else for the night—is a great example of a mystery of human behavior Jesus warned about often.  Jesus warned His followers not to be like the hypocrites. 

You know what a hypocrite is.  It’s become a churchy word.  Sometimes we use it in the church and sometimes people outside the church like to call people who go to church hypocrites.  In Jesus day, hypocrite was a Greek word that came from the Greek culture.  In Greece, people loved to watch plays in the theater.  And the actors in the play were known as hypocrites.

The actors in the plays would put on costumes or masks and pretend to be character from Greek mythology.  And then the actors would act out the great mythological stories of Greece.  Hypocrites pretended to be other people in order to tell the story.  That’s fine if you are an actor in a play (or if you’re dressing up for Halloween), but we shouldn’t be like hypocrites in real life. 

This is a theme Jesus touches on again and again throughout the 6th chapter of Matthew in His Sermon on the Mount.  Today, we read Matthew 6:1-4.

Matthew 6:1-4
“Watch out! Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven. When you give to someone in need, don’t do as the hypocrites do—blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to call attention to their acts of charity! I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get. But when you give to someone in need, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Give your gifts in private, and your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.

When You Give...
The people of Jesus’ day, as do Christians today, inherently knew that righteous people do good deeds—including giving charity to people in need.  Throughout the Old Testament, God instructed people to give to help people in need. 

And it’s important to point out, Jesus assumed His followers would give to the needy.  Jesus didn’t say, “If you give to the needy…”  He said, “When you give to the needy…”

Tooting Your Own Horn
Important and wealthy people of Jesus day—both Romans and Jews in Israel—made big displays of when they gave money to the poor.  Roman officials would often erect monuments to commemorate their giving.  One Roman official I learned about recently had a record of all the money he had given and all good deeds he had done carved onto a wall in the city where he governed.  The record of his “righteousness” is still preserved in ancient ruins to this day.

Sometimes, wealthy religious leaders in Israel would stand on a street corner and have trumpets blown to get everyone’s attention while they handed our charity to the poor.  Everyone in the neighborhood would hear the trumpets and know that person was a righteous and generous person.

But Jesus said, “Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven.”  It feels good to be admired by others.  And a fact of life in our modern world is:  Sometimes you do have to toot your own horn.  In order to succeed as a business or and individual, you have to "market" yourself.

If you’ve ever made a resume in order to get a job, if you’ve ever gone to a job interview, you know you have to show your potential employer that you are worthy of the position.  You may be competing against other candidates and you have to show your next boss that you’re the best choice for the job.  So you sort of have to "toot your own horn" in some sense in some situations.  There's nothing wrong with that.  And Jesus also said, "Let your good deeds shine forth before people so they will glorify your Father in Heaven." (See Matthew 5:16).  

What Jesus is saying in Matthew chapter 6 is:  don’t pretend you’re someone you’re not.  Don’t pretend to be righteous and holy like the religious leaders on the street corners blowing horns so every one will look at them and think, “Now there is a truly godly, righteous person.  You know God them!  Look how good they are!”

You see the Pharisee and Sadducees, the religious leaders in Israel where Jesus lived, were hypocrites.  They pretended to be righteous.  They did such a good job of acting, they fooled everyone.  People believed they were truly holy and righteous.  They looked good on the outside, but they were rotten and evil on the inside.  They cared more about what people thought of them than what God thought.  Their charitable giving was done to win people’s favor.  This helped them stay in power and protected their positions of authority and their income.

In fact, when the Son of God, Jesus, came to the religious leaders of Israel, they rejected Him.  They didn’t care about God.  They didn’t care about the people. They only cared about themselves.

What was worse, not only did they lie to the people and make them believe they were holy, they also lied to themselves and believed their own lie.  They believed they were holy and God must love them more than anyone else.  They were so blind the didn't recognize when the Son of God Himself came to them.  They crucified Jesus.

Don’t Lie to Yourself
We have to be very careful, because we want to believe we are good people who are holy.  We want to believe we deserve God’s blessings.  We should know better, because if we look inside our hearts, we can easily see we are often selfish and petty and sinful.  Even so, we want to believe we deserve some kind of divine reward because we’re so good.

When we believe our own lies, when we believe we are good, we are blinded to our desperate need of God’s salvation and merciful grace.  Jesus wants us to do good and give to the needy to glorify God, but Jesus doesn’t want these habits to be a way we lie to ourselves and others.

Be very careful, because when you make a big show of doing good or giving to the needy, you could become like an actor (a hypocrite) who is putting on a show, pretending to be good.  Impurity in your heart can sneak in and poison you’re motives to where you don’t even care about the person you’re helping.  You’re just show off for others to see—wearing a mask, pretending to be someone you’re not.

Protecting Yourself From Yourself
Since we are prone to believe our own lies that we are good and deserve God’s favor and people should look up to us, we need a way to protect ourselves from ourselves.  First of all, realize you are not good.  Realize you are sinner who desperately needs God’s grace.  You don’t deserve anything from God.  Every good blessing you have received is a gift given by God in spite of your sin.

Second, give anonymously sometimes.  Now, I’m not saying you always have to give anonymously.  It’s ok to get a receipt of your charitable giving.  It's even ok to get take credit for which you're eligible. But don’t make a habit of making a big show of your giving.  Make sure your giving for the right reasons—to help the needy, to show compassion, and to glorify God, not in order to show how awesome you are.  Do it for the glory of God and to help people in need.  And I challenge you to at least sometimes (maybe even often) to give absolutely anonymously.  As Jesus said, “don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.   

Friday, July 14, 2017

Proverbs Day 14

Read Proverbs 14
Wealthy people don't have much trouble finding "friends."  Everyone admires them for their interesting lives, their cool stuff, and what they might do for others.  The trouble wealthy people have is figuring out who's really a friend and who just loves them because they're rich.  What would happen if they lost it all?  Would their "friends" still stand by them?

Poor people don't have that problem.  They don't have much to offer in terms of material possessions or money.  They spend most of their time and energy just trying to make it from day to day; they don't have much left to give.  When a poor person comes around, they're probably not there just to say "hello" or see how you're doing.  They're probably coming to ask for help.  If you help, they probably aren't going to be able pay you back or return the favor. However, they probably will ask for your help again soon.  You can count on it and it can become very wearisome.

Listen Pastor Chris' Paraphrase of Proverbs 14:20, 21, and 31
20 Everyone hates the poor, even those closest to them; but the rich have lots of “friends.”
21 God hates it when people look down on those closest to them, but He blesses those who give a hand up to the poor.
31 People who oppress the poor insult the One who made them, but people honor God when they give a hand up to help those in need.
The wise person learns to see people as God sees them and treats them accordingly.  Everyone--rich and poor--is a beautiful creation of God.  We must look beyond the glitter of wealth and the dirt of poverty to see the child of God who is beneath it all.  Love is sacrificial.  It's what you do for others not what they do for you or how they make you feel.  It's easy to love people who have it all together, but a wise person treats the poor with dignity and love because it honors God.

Prayer
"Jesus, you said there would always be poor among us (Mark 14:7).  Help me not to be frustrated.  Teach me to love the way You love.  Amen."