Matthew 23:13-36 | How Jesus Cleanses Hypocrisy

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

In a little while, we are going to celebrate the Lord's death, burial, and resurrection together by receiving the elements of the Lord's table.

An important part of that is confession and repentance.

So I am going to confess something to you.

I am a hypocrite.

It's true.

I don't wear t-shirts underneath my dress shirts.

And I get really hot.

So I get sweaty.

So I cover that up with a jacket.

And you don't notice.

I'm a hypocrite.

You are a hypocrite.

There is something in your life, there are things in my life that we cover up.

Maybe, maybe it's embarrassing.

You know, not not really that impactful for all of life, but we just we would just rather that somebody else not know.

Maybe it's shameful.

Maybe it's it's painful.

But we need to confess that we are hypocrites.

Did you know that hypocrisy has not always been a negative concept?

The ancient Greeks employed the term with a meaning similar to how we think of expository preaching.

Long before the time of Christ, the word hypocrisy meant to explain something, to interpret something, to expound something.

During that time in ancient Greece, the noun form almost always meant actor, as in an actor in a play.

For example, a Bible dictionary tells us that a hypocrite could be a speaker or an actor interpreting a poet's words or a composer's music.

So the actor or the hypocrites tried to make sense of what the composer, either of music or poetry or whatever, what the author, the composer had written.

On a larger scale, the hypocrite could be an actor among many other actors performing a drama on a stage.

And so a good hypocrite faithfully interpreted his assigned role.

Well, an undesirable hypocrite did a very poor job at interpreting his role.

It came to be that in ancient times actors wore masks to hide their physical identity in order to communicate the play's message, the drama's message.

And so, in that sense, they were hypocrites.

They were presenting something different from what they really were.

Now, today that misrepresentation is largely viewed negatively.

So in the New Testament, Jesus was never gentle with hypocrisy.

We would deem his words about hypocrisy as harsh, as unnecessary even, and abrupt.

And so as we read this morning in Matthew chapter 23, beginning in verse 13, we might get a little uncomfortable and start to shift around in our seats.

Matthew 23 · chapter mention

Get used to that for a little bit.

It's going to get more uncomfortable for us because while Jesus here addresses a particular group of people known as scribes and Pharisees, we will find ourselves in these verses.

Here Jesus condemned hypocrisy in the religious leaders of his time.

And perhaps not surprisingly, the attitudes and actions that Jesus condemned are common today.

Look with me, if you will, at Matthew 23, beginning in verse 13.

I'm going to read all the way through verse 36, if you would follow along.

Jesus says, But woe to you.

That's not slow down, that's watch out.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces, for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Woe to you, blind guides, who say, If anyone swears by the temple, yeah, that's nothing.

But if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he's bound by his oath.

You blind fools, which is greater?

The gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred?

And you say, if anyone swears by the altar, it's nothing.

But if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, then he's bound by his oath.

You blind men, which is greater?

The gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?

So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it.

And whoever swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it.

And whoever swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe of your mint and dill and cumin, while you neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.

These you ought to have done without neglecting the others.

You blind guides, swallow straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness.

So you yourselves also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.

For you build the tombs of the prophets, and you decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would never have taken part with them in the shedding of the blood of the prophets.

Thus you are witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.

Fill up then the measure of your fathers.

You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?

Therefore, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of the innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barekiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

Amen.

We are hypocrites.

So, in some sense, while we do not belong to the group of the scribes and the Pharisees, the condemnation of hypocrisy in some sense falls on us.

And in a few moments, we will dare to approach the Lord's table to receive the elements that represent his broken body and his shed blood.

What are we to do?

Jesus lays out seven woes here against the Pharisees.

Some of your Bibles may have an additional one, an eighth one in verse 14.

But most modern translations go from verse 13 to verse 15, and they leave out what some translations have as verse 14.

And that's most likely because Matthew really didn't include that verse.

We find that in later, younger copies of the New Testament, where it was an insertion by copyists trying to make Matthew line up more with what Mark and Luke say.

We can tell that they're trying to make things make a little clearer sense.

So there are seven here, and that makes sense with what Matthew's doing.

A woe is a statement that implies great displeasure.

Jesus is not happy with the scribes and the Pharisees, but it's also a term that implies judgment, and so by having seven woes of judgment, it's a linguistic way of indicating this is a complete and utter and final judgment.

Jesus is done.

Patience is ended, mercy is finished, judgment is coming.

That's why the Pharisees' religious system would be dismantled after the destruction of Jerusalem about 40 years after this statement.

So we're going to examine these major aspects of Jesus' speech while identifying how we might fall into similar dangers.

The first danger of hypocrisy is related to verse 13 and the first woe against the Pharisees.

Woe to you, for you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces, for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.

This is the danger of locking the doors of heaven, primarily through false teaching.

The scribes and the Pharisees were the religious teachers of Israel.

You remember in the Gospel of John when Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, and Jesus told him, Listen, you have to be born again.

And Nicodemus said, Um, what?

I don't get that.

And Jesus says, Are you the teacher of Israel?

And you don't understand these things?

How is that possible?

Here are the teachers, the religious leaders of Israel, and they are not leading the people according to God's word.

But the first problem is that they are not entering themselves.

You might say, here's a group of pastors, of churches who are not going to heaven themselves.

Modern parallel, you might say.

They are not on the way into God's kingdom themselves, so how could they lead others to where they are themselves not going?

They lay unbearable burdens on people by building fences around God's word, expanding God's word.

They're not even aiding people in coming to God, but rather they're frustrating that effort to come to God.

And worse, as a whole, the Pharisees are rejecting Jesus as the Son of God and their Messiah.

Meaning they're choosing to remain outside.

Jesus is saying, Come on in, I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me, and they say, okay, well, if that's the only way, we'd rather stay out here.

Isn't that sad?

Religious leaders, understanding what Jesus is saying, but choosing to reject it.

They claim to be sons of God themselves, they claim relationship with God the Father, they claim access to the presence of God when they do not possess any of it.

And then when they hear others who want to come, want access to God's kingdom, they slam the door in the face of those who would want to enter.

Jesus uses a word here that speaks of a lock.

So you shut the door and you turn the key and you lock it so that nobody can come in.

Not only do they go in themselves, but they bar entrance to anybody else who would come in.

Instead of unlocking and opening the doors to enter God's kingdom, they're bringing people close to the doors and then slamming the door in their face so that they cannot enter.

They did that primarily through their teaching.

But it goes further than that because they teach an entrance to God's kingdom, but don't follow through on it.

So there's a hypocrisy there of saying, here's the way, but we're not going to go in.

Here's the way, but we're not going to let you come in.

And we can display this form of hypocrisy today by teaching and speaking in ways that communicate unbiblical concepts.

For example, we can imply that being a good person gains points with God.

Hey, if I'm just kind and I open a door for somebody, or hey, I help somebody who's broken down on the side of the road, that gains me good points with God.

Yeah.

But what about Romans 3 verse 12 that says, There is none who is good.

Romans 3:12

Not even one.

We can be this way by implying that doing good gains access to God.

God, I bring people with me to church.

I bring my neighbors to church.

I encourage my friends to go to church.

And I even go along with them if I have to.

Lord, look what good things I've done in your name.

And yet Matthew, Matthew records Jesus' words in Matthew 7.

Someday I'm going to say, I never knew you.

Go away.

We can do this by implying that going to church will get you to heaven.

We can be this hypocritical by implying that contributing to something, giving to the church or to some organization will please God, and so He will He will be happy with what you've done.

We can be hypocritical by implying that praying a prayer or walking an aisle will save you.

Notice that I use the word implying each time, right?

We likely wouldn't come out and say those things.

We're a good evangelical church.

We wouldn't say those things.

Of course, we would never say that being good gets you to heaven.

But neither would the Pharisees say, just do these things and God will be happy with you.

But we can easily imply something as simple as verbalizing a prayer will save somebody.

Oh, they prayed a prayer when they were in vacation Bible school, and so everything's good.

When in reality, they marit they there may never have been a heart expression of faith and trust in Christ alone.

We can be hypocritical.

Told you I was going to get uncomfortable.

Number two, there's the danger in verse 15, the second woe.

The danger of leading people to hell rather than to heaven.

Jesus says, you guys travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte.

And then when you do, you make him twice as much a child of hell as you are.

Now this is this is this is crazy, right?

It's like Jesus in the synagogue saying to a Pharisee, to the teacher, you are a child of hell.

Now thankfully, he is God and He knows the heart and he can make that judgment.

You and I can't.

But hear what he's saying.

He's condemning these people.

And then he's saying, by you going out and doing your missionary activity, you're making the people you bring even worse.

We don't have a whole lot of historical evidence of Jewish evangelism.

Jesus is probably referring here to taking people who the New Testament calls God fearers, like Cornelius in the book of Acts, somebody who appreciated the Jewish faith and the Jewish God and they supported the Jewish people.

They were God fearers and they would take those people then and convert them fully to Judaism.

They would travel across the world, Jesus says, to take one such person and convert them to Judaism.

They took joy in leading someone who honored God to become a full-fledged follower of the Jewish rules and regulations.

And what dedication is that?

They would go across the world for one.

But their efforts carry disastrous effects.

Because of the first woe, slamming doors in their faces, they're not leading that person to the Messiah and to God's kingdom and to faith in that kingdom and faith in that king.

Instead, they led them to a point of being wrapped up in the pharisaic faith, distracted from the truth of God's word, and focused on all of the wrong things.

Can we lead people to be focused on the wrong things?

Nod your head, up and down.

Yes.

Extreme examples exist, of course.

Some of you will remember Jim Jones.

Some of you a little younger than that might remember David Quaresh.

Those are extreme examples, of course, but Jesus says that converting people so that they become followers of false teaching leads them to hell.

They become enthusiastic followers of false doctrine that leads them to the wrong place.

And we see this all over today.

We could spend the rest of our time just detailing this, and I don't want to do that, so I'm just going to give you a couple of examples.

One way that we see this is often through the prosperity gospel.

For example, one of the most popular is T.D.

Jakes.

T.D.

Jakes, for example, teaches a false gospel, for he does not believe in the Trinity.

He holds to a doctrine that is condemned by the church, by church history, through the Athanasian Creed.

And yet he promotes self and comfort instead of scripture and gathers people and leads them down the wrong path.

Another way that we see this is through misleading.

Or inaccurate theology, whether it's intended or not.

For example, Andy Stanley is noted for saying we need to let go of our hold on the Old Testament, and more recently that we need to let go of our firm grip on the inspiration of Scripture.

Those are just examples of giving them the benefit of the doubt, well-meaning teachers leading away from Scripture.

These are well-meaning Pharisees and scribes going across the world to make children of hell.

Do we lead people down a false path?

Do we make disciples and lead them not to the doors of heaven, but to the doors of hell?

There's a third woe, verse 16, and this highlights the danger of meaningless distinctions.

Woe to you, blind guides, who say, if anyone swears by the temple, that's nothing.

But if you swear by the gold of the temple, he's bound by his oath.

You see, the temple was made with timber and stone, but it was overlaid with sheets of gold.

It was so brilliant when the sun was shining on it that it was said to be seen miles and miles and miles away.

So the gold is what makes it all beautiful.

So if you swear by the gold, then you're held to that.

History tells us that the Pharisees spent a good deal of time discussing oaths or promises, we might say today.

And which ones, which promises were legitimate and were binding, and which ones weren't.

Which oaths and promises could you make and break those promises and be okay?

So the distinctions, the discussions focused on what was binding for a person.

In other words, they wanted to know what promises can you break without it being a sin.

They developed an elaborate system to guide the people.

And Jesus highlights that system here in verses 16, 17, and 18 and 19.

First, hey, you swear by the temple.

Or you swear by the gold of the temple.

So if you, the Pharisees would say, if you swear by the temple, that's just a building.

And so, you know what?

If you swear by that, you can change your mind and break your promise and go your way.

But if you swear by the gold, that's so much more important that that's binding.

So if you want, if you wanted to give your word to somebody and not be held to it, swear by the temple, not the gold.

Same thing with the altar and what was offered on the altar.

Interestingly, they ignored Exodus 29, verse 37 that says, whatever touches the altar shall become holy.

Exodus 29:37

So if something touches the altar and it becomes holy, which element, which item carries an intrinsic holiness?

Not the thing that's put on it, but the altar itself.

It wasn't the sacrifice that caused the thing to be holy.

It was the altar.

It wasn't the gold that made the temple holy, but the temple that made the gold holy.

So the teaching of the scribes and the Pharisees was flipped, it was backwards.

And that teaching allowed people to back out on their oaths and their promises.

It might be similar, we could say in the modern parallel, if you made your wedding vows in the church itself, then they are binding.

But if you were married in Las Vegas, yeah, you can do whatever you want.

But Jesus says that ultimately any oath or any promise is made in God's presence.

And if you say something in the presence of God, then it's binding.

He says our yes is to be yes and our no is to be no.

We should not even need to make promises.

We should not need to make oaths for our statements to be valid and binding.

Jesus' followers are to be characterized by honesty and integrity and truthfulness in their speech, whether it's made under the bind of a promise or an oath or not.

These particular teachers, Jesus says, are blind guides.

Verse 19.

He calls them blind fools, literally.

They're blind because they do not see the truth, they cannot see what Scripture says, and they are hypocritical because they emphasize meaningless distinctions that lead not to a proper understanding of what God has said, but they lead away from a proper understanding to confusion and misunderstanding that leads people to the doors of hell?

Are our words important?

Are our distinctions important?

Jesus would say yes.

So is it possible for us to be involved in this kind of hypocrisy?

Well, let me ask this.

Have we ever de-emphasized lying?

Have you ever thought or said, oh, that's just a little white lie?

As if a red one's different.

And yet, Proverbs says that lying is one of the things that God hates.

If we've de-emphasized what scripture says, then we've been hypocritical in this same way.

We're on our way to being the same kind of people as the scribes and Pharisees if promises are needed from one another in order to be able to trust what we say.

What if we focus on giving people reasons for divorce rather than emphasizing the divine intention of the permanency of the marriage union?

What if we point to church attendance as a guide for the depth of spirituality?

Oh, you've been here three out of the four weeks this month?

Oh, you are holy, holy, holy.

Facetiousness is intended there.

You can chuckle.

It's okay.

What if we focus solely on the love and the goodness of God and neglect his holiness and his justice?

What if we point to someone's morality as a sign of their connection with God?

Are we then not highlighting meaningless distinctions?

What about our modern gender confusion?

What about our use of pronouns?

If we highlight distinctions that God did not make, are we not putting ourselves in the sandals of the scribes and the Pharisees?

Number four, verse 23, this woe highlights the danger of majoring on the miners.

We're so adept at this.

Here Jesus in verse 23 highlights gardening.

And no, it's not simply being a gardener that makes one a hypocrite.

Here Jesus points out that the Pharisees have misplaced priorities.

You see, Leviticus 27, verse 30, and Deuteronomy 14, verses 22 and 23 command the tithing, giving 10% in that time, tithing the produce of seeds, grains, and wine.

Leviticus 27:30 Deuteronomy 14:22

And so the first 10% of the harvest belonged to God.

Oh, but these Pharisees, they went the extra mile.

They're even tithing from their garden herbs.

Not the produce of the fields, of the farming, but of their gardens.

Now, significantly, Jesus doesn't condemn that practice.

He says, that's good, you should do that.

He never says they shouldn't.

The problem is that they focus on tithing even a tiny bit of produce while neglecting the things of greater importance, like justice and mercy and faithfulness.

He's probably here having in mind Micah chapter 6, verse 8.

Micah 6:8

He says, You know that God expects these things, but you don't do those.

Oh, but you'll tithe of your dill and your mint.

They were so caught up in the minor things that they neglected the important requirements of God's law.

Their focus was more on the little things, and in focusing on the little things, they were sinning against the bigger things.

We might say that this is the parallel in Jesus' time of Samuel's challenge to King Saul.

When King Saul disobeyed and did whatever he wanted to do instead of obeying God's word, the prophet Samuel said, King Saul, you ought to know of all people that obedience is better than sacrifice.

To illustrate, Jesus uses a common word picture of the time.

Small bugs, like gnats, were unclean in the Jewish law.

So if you accidentally swallowed a gnat, you swallowed an unclean food thing.

So, after grapes were crushed, after the grape harvest, the juice was filtered through a piece of cloth before being stored in jars.

That ensured that that filtering process ensured that no small bugs like gnats would be in the wine that resulted.

Jesus applies that illustration to the Pharisees' teaching and living.

He says, you go to every effort to strain out all of the gnats to make sure that you don't do anything unclean that's building that fence around the law.

Don't even get close to consuming a gnat.

He's about to make a joke on masks that I will refrain from.

You make sure that you don't swallow a gnat, but in the process, you don't have any qualms about swallowing a camel.

Camels were unclean too, by the way.

The emphasis here is not on clean versus unclean, it's on the size of the unclean.

You avoid gnats, but you're okay swallowing camels?

Really?

You don't see a problem with that.

Their hypocrisy blinded them to this area of sin.

And yes, we can be this hypocritical too, my friends.

We might emphasize, we might emphasize giving back to God from everything that you have, even your garden.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Yes, absolutely.

We might emphasize that.

While at the same time forgetting to be kind to our neighbor, neglecting to be gentle and self-control.

Hypocrite.

See, we're all hypocrites.

We've been there.

We focus on how people dress in church.

Yeah, cover it up, right?

We focus on how we dress when we come to church while we're forgetting that we need to bring people to Christ.

See how that person's dressed this morning?

Can you believe it?

While we forget they might need Jesus.

We focus on politics and ignore our arrogance.

We focus on particular areas of doctrine and make them areas of emphasis when it isn't an emphasis in Scripture, and so we push people away because of that.

We got to keep going because we got to get to forgiveness somehow.

Number five, verse 25 Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, for you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

Try this sometime.

Try hand washing your dishes and being very careful to just wash the outside and put it back in the cupboard.

And then use it the next time.

Jesus says, that's what we do.

That's what they're doing.

Number 23, Leinster Gardens, is a strange house in London, England.

Strange because it looks like any other house on the block, but nobody ever comes out of it.

Nobody ever comes out of this house.

The address does not have a doorbell, it doesn't have a mailbox.

No one ever looks out from the windows, and no one is ever seen standing on the balconies.

Number 23 Leinster Gardens is known as the house that never was.

Because it's a sham.

It's a dummy house.

It's painted on a wall.

It's painted on a wall.

It's appearance is beautifully painted on a wall, but behind that wall is a network of girders, some train tracks, and an entrance to a subway tunnel.

Every so often a fresh coat of paint is put on the wall to keep it looking nice and in line with the neighboring buildings.

The house that never was was put up by London's Metropolitan Railway.

The officials decided it was the best way to hide the entrance to the subway tunnel.

They decided that it was the best way to hide the gap between the row of houses and to not spoil the harmonious look on the street.

The Pharisees thought that they were the most beautiful, clean houses and ensured that people noticed, but inside Jesus says, you're just filthy.

Do we ever deceive ourselves into thinking that we're okay because of how we look?

If you ever are mourning, hurting, sorrowing, suffering, and you come to church and you put on a good face and a happy face so that nobody knows that's you.

It's me.

If we ever put on a show to make it look good on the outside, but inside we're all ugly and dirty and filthy with sin, we're the scribes and the Pharisees.

Jesus says, you know what, you need to humble yourself and admit that you are a dreadful sinner in the presence of a holy God.

And you need to come to Him alone for cleansing.

Not with a bath, but from the inside out.

You need a new heart.

God says, you have no reason to be confident in your salvation if your faith doesn't match your life.

So maybe you need to come back to the beginning and say, Where am I?

Am I a real house that is a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, or am I just a sham?

Here are religious leaders who are leading God's people.

No wonder, no wonder they don't enter in.

No wonder they slam the door to God in people's faces.

They're rotten.

And that's what the next woe is about, number six in verse 27.

This speaks of the danger of covering up rottenness.

You're like whitewashed tombs.

Outwardly they appear beautiful.

But within they are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness.

Touching a tomb, according to the Pharisees and the scribes, made a person unclean for seven days.

That meant you couldn't go to the synagogue.

You had all kinds of limitations and restrictions.

Just touching, touching a tomb.

So they made it a pattern to whitewash their tombs, especially for visitors to Jerusalem during holy days, so that they would recognize, well, that's a tomb, and I need to stay away from that.

They built elaborate tombs.

You can see examples of them online today, pictures all over, that were amazing pieces of construction, beautiful even.

But inside the tomb are bones and rottenness.

So they dressed up the outside while hiding what was inside.

And unfortunately, most of our Bibles don't reflect this, but in verse 28, Jesus is emphatic.

He says, You yourselves.

So as though he's pointing right at them, you yourselves outwardly appear righteous.

You look good.

But you stink on the inside.

You're full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Friends, if we are walking in sin and we hide that, we are no different.

Let God open you up.

Let God render you open so that your sin is confronted with His holiness.

Don't paint over the sin that rots to the core.

There's a seventh danger here, and that is the danger of being blind to our own sin.

This is this is the claim that we wouldn't be like those people.

I would never do that.

Those people in Jesus' day that had him crucified, yeah, I would never do that.

That person that was abusive to somebody that we know, oh, I would never do that.

I would never be that gossip.

I would never be that mean employee that just can't be suffered with.

I would never be like that person.

Jesus says, listen, listen, you Pharisees and scribes, you say if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would never have taken part in the shedding of the blood of the prophets.

We would have heard God speak through through those men, and we would have understood this as God's word, and we would have wrapped our arms around them and we would have repented in dust and ashes.

And Jesus says, Yeah, no.

Not so much.

He condemns them for their hypocrisy, telling them that not only are they following in the line of their sinful fathers, they would actually fill up, they would complete what their fathers began, and so they would kill Jesus, and he would send them others, and they would kill them too, and in so doing they would, like their fathers, become guilty of righteous blood.

And he mentions two people: Abel, whom we know from the book of Genesis and Zechariah.

Zechariah is a little confusing for us English speakers, because our English Bibles, the last book of the Old Testament, is Malachi.

But if you look at it in a Hebrew Bible, the last book in the Hebrew Bible is 2 Chronicles.

And in 2 Chronicles chapter 24, a prophet by the name of Zechariah was murdered in the temple.

2 Chronicles 24 · chapter mention

So Jesus is highlighting all of the righteous martyrs, from the very first one, Abel, to the last one in their Bible, Zechariah.

And he's saying, You're just like your fathers.

And you're guilty of all of it.

Now that we're uncomfortable.

This is a history lesson.

This event occurred in a specific place at a particular time in history, and it was a message directed to a Unique group of people who would take the lead in crucifying the Lord Jesus.

No one today is among these scribes and Pharisees.

No one today is among these scribes and Pharisees.

This is a very pointed condemnation to a very particular group of people.

But we can be like them.

We can be blind to our own sin and the consequences it brings.

And so instead of looking at a hard and difficult text like this and saying, boy, I am so glad I'm not like them, we must confess our hypocrisy and repent of it.

And to look at the sin in our own hearts, not the sin in others.

You see, those scribes and those Pharisees as a whole missed that Jesus came to cleanse them of that hypocrisy.

He came to be an offering for their sin.

And instead of recognizing that here is the solution to our problem, they said, no, I don't have a problem.

So here is how Jesus cleanses hypocrisy.

He will either do it through the fires of judgment, or he will do it through the cleansing of forgiveness by his blood and the transforming work of his spirit.

Which will it be for you?

My friends, we all sin.

You're in good company this morning.

None of us is above another.

We all have our elements of sin and hypocrisy, those things that we want to cover and for no one to ever see.

We all want to hide our sin like Adam and Eve desired to hide in the garden.

It's our own nature to act like something that we are not.

Because what if somebody knew what I was really like on the inside?

But here is the problem of hypocrisy for the Christian.

Hypocrisy in the Christian elevates me over Jesus.

It elevates me, puts me above Jesus.

Now think about this for a minute.

If you are not a Christian, and if you have never been faced with the reality of your own sin, and that God is going to judge that just like Jesus is judging the Pharisees.

You need to own that sin.

Acknowledge it, and bring it to Jesus and say, I can't deal with this.

I need you to save me from my own condemnation.

That's a humility.

That's a saying, I need Jesus.

But if you are a Christian and you are standing in your hypocrisy and you are firm in it, and you are unwilling to confess it and repent of it, it puts you above Jesus.

Think of this: sin is forgiven in Jesus.

And in him, we are sinners who have been saved from our hypocrisy.

Yet we go about living as though we have our mask, our acting, and our comfort level as the most important thing that even supersedes Jesus.

When Jesus says, take off your mask, and I say, no, I put myself as more significant than Jesus.

When covering up the real us rather than making much of Jesus work to forgive our sin becomes reality, we've made more of ourselves than of Jesus.

When we put on a mask rather than show the person of Jesus at work in us, we become scribes and Pharisees.

The key to overcoming hypocrisy.

Please leave with this.

The key to overcoming hypocrisy is to make little of yourself and to make much of Jesus.

The key to overcoming hypocrisy is to make very little of yourself and to make much of Jesus.

How much better to let people see Jesus at work cleansing me, forgiving me, taking off the jacket, and to see him growing me, making me more and more holy day by day through the work of his spirit.

How much better is it to let people see Jesus in all of his holiness and all of his beauty than to see a mask of our own making?

My friends, let's lead people to Jesus and let him cleanse us of our hypocrisy.

Lord Jesus, may we come to you this morning.

Humble, broken, maybe even.

We confess our sin to you.

Yes, we acknowledge we are hypocrites in so many ways.

Oh Lord, we need you.

We need your life.

We need your spirit at work within us to open us up and to give us new hearts that have been cleansed by the washing of water through the word, that have been forgiven by the blood of the Lamb and washed as white as snow, so that what is seen in us is not a mask, not a not a hypocrite, but the beauty of Jesus in all of his glory.com.