Hypocrisy Begins with Procrastination

People can’t stand religious hypocrisy! This can drive people away from church, but it’s just as likely to drive people toward Jesus. No one could deflate the pretensions of the hypocritical and self-righteous like Jesus. Yet we should be careful: if we think the hypocrites are other people, we’re in danger of becoming hypocritical. To help us see this danger, Erik described hypocrisy as arising out of something to which no one seems immune: procrastination.

We don’t know how to be holy as God is holy; how to love God and our neighbors with everything we have. We feel ourselves defiled by sin, repulsive to God and others.  We can’t fix the problem of sinful heart, so we look for other things to do instead…How do you procrastinate spiritually? What is the thing you do when you don’t know how to do the thing you need to do? Jesus’s point isn’t that you should stop doing that thing, but it is that procrastination becomes hypocrisy: you try to look holy because you don’t know how to be holy. You compulsively wash your hands because you don’t know how to change your heart.