THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY

I came across a Reader’s Digest the other day, and everyone knows there will be funny stories and sad stories and so on in a Reader’s Digest. In this particular one I read where a pastor had been teaching his church about the importance of studying their Bibles. He wanted his congregation to be engaged in reading Scripture. What ended up happening was one of the parishioners invited the pastor and his wife over for dinner. And when the pastor’s wife was in the kitchen she noticed up on the calendar a note that said, ‘The pastor and his missus is coming over - dust all Bibles.’

You think about that right there and what we can quickly understand is this lady was a pretender. In fact she was living a hypocritical life. She wanted her pastor to see her as something that she was not, someone who stays in the word, but the word had been dusty. If you think back to the Greek plays in the ancient world the word hypocrite referred to the actors who would come out in the midst of a drama or a play and they would put a mask over their faces. And that mask would represent a character that they were seeking to act out. And in order to take on another character they would set that first mask down and pick up another mask, and then they could play the hypocrite.

So a hypocrite is one who wears a mask and that is what the word refers to. It is someone who is pretending to be something that they are not. Like this lady who was pretending to stay in the word when she really hadn’t been reading the Bible at all. She was reminding herself she needed to dust the Bibles off before the pastor and his wife could see them.

Hypocritical living is something that can be a problem in the church, and for all people for that matter. One particular individual, Melvin Wheatley, who lived a while back as a Christian man wrote a poem where he said this: “We are split spiritual personalities. We swear allegiance to one set of principles and live by another. We extoll self-control and practice self-indulgence. We proclaim brotherhood and harbor prejudice. We laud character but strive to climb to the top at any cost. We erect houses of worship but our shrines are our places of business and recreation. We are suffering from a distressing cleavage between the truths we affirm and the values we live by. Our souls are the battlegrounds for civil wars, but we are trying to live serene lives in houses divided against themselves.”

So hypocrisy is pretending to be something that we are not. In fact I think if one band ever got their name right, or their title right, it was, ‘The Pretenders.’ And some of you have probably heard of ‘The Pretenders,’ and that was a great name, right? They recognized that we do not live up to the standard that we profess to believe. So there can be a lot of forgiveness when someone acknowledges that they fail to live up to the standard.

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I was curious as I thought about the word pretenders this week, and I wondered what made the band ‘The Pretenders’ come up with that title for their band. So out of curiosity I went into research mode and what I found was they got their name from a song that was sung by ‘The Platters’ called ‘The Great Pretender.’ And that particular song is what influenced them. I extracted a few of the lyrics and here they are for you to kind of think about:

“Oh-oh, yes I’m the great pretender Pretending that I’m doing well My need is such I pretend too much I’m lonely but no one can tell. Oh-oh yes I’m the great pretender Adrift in a world of my own I’ve played the game but to my real shame You’ve left me to grieve all alone. Yes I’m the great pretender Just laughin’ and gay like a clown I seem to be what I’m not, you see I’m wearing my heart like a crown”

Hypocrisy is wearing a mask. Hypocrisy is play acting. Hypocrisy is pretending to be something that we are not. In fact many people have a bad taste in their mouth when they consider the church because of hypocrisy. But as I said last week hypocrisy is not a Christian problem, it is a human problem. All of us as humans have a standard by which we believe we are to live, but all of us fall short of that.

At the same token I shared why it is that we see more hypocrites in the church. It is not surprising that we would see more hypocrites in the church because Christians are striving to live according to a higher standard. It would be easy to remove some of the hypocrisy by just erasing the so called standard. ‘I will act as if I have got it all together. I will act as if maybe this isn’t a real issue.’ So what do we do? To feel better about ourselves we reduce the standard down to fit what we believe we can attain. We believe we could live up to this standard so we will keep it there; therefore I won’t have to be a hypocrite. So we reduce, shrink or press down the standard.

Maybe you are here today as a guest with us and you would say that you have really struggled with hypocrisy in the church. If so I would tell you that you have a good ally if it is hypocrisy you struggle with. No one hated hypocrisy more than Jesus. Jesus hated hypocrisy. In fact he used His sharpest statements for the hypocrites.

Now there is a hypocrisy that strives to pretend to be something that they are not and then there is a hypocrisy that is sort of blinded to their own hearts. They don’t

Page 2 of 12 pages 2/19/2017 THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY realize that they are pretending. They are deceived. And as it has been said the problem with being deceived is you don’t know you are deceived. So as we think about hypocrisy here is what I would want to say - one way we can assuage someone’s concerns that struggle with hypocrisy is just to be able to admit that none of us live up to the standard we desire as believers.

And if you are a guest here this morning we welcome you to Life Fellowship. Yes, we are a bunch of hypocrites, none of us have our lives together perfectly, but I would say as a group of people what we realize is that Jesus is the great example that we set our eyes on. And we want to look to Him.

With this in mind, what I want you to do is turn in your Bibles to Romans Chapter 2. If you don’t have your Bible with you, you can go to your Google search engine and type in Bible Gateway, and that will take you to all sorts of Bible translations. And then you can just type in your search engine ‘Romans Chapter 2.’ Today we are going to explore verses 17 to 29. And what I want us to do is get our hands around what Paul is trying to do in the book of Romans.

You see there is often an inconsistency, a disparity, a wedge in our life between our words and our actions. Frederick Nietzsche, the 19th century German Atheist who made the declaration, “God is dead,” also said this - “The best argument against Christianity is Christians.” And isn’t that just a sad statement? Gandhi shifted away from Atheism over to Hinduism and said, “I love your Jesus, I love your Christ; it is your Christians that I struggle with.” He felt a deep sense of inner struggle as it related to the inconsistency between the Christ we profess and the Christianity that we live.

Now we need to remember that Paul wrote Romans as a letter and it was his longest letter. And he wrote this letter in order to really lay out the gospel. Now the gospel is one of these words we hear and we wonder what does it mean? It refers to the good news that we as Christians believe in. That is we believe that Jesus paid for our sins, He died on our behalf, He rose again, and through faith in Him we can experience forgiveness and everlasting life. That is the gospel; that is the good news.

Now Paul had never been to Rome but he had longed to go there. He had heard about the church at Rome and that it was growing and exploding. It was a church that was an amalgamation made up of both Jews and Gentiles. And Gentiles are all non-Jews. Most of us in this room or probably all of us are Gentiles.

And Paul wrote to them telling them he was very excited to hear about their faith and how well their church was doing. But then after he talked about how glad he was to hear how things were going, what he would do next is he would spend the first three chapters helping them to understand the gospel. And the gospel, folks, is not just sort of this moment we come to and we say we believe it; it is the way that we live our lives.

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Every day we need the gospel. Every moment we need the gospel. It is a life style of understanding what Christ accomplished on our behalf.

So what Paul does then is he starts with the Gentiles, the pagans. And he says in Chapter 1 that though they don’t have the law, though they are not Jews, though they weren’t the chosen ones so to speak, they are still sitting under God’s judgment. They are still at odds with God because of their sin. They still have the same problem that everyone else does - the problem of guilt. But they are not going to be without excuse because Paul says that God has made Himself known in creation and He has also made Himself known in their conscience. There is a moral law within them and they have this sense deep within that they were created by a God who cares about their life. And they will have to give an account before Him.

But then Paul shifts his argument and he goes over to the Jews. And he wants the Jews to know that just because they are Jews, and just because they were called out to share the message, and just because they have A,B,C,D, E and F, they are not to think that they aren’t hosed as well. He wants them to know, like the Gentiles, they are in the same camp.

And he wants us to know in the first three chapters of Romans that we are in a predicament. That all of humanity has this common problem - it is called the problem of guilt. We feel it, we know it is there, but we seek to deal with it by denying it, or we get paranoid. Or we start to cover it with secrets. Or we get addicted to things to anesthetize our guilt. But there it is, and it haunts us, it undoes us. We have to lower God’s standard to even be able to handle it.

And Paul wants us to know that because he starts laying out the black backdrop of our sin and our stance before God. And what Paul is going to do is drive a nail into the beauty of the gospel so deeply that hopefully it explodes our heart with love for Him. That we are going to see that that is our state, and He was willing to die for us, so that we will want to live for Him.

Paul is going to start off and let the Jews know that just because they have the law, just because they have been circumcised, just because they can say that they are Jews, it doesn’t mean that they will escape the judgment. The Jews, like the Gentiles, are in the same boat. And everyone here this morning is in that same boat. We have all been created by God and all of us know that there is something broken in us, that there is something wrong with us, that we have an inclination to go the wrong direction, that we can rationalize inappropriate behavior, that we can excuse it away. And we will pardon ourselves while we hold others to a standard that we are not willing to live ourselves.

So let’s pick up the first point of the two that I want to draw out before I share some takeaways this morning. And the first point is - religious hypocrites are often

Page 4 of 12 pages 2/19/2017 THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY misled by their false sense of assurance. With that context in mind let’s begin in verse 17 of Chapter 2. Paul is going to list an array of things that the Jews were counting on for their assurance. He is going to give some examples of the ways that they are going to contest, and he anticipates their contesting. He is going to let them know that they think they are secure because of these things.

Let’s read verse 17. “But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast in God.” In other words they think because they are a Jew they can take pride in their national identity. And we hear people doing that all the time. ‘You know my grandpa was a great Christian.’ But you see God doesn’t have any spiritual grandchildren, folks. So it doesn’t matter if your grandpa was a great Christian or your uncle was a preacher. We come up with all of these things. And these people were saying, ‘But I am a Jew.’ And today we might hear someone say, ‘But I am a Presbyterian.’ Or ‘I am a Lutheran.’ Or ‘I am a Methodist.’ Or ‘I am a Catholic.’

And we come up with these different things. ‘But I have been through confirmation.’ Or ‘I take communion and I believe in transubstantiation that when I take the elements it turns into the physical body and blood of Christ.’ Or ‘When I take communion I am more Lutheran and it is consubstantiation for me. The elements don’t turn into the blood of Jesus literally, but Christ is present with us literally.’ Or maybe we are like Huldrych Zwingli, the great reformer out of Switzerland, who believed that communion is an act of remembrance and reflection.

Maybe you are wondering what all this stuff is. We are talking church history here. In other words the people Paul was addressing were thinking because they were Jews that they had assurance. And we do the same type of things by thinking I’m this, or I’m that, or I’m the other. And we brand ourselves and we feel secure behind these titles and we are missing it. We develop a false sense of assurance like, ‘I walked an aisle.’ And we come up with all these things.

Verse 17 again, “But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast in God.” Some people find their assurance in being able to talk about God accurately and lay out the doctrines. “And know His will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed from the law; and if you are sure that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish.” They were feeling extra special as Jews looking down on those who weren’t like them. “A teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth. “

So what happens here is Paul is laying out all these things. They have the law, they are Jews, they teach people, they know what is right to do, and they were finding their sense of security in those things. And now what he is going to do is anticipate four questions that they would ask. Let’s read verse 21. “You then who teach others, do you

Page 5 of 12 pages 2/19/2017 THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?” And remember while surely none of the Jewish people would have been guilty of these actions, Jesus raised the bar and told them even if they haven’t committed adultery, if they lusted for someone in their heart they were guilty of it. So Jesus got to the core of it.

“You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” Perhaps he was referring to pagan temples. “You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law.” What Paul is saying to them was they were acting like they have it all together. They teach others but they don’t teach themselves. They tell other people how to live but they were not living it. They claimed that this is what truth is, this is what created assurance, but they were not modeling it. And that was the real problem Paul was communicating to them hoping they would grasp it.

And there is a real consequence to this kind of living. And that consequence is God’s reputation is at stake when we walk hypocritely. In verse 24 he says, “For as it is written, The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” See, the Gentiles want no part of the message because of the hypocrisy. And isn’t that a sad thing? How many people have we known that don’t want to come to church because they will say the church is full of hypocrites? And as I said last week we could just say to them, ‘You’ll be in great company because we are all hypocrites at the end of the day, every one of us.’ But it is a fair expectation. If we profess to believe a certain way then people want to see that it is the real deal.

Now, as we think about this whole idea of tarnishing God’s reputation, I would ask you a question - if people were to discover the truths about God and all they had to learn about God was our lives, what would they conclude about God? Being that we are created in the image of God, if all that people had was the life that we live to draw their conclusion about God, what conclusion would they come to? Isn’t that one of those questions you wished I wouldn’t have asked this morning? That is a challenging question, because ideally we are following Jesus and we are living in such a way that people are seeing something about Jesus through our lives. They get hungry for Him; they desire Him because of the way we live.

So this whole idea then of hypocrisy has to be dealt with. I love to share the story about the man who was looking for a job, and he read in the newspaper that the local zoo was hiring a manager. So he went down and he saw management and inquired about the job only to discover that the job was no longer available. What ended up happening was the guy that was working there filling the position noticed that the guy inquiring about the position was a rather large guy. And he said, ‘You know what, we just lost a gorilla recently and we really need someone to wear a gorilla outfit and play the part of a

Page 6 of 12 pages 2/19/2017 THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY gorilla. We will pay some really good money to you if you will just wear a gorilla suit, kind of beat your chest, and act the part of a gorilla.’

So what ends up happening is the guy takes the job because he is desperate to pay his bills. He shows up at the exhibit, he beats his chest, and the kids are coming up and loving it. And as he is swinging from a rope he loses his grip and he ends up landing in the lion exhibit, and this is not a good setup for him. He realizes he is in big trouble, and he wishes he were a real gorilla so he would be able to ward off the lion. He starts backing away nervously as the lion comes closer looking very hungry. Now the gorilla didn’t want to blow his cover, but he also knew he did not want to be the lion’s lunch so he yells out, ‘Help!’ And then the lion says, ‘Shut up stupid, you will get us both fired.’

Now obviously you can imagine the poor little kids who thought the gorilla was a real gorilla and the lion was a real lion. They probably never wanted to go to a zoo again. And it was all because the gorilla was playing the hypocrite. And he was found out. Listen, there is an old adage that says, ‘Do as I say but not as I do,’ and that doesn’t cut it. That is hypocrisy. And Jesus said, “Even the demons believe and tremble.” It is one thing to say we believe, but it is another thing to truly live for Jesus, to invest in Him.

The word ‘belief’ really means ‘to live by.’ Our beliefs are the things that we live by. Not just the things that we say we believe. So what we are going to see here is I am not talking about a works based salvation. But if the Jews wanted to make their salvation about keeping the Law, then they are going to have to keep it perfectly, and that is a problem, because none of us can live according to God’s standard. And that is the issue. So if Heaven is a perfect place where God dwells and we are imperfect, how does an imperfect person go to a perfect place and not make that perfect place imperfect because we showed up? No, we have something wrong that needs to be dealt with. There is this disconnect.

By the way if you are a guest I typically wear Converse and jeans. I usually just dress more casually. But I got this jacket that originally cost $250 for $38, so I thought I would wear it. And maybe next week I will have this jacket with my new Munster’s tee shirt on under it. So it is not about how someone dresses, it is not about external things. Hey, it is good to tithe, it is good to read the Bible, it is good to pray, it is good to do those things, but the questions is - why are we doing them? What motivates us to do them? Is it because we are putting on a front? Is it because we are finding false assurance in these externals?

So the Jews boasted in God, they knew His will, they knew what was right, they could teach it, but guess what - it made no difference in their lives. They could live it but not from the heart. I remember reading a story about three Irish brothers that would go every Saturday night to the pub together where they would each order a pint of Guinness.

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Two of the brothers ended up moving out of Ireland, one went to Australia and the other went to America. But they had committed to drink their Guinness every Saturday night together. They would be on different time zones, but they would make sure that they ordered three pints of Guinness, and they would drink those in memory of their times together.

So the brother who stayed in Ireland went into the pub as usual on Saturday night and he orders his three pints of Guinness. The bartender brings him the three beers and says, ‘Look, I know you like your beer cold. You don’t have to get the three beers all at once. I can bring you one at a time.’ And the brother said, ‘No, you don’t understand. One of my brothers moved to Australia and the other brother moved to America. And we committed that we would always drink together every Saturday night.’ The bartender said, ‘Okay, that is really special.’

So the next Saturday night the brother who stayed in Ireland shows up and he only orders two Guinness pints. And the bartender came up to him to offer his condolence thinking that one of the brothers had died. He said, ‘I am really sorry about the loss of your brother as I see you only ordered two beers.’ And the brother said, ‘No, I didn’t lose one of my brothers. It is just that I quit drinking - but they didn’t.’

That story just illustrates that sometimes we will just do anything to make room for us to change the standards, to live in a way that we want to live. And religious hypocrites are often misled by their false sense of assurance. But secondly religious hypocrites are far more concerned with their outward appearance than internal change. And this is where we are going to get into circumcision. I want to explain this by means of understanding what is going on here, and especially if you are coming to church maybe for the first time and someone asks you what we talked about. They may not think that sounds very relevant today.

But here is the thing. I don’t want to dismiss the Bible, because it is what has been left for us, and we need to understand it. So what is going on here? In Genesis Chapter 17 God spoke to Abraham and He tells him that he wants him and all of his menservants to be circumcised. And that was going to be a sign of the covenant that they were in with God. So there was this cutting off then that would symbolize that if the covenant was broken that they too would be cut off from God.

Now when we understand the gospel and we understand all of God’s Scripture, we realize that no one is going to be able to keep this covenant. Everyone is going to fall short of God’s standard. But it was meant to be a sign. There would often be like a breaking of something amongst the Jewish people. They were highly symbolic. So if there was going to be a covenant made sometimes they would break glass, or before a husband and wife got married they would take a bull calf and cut it in half and separate

Page 8 of 12 pages 2/19/2017 THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY the two halves and the couple would walk out barefoot and do a figure eight around the two halves of the bull calf as if to say, ‘Do so unto us if we break this commitment until death do us part.’ It was to lay weight on the importance of their word.

It was a covenant. It is the sign of a covenant. Now if I were Abraham I would probably have gone through a process like this. He was 99 years old when he heard from God on that. I probably would have been thinking, ‘You know what, I surely must be getting senile at this stage. God just said to I am to be circumcised; but surely that is not what He meant, right?’ But Abraham obeyed and he did it. And not only that but imagine Abraham going out and saying to his servants. ‘Hey guys, you are going to get circumcised, and sorry no anesthesia.’ That is some tough stuff right there. That is one of those moments that I am not sure I am digging Father Abraham.

But they got circumcised which was showing the sign of their covenant. What they were saying was they were going to be cut off from God if they didn’t keep this. And obviously no one can, and no one can keep the Law, and that is the point. We are to come to the end of ourselves where we realize that we can’t earn our own salvation; we can’t do it on our own.

With that context in mind, now pick up in verse 25 so that I don’t lose you with circumcision language. “For circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the Law, but if you break the Law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. So, if a man who is uncircumcised (like a Gentile) keeps the precepts of the Law will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision?”

So you have these Jews that have been circumcised, but if they don’t obey the Law then it is like being uncircumcised and the covenant is broken. And now you have these non-Jews, these Gentiles, who haven’t been circumcised, but if they keep the Law, it is like circumcision. Now you may wonder how they could keep the Law if they didn’t have the Law. Well, one of God’s created graces is He created all of humanity, as we saw in Romans earlier, with this innate sense of right and wrong. The moral law is written on our heart and on our conscience. That’s why we have this sense that something is off. And when a non-believer begins to act in accord with that, guess what? There is something that happens in that. He is living out the moral law.

As some people have said before, there are non-Christians that will look and say, ‘Why do I need Jesus to be moral? I don’t need to believe in God to do good.’ And guess how I would respond to that? I would say, ‘That’s exactly right.’ Now before some of you choke on that - there is a key word. You don’t have to believe in God to do moral good, but God must exist for us to do moral good. Why? It is because God is the standard of morality and we are measured according to His standard. So God is the objective grounding of our morality. And if there is no God there is no objective

Page 9 of 12 pages 2/19/2017 THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY morality. Morality is simply subjective. We are the subjects, and it is my word against yours. But if God exists, He is the objective standard of morality.

What happens is these Gentiles could conclude, ‘Hey, why do I need your God, why do I need to be like you, because I don’t see the need to get circumcised, I am able to do good things on my own. I don’t need to believe in your God to do good.’ But God must exist for us to be good. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German Atheist, or Albert Camus, or Jean-Paul Sartre, these existentialists who were Atheists, they took Atheism to the logical conclusion and realized that if there is no God, there is no objective morality.

Michael Ruse out of Florida State, the great Agnostic, basically said this: “Morality is an illusion fobbed out on us by our genes to cause us to cooperate.” So there are these moral features that help us cooperate. See, we shouldn’t be surprised then when we see non-believers being able to not steal or not lie; but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need the gospel because we all do.

Now, this is the issue then. These people, these Jews, came to the conclusion that they were okay because they had been circumcised, or because they were Jews. Let’s pick up now in verse 27. “Then he who is physically uncircumcised but keeps the Law will condemn you who have the written code and circumcision but break the Law. For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.”

Ultimately, it is not our circumcision, it is not our nationalism, it is not the Law that makes us right with God; it is trust in Jesus. In ‘The Message,’ which is a paraphrase written by Eugene Peterson, it helps sometimes to see a paraphrase deal with difficult verses. So let’s look at what the paraphrase has to say with some of the verses we just looked at.

“Circumcision, the surgical ritual that marks you as a Jew is great if you live in accord with God’s Law. But if you don’t, it is worse than not being circumcised. The reverse is also true. The uncircumcised who keep God’s ways are as good as the circumcised, in fact better. Better to keep God’s Law uncircumcised than break it circumcised. Don’t you see it is not the cut of a knife that makes a Jew; you become a Jew by who you are. It is the mark of God on your heart, not of a knife on your skin that makes a Jew. And recognition comes from God not legalistic critics.”

As it says at the end of Verse 29, praise is to come from God not man. Many hypocrites strive to get approval of man and they become very confused in their identity, because they live by these eternal rites, they set up these certain standards, they know how to fit in, they know the right thing to say and do, and how to act and how to dress, but their hearts are missing it.

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With that mindset then, folks, I want to wrap up with four takeaways. That is the passage of Scripture before us, now let’s see what we can take away from it. First of all - religious hypocrisy may taint the reputation of God, but it doesn’t taint the unchanging character of God. As it has been said, ‘Reputation is what others say about you, character is who you really are.’ While our lives may taint the reputation of God when we live outside of God’s will, it does not change the character of God. God remains holy, just, righteous and good.

And if you are not a Christian and you are spiritually just thinking through the faith and what to believe, here is what I would say. If you have been wounded by hypocrisy, look past the hypocrites to a holy God who is unchanging in His character.

Secondly, I would say this - just because we may look the part doesn’t mean we fit the part. Only the legit will escape God’s judgment. In Chapter 2 it is about judgment and how the Gentiles are up against judgment, but it is true for the Jews as well. And the Jews couldn’t say just because they were a Jew, or just because they kept the Law, or just because they had been circumcised that they could evade judgment. That is not the case. It is bigger than looking the part, it is being the part. And to be the part, if we are going to live according to the Law, we are going to have to keep it, and none of us do because we are broken. We are to live for an audience of one, folks.

The third takeaway that I would share is - as believers we are at risk of religious hypocrisy every time we lose sight of our true identity in Christ. That is to say what happens to us when we believe is we are forgiven and we are declared righteous. Just as God looked at Jesus on the cross as a sinner, basically He counted Him as a sinner, and our sins were placed on Him, when we believe that Jesus fulfilled the Law, that He was righteous on our behalf, He counts His righteousness to us. And therefore that becomes our identity. We strive then to live like Jesus and we strive to walk in His ways. But when we strive to appease those around us, we strive to fit in, when we strive to be like everyone else what ends up happening is we get confused. When we start wearing lots of masks we lose our true identity and we become merely an actor. And we are not meant to be actors; rather we are meant to live out our true identity.

Finally, the last think I want to share is - in the end religion fails, but Jesus wins. And here is what I want us to get. Religion at large manufactures hypocrites. The difference between religion and Christianity relationship is religion, as it has been said is spelled ‘d-o’, do, it is about us trying to earn God’s approval, whereas Christianity is about relationship and God’s grace and it is spelled, ‘d-o-n-e,’ done. Jesus on the cross said, tetelestai, “It is finished.”

In the book of Isaiah we learn about the suffering servant, and it tells us that the suffering servant would be cut off on our behalf. And what does circumcision mean? It

Page 11 of 12 pages 2/19/2017 THE GOSPEL OF GOD - PART IV - UNMASKING HYPOCRISY means this cutting off. And all of us have failed to live up to the standard. But Jesus who did keep the Law perfectly on our behalf was cut off so that in Him we could find forgiveness of sins.

So here is what I want to say. Some of you all of your life may have been striving to save yourselves. You may have been striving to prove yourself, feeling good and safe behind your denominational label, your communion preference, your dress style, or the type of music that you listen to. You may have been finding security behind what you do not do. You might be finding your identity by looking down on others and feeling a sense of self-righteousness, or feeling withered when you find someone who seems ahead of you and it kicks you into competitive mode. You may either feel competitive with others who are ahead, or you feel superior to those you believe are behind. And that is no way to live. It will confuse our identity.

Our identity is this - Jesus coming to earth to rescue us pulled off what none of us ever could. He fulfilled the Law that all the Jews broke. And what Paul wants them to know is we all have the problem of guilt too. We are all in the same boat. And the point was never for us to keep the Law because we never could. But Jesus fulfilled it on our behalf and He pursues us like the great hound of heaven with unbelievable love and grace to invite us into a relationship. And next time we begin feeling overly confident because we think we are keeping the Law, we need to remember that the gospel is not just something we say so that we can be forgiven, it is to be the way we live every single day of our lives. And we need to remember that He already fulfilled it so that we don’t have to earn it, that what we need is regeneration. We aren’t to be crushed beneath the standard; Jesus fulfilled the Law for us. He was cut off for you and me. Let’s pray.

Lord, I pray that you will use this great book of Romans, the gospel of God, to change our lives. If anyone does not know you and your unbelievable love, may they look to you and realize that on the cross you are offering them your forgiveness and all the grace that comes along with it for a new life, a life that will outlast this life, a life that is eternal, a life with you now and forever. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases.

Page 12 of 12 pages 2/19/2017