Jesus said, “Hypocrite!
First of all remove the beam from your own eye, then you will be able to see
clearly to remove the speck from the other person’s eye.”
—
Matthew 7:5 (USC)
Hypocrisy is not something any of us want to be accused of. None of us
is enamoured of the antithesis of integrity.
Courage is to
integrity, as cowardice is to hypocrisy. The hypocrite is too afraid to conform
to the truth. Indeed, they are too afraid that their ‘truth’ is a lie. They
prefer the comfortable situation of remaining unchallenged, though life
inevitably challenges them and, ultimately, they are rent asunder — undone by
some thing or other. But the person of integrity is willing to die to lay claim
to the truth. They see the living of a lie as a death worse than dying. Being
that they are willing to die for the truth, God rarely requires that of them,
but they are no less willing.
Those with integrity
— those who have received Christ’s call on their lives — form themselves into
the unity of the gospel demand. They hear the Holy Spirit say to them, “You
must trust and obey your Lord Jesus in order to make faith possible, and only
through faith is it possible to please God.” But the postmodern church rarely
wants to put faith in such terms as obedience. It always seems ‘too hard’. We
will have to if we have integrity. Having integrity means reading the unison of
Scripture and being of one mind and heart with how to abide by it.
It is the surest
sign yet of a person without integrity that they see and experience truth only
through their observation of others, whilst their own truth goes begging
because they are fearful of approaching it. Honest self-observation is only for
the person of integrity. The man or woman with integrity start first with themselves.
They have no time to judge another person, for God is never finished engorging
them with improvement opportunities. And their growth opportunities are not
just hard-to-digest things. They enjoy much of their learning. Their learning
is a symbol of their humility and their courage; the ardency of their
commitment to truth.
***
We can trust the
person who is honest with themselves, but we have no such faith in the one who
is never comfortable within themselves.
Be the one you have
become and you will be won to the one you have become.
To others,
ourselves, and God we are received; everyone loves the person of integrity.
Integrity is the
brush that paints in strokes of truth. But hypocrisy paints a picture of bewildering
deceit and of division. Integrity, alone, is trustworthy.
***
QUESTIONS in REVIEW:
1. How will we know we are closer to
integrity than hypocrisy?
2. What hypocrisy do you struggle
with?
© 2015 S. J. Wickham.
Note: USC version is Under the Southern Cross, The New Testament in Australian English
(2014). This translation was painstakingly developed by Dr Richard Moore, a NT
Greek scholar, over nearly thirty years.
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