News from February 2011
Love without hypocrisy
Posted on February 10, 2011 by Pastor Tom
It’s the Valentine’s Day season with lots of talk about love. I think it’s great to have a specific time to celebrate love and express our love in a more creative way. But Valentine’s Day can also expose a lack of love or the flawed love we give and receive.
Hypocrisy can greatly tarnish love. The term hypocrite originally referred to a play actor who projected an image of some character but hid their true identity behind a mask. Hypocrisy was a theatrical term meaning “speaking behind a mask.” But it was later applied to someone who said one thing but hid behind the mask of something else. So it referred to someone who was insincere, deceitful or projecting one image while believing or being someone else in heart.
Hypocrisy shows up when one tries to act different on the outside compared to the goings on inside of us. We may speak kindly to a person but inside we feel animosity for them. Behind their back, we tear them down. We can also love hypocritically when we draw attention to other people’s flaws so that ours don’t show up. It’s like pointing out a speck in someone else’s eye while you have a log in your own eye.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of hypocritical love, you know how much it can hurt. No one likes to receive love that seemed genuine but is later discovered to be false. No one likes someone else pointing out their faults when that “someone” has plenty of their own faults.
Yet people love like that. Sometimes you might even love like that. Why? Sometimes we may be driven by the craving for others to make much of us. So we put ourselves forward pretending to love so others will commend us. Or we point out the faults of others so we look better. Other times we may simply want to cover up our own faults. So we loudly complain about something or someone when the real issue is something else inside of us.
Jesus exposed this one time when he healed a woman on the Sabbath. A religious ruler criticized Jesus for “working” on the Sabbath. But that wasn’t really this ruler’s issue. He himself did some “work” on the Sabbath. Jesus pointed out that if this guy’s ox got lost or a sheep fell into a well, he would certainly work to find them. He worked to protect his investments. But he didn’t care about that woman Jesus’ healed. So he covered it with a hypocritical charge.
Love without hypocrisy is profoundly different. It forgets about self and receiving praise. Instead, this love offers genuine care and concern to someone else. The inner workings in our heart agree with our outside actions. And I believe that we can receive that kind of love first from the most genuine person to ever walk the earth – Jesus. From Him, we can then offer it to others. That’s a love that I think everyone would love to receive on Valentine’s Day and every day.