Abounding Grace

Pastor Ed Taylor: Coming up today on Abounding Grace, hypocrisy is real, and it exists in the church. It exists in our society, but it's real in the church. Hypocrisy, something we need to be careful of, something we need to pay attention to. Hypocrisy is a sin and a big problem in the church. God help us to be men and women of truth. Why? Because truth, fidelity, being trustworthy, matters. It is a big part of your testimony.

This is amazing grace

This is unfailing love

That You would take my place

That You would bear my cross

You laid down Your life

That I would be set free

Oh Jesus I sing for

All that You've done for me

Guest (Male): Today on Abounding Grace, we're confronting the sin of hypocrisy. We'll be in Galatians chapter two, so find your place there now. Here the apostle Paul is dealing with hypocrisy in the church, and the hypocrite in this case just may surprise you. But before you look down your nose at them, it would be good for us to look in the mirror to see if we are guilty of the same. Here's Pastor Ed Taylor in Galatians chapter two.

Pastor Ed Taylor: Open your Bibles to Galatians chapter two, would you? Galatians chapter two, when you get there, we're going to pick up in verse 11 where we left off last time. I've entitled our Bible study, "Grace Confronts Hypocrisy."

Hypocrisy is real, and it exists in the church. It exists in our society, but it's real in the church. Hypocrisy, something we need to be careful of, something we need to pay attention to. Hypocrisy is a sin and a big problem in the church. God help us to be men and women of truth. Why? Because truth, fidelity, being trustworthy, matters.

It is a big part of your testimony. It is how you are able to build bridges when someone trusts you with the significant portions of their life as you share life with them. I'm sure you've heard it. I'm sure you've heard it in your conversations with others where they say, "I don't go to church. I don't want anything to do with church. I don't want anything to do with Christians because Christianity and churches are filled with hypocrites."

And I've heard it on more than one occasion. But before you're so quick to be defensive on that statement, I have learned over the years, I'm not so quick to be defensive on that statement because it's not entirely untrue. There is a lot of hypocrisy in the church of Jesus Christ today. It's not entirely untrue. There is hypocrisy at King Soopers. There's hypocrisy at Safeway. There's hypocrisy at your workplace. But there's also hypocrites in the church, and it's very unfortunate.

Hypocrisy needs to be dealt with in your life. It's important that you choose to live a life of integrity and develop your character. Be a man, be a woman that people can trust. Be a person with one face, not two. Often we'll describe hypocrisy as being two-faced. Have you heard that? Two-faced. It actually is a pretty accurate definition for the Greek word.

The Greek word used in the New Testament for hypocrite is the word *hypokrites*. And they just took that word and made it into an English word, hypocrite. Very accurate word. It comes to us from the Greek plays, from the stage. You know, in Greek plays, when a person wanted to play a part, they would put a mask over their face.

So for example, if they wanted to play a part where they were happy, then they would put a mask over their face that had a smile. And so on the outward you would see the smile, but it would mask or it would cover what the reality was. So that then if they wanted to play a character that was sad, then they would switch out that mask and put a sad mask on. And now you see the mask, but you don't see the reality.

Hypocrisy is putting on a mask. It's good to pause here today and make sure that we understand what hypocrisy is and isn't as we get into the text today. Hypocrisy, if you're taking notes, is not... Let's start number one with hypocrisy is not describing someone who believes something, strives to live it, but fails and falls short. That's not hypocrisy.

For example, you were here today as a Christian, you love God, you're learning about him, you're reading his word, but you still make mistakes. You still sin. People still see failure in your life. That's not hypocrisy. That's normalcy. That makes you a normal believer who desires to live a godly life. You desire, you're rearranging your whole life to follow God, but you're not perfect. That's not hypocrisy. That's normal. Every believer falls short now and then. It's a regular part of the normal Christian life. That's not hypocrisy.

A hypocrite, number two, is... So we looked at what a hypocrite is not. Let's now understand what a hypocrite is. A hypocrite is someone who lives a lie. We could just stop there. But it's a walking liar, a hypocrite. And you can see the significance of this sin. The sin of dishonesty, the sin of being disingenuous, the sin of being duplicitous, the sin of being dishonest, disloyal, and on the list can go.

A hypocrite is someone who lives a lie, wanting everyone to believe something about them that simply isn't true. In the church, that is that sense of you want somebody to think something about... Everything's fine. Everything's good. I'm here for you and I'm here to serve you, but all the while you're a manipulative, deceitful person and you put on a mask for church. Hypocrisy. Of course, that's in its worst case.

But Jesus, when he described the false teachers, remember what he said? He says that they come in sheep's clothing. The wolves come in sheep's clothing. You could say the sheep's clothing is a mask. They're pretending to be something that they're not. They're wearing a mask. And Paul deals with this issue here in Galatians chapter two of someone very prominent wearing a mask.

And as he's displaying the grace of God to the churches in Galatia by way of review, remember, Paul wrote a letter to the churches in Galatia that he planted because they were being ripped off by false teaching. There was a movement in the early church to want to add something to the gospel. And let me just say for a moment here that you can add nothing to the gospel. Once you attempt to add something to the gospel, it is no longer the gospel.

The gospel, the good news, that we are saved by faith, that God sent his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to die on our behalf. To exchange our sinfulness for his sinlessness, our unrighteousness for his righteousness, our imperfections replaced by his perfection. Remember the gospel? He made him who knew no sin to become sin for us, that we might enjoy the righteousness and become the righteousness of God in Christ.

We are saved by our simple faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and what he has done for us. We receive the benefits of his labors, his sacrifice of him giving himself for us. It's so important that our hearts receive and that we believe in him and that we trust in him and that we grow in our hearts and our love toward him. That's how the churches were planted.

And then not too long after Paul left, these guys roll into town and begin to add to the gospel. They begin to say you cannot be saved by faith alone. You must be saved by faith and... And it was in that moment that they left the gospel and began to rip off the people. In this case in the Galatian region, the issue they were dealing with was the work of circumcision and keeping the law.

So they would come in and say, "You can't listen to Paul. He's a liar. He's a deceiver. He's not even a real apostle." Remember, they're attacking his credibility, his integrity. "Don't believe him because really what the gospel is, is it's you are saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and circumcision. You're saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and you have to keep the law the rest of your life." And Paul hears about that and says, "Oh, no, no, no. Let's get back to basics. Let me remind you of the grace of God that you are saved by grace through faith."

Do you know we're 2,000 years after this? We're 2,000 years in the life and the history and the maturity of the church and this still exists. It exists among us now. It has changed a little bit, this legalism. I haven't met too many people, I mean really I don't think I've... Well, I have met actually, I have met some that make the inference that in order to be saved, you have to get circumcised. I'm like, "Whoa, no thanks."

Or in order to be saved you have to keep the law or a set of rules and regulations that go back to the law. I have heard variations of that. But most of the time, there are people that still want to come along your life and say, "Your simple faith in Jesus is not enough. Your simple faith in Jesus isn't enough. You need to add something." And isn't it interesting, when someone comes with that message, they always have what you have to add?

They always have some package of works ready to deliver to you so that your life now will no longer be by faith, but now by faith and works. And so you'll have someone, "You can't be saved unless you're water baptized. You can't be saved unless you read this book. You can't be saved unless you follow this man. You can't be saved unless you do all these good deeds. You can't be saved unless you go to church multiple times," and on and on the list goes.

But you see, all of these works, they are given to us... You see, we're not saved by works, we're saved *for* works. It's a very different, very important distinction here that you need to understand. That your salvation, your faith in Jesus Christ, will lead you to be water baptized obeying God. Your belief in Jesus Christ as a believer will lead you to want to read your Bible. It will lead you to want to be in church. It will lead you to all these wonderful what the Bible calls works of righteousness.

But they don't save you. Only the blood of Jesus Christ saves you. A believer participates in all these, but when an unbeliever reads the Bible and isn't born again, the Bible doesn't change them. They have to repent of their sins. An unbeliever comes to a baptism service and goes, "Well, I think I want to do that. I think I need to be..." Well, when an unbeliever gets into the waters of baptism, the only thing that happens apart from repentance, if they don't repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you know what happens to that person? They get wet.

That's all that happens. There is no power in the water to save. There is no power in the law to save. We'll see that today. There is no power in good works to save. The gospel is the opposite. The gospel says this: you are saved by faith in Jesus Christ and his finished work. You don't come... I don't come to God with all my works and say, "God, save me." I come to God with empty hands and say, "God, save me." And what does he do? He gives me these good works that I get to participate in.

Very, very important. Well, notice now as Paul has to deal with hypocrisy in the church, and you may, if you read ahead, you know who it is, but you may be surprised by who is playing the hypocrite in this episode. Verse 11: "But when Peter came to Antioch..." Remember, Antioch is the church that sent them out to church plant. This is Paul's home church. "Peter came to Antioch. I withstood him to his face," Paul says, "because he was to be blamed."

"For before certain men came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles. But when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, 'If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of Gentiles and not as the Jews, why do you compel the Gentiles to live as Jews? We who are Jews by nature and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law...'" We'll get to that verse in a moment.

Antioch is the home church of Paul. This is where Paul and Barnabas were sent out on the missionary journeys. Peter had come to visit, and I want you to notice how the visit went. When Peter came to visit the Gentile church in Antioch, he had no problem enjoying the believers in Antioch. He had no problem eating with the Gentiles, hanging out with them, talking to them, sharing life with them. No problem at all. No doubt he ate food that was not kosher because he understood it's not the food.

Peter, in the book of Acts earlier on, God dealt with this in his life. He received that vision that came down of the animals and he's all, "No, I would never eat that." And God said, "No, no." And this was the summary for Peter. The summary was this: what I've called clean, don't you ever call unclean. And though Peter gets it, and what was the very next thing? God was prepping him for Cornelius' house where he would take the gospel to Cornelius, the first Gentile family that we see get saved in the book of Acts, where God unleashed the gospel upon the whole world. That the gospel from the very beginning, God's heart was for every tribe, tongue, and nation, not just for a small select group.

And Peter knew this. He knew this we see even later on because he's eating with the Gentiles, enjoying them. There's no issue. He's a believer eating, they're believers eating, enjoying life in what would commonly be called... You can jot it down in your Bibles if you like, but this would be like an Agape feast. The early church would get together and eat, and it's not uncommon. We like to eat as believers. We get together to... You know what they call Agape feasts, we used to call potlucks, but then somebody go, "Oh, we don't believe in luck." So now they're pot blessings. Whatever.

We just come together and we eat. You know, we come together, we bring food. And just leave your rhubarb at home, but you can bring anything else. Leave your Brussels sprouts too. You can bring anything else. And we just come together and you share a meal together. This was the early church. They'd come in someone's house, they'd come together for fellowship, Bible study, they'd eat a meal together, they'd have communion together. Acts chapter two, verse 42, we have studied all this. That's where he was and he just came and enjoyed fellowship. Today we would say he came to church and worshipped with the Gentiles. That's how we'd say it.

Until things changed. It says here: "before certain men came from James," which means they came from Jerusalem, probably very legalistic Jewish believers, could even be a few Judaizers among that group. They show up and Peter changed. And what happened to Peter, the man that enjoyed meals with the uncircumcised? He became a hypocrite. I believe that he was not a lifelong hypocrite. I believe this was episodic, which is what most of we experience.

We have these episodic times in our lives when we're not real or we don't give the full story. If you don't believe me, I'll give you an example that it may affect most of us here today. You come to church, you come to work, you're meeting someone, and they say, "How are you doing?" and you say, "Fine," when you're not fine. Hypocrite. Because they asked you how you're doing and you don't want to tell them.

So you put on a face, you put on a smile. "Oh, I don't want to bother anybody." I mean, you have your motives. It doesn't mean that you did it necessarily on purpose, but you did. Because you chose not to be real and authentic. There'll be many times I receive feedback in our Bible studies here, maybe from the radio or even from the congregation here, say, "Oh, Pastor Ed, I just so appreciate your transparency."

And it kind of breaks my heart because I always think, "Well, what did you expect? What do you want from me in the pulpit? Do you want me to be fake?" Do you want me to... And I know they're not saying that, but I know the pulpits are filled with so many fake people today that transparency becomes a value when it should just be normal. We should be telling people the truth. We're sharing our life, not really worrying about what people are going to think about us.

Notice what he says here. We know the motive now. We know why he became a hypocrite, right there in verse 12. Because he feared those of the circumcision. Not too long ago, we had a Bible study in chapter one, verse 10. If the fear of man or people-pleasing is an issue in your life, just a couple weeks ago we studied that one verse and we did a whole Bible study to help you fear God more than you fear man.

It's so important because if you fear man, you're going to be doing things that you typically wouldn't do. The Bible says in Proverbs 29, verse 25, that the fear of man is a snare. It's a trap. But whoever trusts in the Lord shall be safe. So that one verse tells me that when I fear man, I leave the safety of abiding in Christ. Because when I'm in Christ, it doesn't really matter what people think about me. Everybody has an opinion, but only God's opinion matters. And you'll really value that when you're abiding in Christ.

He fears man and he chooses to abandon the Gentiles. He withdraws from them, refuses fellowship to those that he enjoyed prior to this visit. It was so bad, notice in verse 13 at the end, that even Barnabas was carried away by the hypocrisy. Peter, this doesn't surprise me so much with Peter because Peter's a big personality. You know, when he did faith steps, he did big ones. Like he's the only other person recorded in the history of humanity besides Jesus to walk on water.

I mean, he was big. When he took a step of faith, it was big, it was dramatic and amazing. But when he fell, his falls were pretty hard. Big steps, big falls. This is a big fall in the early church of a very well-esteemed, well-respected leader not acting like he was taught by Christ. I don't have time to develop these. I encourage you to jot them down. I could develop them all into Bible studies, but I want to give you some life lessons related to this issue of hypocrisy before we go on to the rest of the text that will be helpful for you.

If you're taking notes, jot them down, things to chew on, things to think about this week on this topic of hypocrisy from this issue with Peter. Number one: fear God more than you fear any man. It's a simple statement. Pray it into your life if you need to. Those of you that are just afraid of other people's opinions and you... Again, when we illustrated fearing man, some of you go, "I don't have any problem fearing man."

But then I reminded, "Does anybody ever know what it's like to walk on eggshells?" and hands went all the way up and the flag started waving so many hands went up when I said that. Walking around eggshells is a form of fearing man where you're just trying to delicately get through and try to not... Don't disrupt anything. Yeah, because you don't want to deal with the consequence of what might happen if you told them the truth or if you said something. So you just keep it to yourself. Don't fear man. Number one.

Number two: stay sensitive to other believers that are different than you. Invite them into your life. Here, Peter's eating with the Gentiles, that was very good, but stay sensitive to them. Have in your friend group, have in your desire to reach people, people that are different than you, where you can value the humanity in front of you. People that have a different background, people that might be of a different skin color, people that come from a different part of the country.

Get involved when we start seeing the short-term mission trips ramp up again. Go, go, go, and then go some more. See the world. Serve the people. Expand yourself and broaden yourself beyond what wherever you are today. Because Peter, he might have made a different decision if he valued the people that were in front of him more than he feared man.

Thirdly, I want you to consider this this week: cherish and develop personal friendships and fellowship. Again, they build on one another, but this one's a little different because in the friendship and fellowship as you're gathering together, even in this church family, I started thinking, I wonder how the Gentiles felt when Peter abandoned them. "You were just eating with me, man. Like we were just sharing... and now these guys come, you don't want to talk to me anymore? You don't want to be around me anymore?"

I wonder how their feelings were hurt. Again, you're like, "I don't go to church because of hypocrites." Well, don't be so quick to defend that. Like hypocrisy exists and it's felt by real people. The sin of hypocrisy hurts people, not only the person that's a hypocrite, but it hurts... Think of the Gentiles. When you develop these personal friendships and fellowship, you begin to think about how God will use you in their life. You begin to care about them more than yourself. It's very powerful.

Number four, this comes from Barnabas, from the angle of Barnabas, and that is this. It's so important you get this. You ready? Even if someone is influential in the church, even for someone that's influential in the church, if they do something wrong, don't follow them.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Pastor Ed Taylor on Abounding Grace, part of our study in Galatians. Pastor Ed's message, "Grace Confronts Hypocrisy," can be heard again at aboundinggraceradio.com. Another way to take in a steady dose of God's word is through the app. It's free. We're also on oneplace.com.

Abounding Grace is made possible through the support of our listeners. And when you give a donation of $25 or more to Abounding Grace, we'll send you a copy of "When the Storm Hits" by Chuck Smith. Maybe you're in a storm even as we speak. Know this: the Lord stands by you. His purpose sustains you, and God's word will encourage and guide you.

So if you're feeling a little overwhelmed by the waves, see how to get anchored on Jesus the Rock as you read "When the Storm Hits." Call 877-30-GRACE. That's 877-30-GRACE. You can also get the book online at calvaryco.store. We'll finish up Pastor Ed's look at Galatians chapter two next time we're together for Abounding Grace.

This is amazing grace

This is unfailing love

That You would take my place

That You would bear my cross

You laid down Your life

That I would be set free

Oh Jesus I sing for

All that You've done for me

Abounding Grace is brought to you by Calvary Church Colorado, here in Aurora.