Hypocrisy

Text: Matthew 23:13-16

Series: Restoration Sermons

Date:

Speaker: Ed Rangel

Location: Waupaca Church of Christ

Bible Version: NASB 1995

Sermon Type: Expository

Learning Objectives

By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:

1. Define hypocrisy from its Greek roots and explain why Jesus singled it out for his sharpest condemnation.
2. Identify the distinguishing marks of a hypocrite — including the danger of self-deception.
3. Recognize how hypocrisy damages every level of the church: pulpit, elders, membership.
4. Understand why God's hatred of hypocrisy is total and why only the deepest penitence can bring forgiveness.
5. Commit to a life of truth-telling in word and practice as the opposite of hypocrisy.

Thesis

Hypocrisy is the sin of performing religion while inwardly rejecting it — and Jesus reserved his harshest words for those who do.

Burden

The Pharisees were the most religiously meticulous people in the ancient world. They fasted twice a week, gave tithes of mint and cummin, washed hands before meals, and prayed loud prayers at street corners. And Jesus called them hypocrites — whitewashed tombs, full of dead men's bones. He did not reserve such language for the openly immoral. He aimed it at the devout who had perfected the outward form while abandoning the inward substance. That is not an accident. Hypocrisy may be the most dangerous religious sin because it is the most invisible — invisible to observers, invisible to the hypocrite himself.

Introduction

The word "hypocrisy" appears only a few times in the Old Testament, and when translators work with those passages, they often render the underlying Hebrew with words like "profane," "godless," or expressions meaning "to cover," "to hide," "to becloud." That is telling. Even the Hebrew conception carries the idea of concealment — putting something over what is really there. The New Testament word is Greek, and its origin in Greek culture is even more revealing.

The Greek hypokritēs was the technical term for a stage actor — a person who wore a mask and spoke lines that did not represent his own life or beliefs. Everyone in the theater knew the actor was performing. No one was deceived. The sin enters when the mask leaves the stage and gets worn in real life — when a person performs the part of a Christian for an audience of men while inwardly maintaining a different self.

I. New Testament Use of Hypocrisy

The word "hypocrite" appears far more frequently from the lips of Jesus than from any other speaker in the New Testament. It is predominantly his word for a category of religious failure he found uniquely dangerous.

1. Jesus used the term more than anyone else in the New Testament — it belongs to his vocabulary of condemnation.
2. The Greek background is the actor on the stage: to play a part in a drama, to act a role in life. The root makes the sin concrete — it is performance replacing reality.
3. On no class did Jesus pronounce condemnation so severe. Not on the openly immoral, not on the pagan, not on the doubter — on the hypocrite.
4. The severity of the condemnation measures the severity of the sin. When Christ speaks in "woe" language (Matt. 23:13–16), it is the strongest warning language in his vocabulary.

II. Characteristics of the Hypocrite

1. False, deceptive, insincere. The hypocrite says one thing and is another. His religious words do not match his heart.
2. A skillful deceiver. Hypocrisy is not usually bumbling or obvious. A successful hypocrite has developed the ability to produce convincing religious performance for years. The skill is what makes it dangerous.
3. He becomes a self-deceiver. This is the most sobering mark. What begins as deceiving others can become deceiving oneself. After years of performing religion, the actor can forget he is wearing a mask. The Pharisees are a warning that it is possible to be completely wrong about one's own spiritual condition while being meticulous in external observance. The leaven of the Pharisees — the thing Jesus warned against — was precisely this (Luke 12:1).
4. The leaven of the Pharisees is hypocrisy (Luke 12:1). Leaven works invisibly, quietly, spreading throughout the whole lump. So does hypocrisy — one hypocrite in a household of faith can shape the atmosphere of the whole body.

III. How Hypocrisy Has Cursed Every Phase of the Church

Hypocrisy is not merely a personal sin. It radiates outward and damages every component of the body of Christ.

1. The pulpit. A preacher who proclaims what he does not practice drives people away from Christ rather than toward him. The man who condemns sins in public that he commits in private is a direct agent of harm to the kingdom.
2. The elders. An elder is to be "above reproach" (1 Tim. 3:2) — not above accusation (anyone can be accused), but above reproach: a man whose life matches his office. An ungodly pretender in the eldership is among the most damaging figures a congregation can have, because his office grants him credibility he has not earned.
3. The membership. Members who profess godliness while living inwardly in unrepentant sin are stumbling blocks. The New Testament identifies this directly: a hypocrite causes stumbling (1 Tim. 4:1–2). Those who watch Christians perform religion without any corresponding life change conclude that Christianity is itself merely a performance.
4. It hinders spiritual growth (1 Pet. 2:1). Peter commands that Christians lay aside all hypocrisy alongside malice, envy, and slander. Hypocrisy is not a minor failing on the margin of spiritual life — it is listed as a fundamental obstruction to growth. You cannot grow in grace while maintaining a false front.

IV. Truth-Telling and Lying

The remedy for hypocrisy is truth-telling — the alignment of inner life with outward profession, of private conduct with public claim.

1. The commercial life is the most common testing ground for truth-telling in the day — as in ours. A person who professes Christ on Sunday but practices dishonesty in business through the week is the definition of a hypocrite in a domain that everyone can see.
2. God hates hypocrisy with a perfect hatred. This is not a mild preference or a disappointment — it is the active opposition of a holy God toward a sin that mocks him. Hypocrisy takes the forms he ordained for genuine worship and uses them as a costume.
3. He will not forgive without the deepest penitence. This follows necessarily. Superficial repentance — the kind that changes one's outward story while leaving the inner man untouched — is itself a form of hypocrisy. God requires the genuine article. The penitent must stop performing and start being. David's cry in Psalm 51:17 is the model: "a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise."

Application

The danger of this sermon is that a congregation will hear it about the person sitting three rows away. Hypocrisy survives by directing accusation outward. The question each listener must ask is personal:

Is the life I live in private consistent with the faith I confess in public?

If a man prays before the congregation but never prays at home, he is a hypocrite in prayer. If a woman defends the authority of Scripture in Bible class but has not read it this week, she is performing the part of a Bible-believer. If a person sings "I surrender all" and has surrendered nothing since the last time they sang it, the song is a mask.

The Greek actor's mask was made of clay and painted to look like a face. God looks through it. He is not deceived. The good news is that when a person stops performing — when he comes before God stripped of the performance, saying only what is actually true — God meets him there. The thing Christ is looking for is not a polished performance. It is a real one.

Conclusion

Jesus did not hate hypocrites. He hated hypocrisy — the disease that hid people from God behind a wall of religious performance. The woes of Matthew 23 are not the words of a man who has given up on the Pharisees; they are the words of a man who knows what the Pharisees are capable of being and is enraged that they have settled for a mask. He wants the real man, not the actor.

The mask can come off. That is the invitation embedded in the warning. Whatever layer of performance has built up in a person's religious life, it can be set aside. The condition is what Jesus calls "the deepest penitence" — not a performance of sorrow, but actual sorrow. Not a new and better mask, but no mask at all.

Invitation

If you have been performing Christianity rather than living it — if there is distance between what you confess and what you are — the invitation is to step out from behind the performance. God already sees what is there. He is inviting you to acknowledge it, to repent genuinely, and to begin again from an honest place.

For those who have not obeyed the gospel at all: believe in Christ as the Son of God, repent of your sins, confess his name, and be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38). That act of immersion is itself a truth-telling — a visible statement that the old self is dead and a new life has begun. There is no hypocrisy in it when it is done from genuine faith.

For Christians who need to come back: the congregation stands ready to pray with you and restore you (Jas. 5:16).

Word Study

Scripture Interlock Table

---

Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 75. Doctrinal audit: core framework; hypocrisy defined from Greek theatrical origin; self-deception as the most dangerous characteristic named and developed (Luke 12:1 leaven metaphor); three-level damage (pulpit, elders, membership) developed from Boles's sketch; God's hatred of hypocrisy stated without softening; deepest penitence required — no superficial repentance; invitation calls to full obedient response (Acts 2:38). No OCR errors found in source.