In the last blog, I asked you to name some of your own hypocrisies. I suggested you try to identify ten as a beginning and shared ten of mine. The purpose of ten is that is forces you to go deeper. The purpose of naming them is not for guilt sake but to enable you to break free of their power.
Once I was able to acknowledge that despite the mandate of the Gospel, I was a racist, I could open myself to the power of God to use an imperfect servant to break down some racial barriers. Once I am free to acknowledge that I am very imperfect and that God loves me anyway, I am free to be less self-righteous of others. The more I can identify both my own failings and the failings of the church, the more I stand in awe at God’s ability to work through the church for the sake of God’s world.
Take the list that you created of the situations and attitudes that make you feel like a hypocrite, and try to identify specific possibilities of how God might work through each of them for a greater good either in your personal life or your ministry.
I had a minister friend who had messed up his marriage and was going through a divorce. He told me that Sunday after Sunday he would feel overwhelmed by his unworthiness to say anything about God, Christ, and faith. Yet each Sunday he had to rise and preach. As we talked about it over time, he discovered that his very pain of unworthiness deepened his sermons. It was not from a perspective of purity that he addressed his congregation but as a sinner who was wrestling with the Gospel. That didn’t justify what had happened in his marriage, but it did allow him to experience personally how God’s power is made perfect in our weakness.
