We sometimes make the mistake of letting God define what is a sin and what isn’t, and then spending a lot of fruitless energy trying to come up with our own stratagems for dealing with those sins. But there are many places in Scripture where we are told, not only what to avoid, but how to avoid it. I noticed one of these this morning.
“Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known” (Luke 12:1b-2).
The Lord is telling us to beware of the slow, silent growth of hypocrisy. Like leaven it works gradually — you cannot hear it rattle as it heads toward you. The antidote to this temptation is to know, really know, what kind of story you inhabit, and you cannot know this without reflecting on the Author’s devices. We don’t need to guess about this because He not only writes the story of our lives, but He also — as many writers do — wrote a book about how He writes. He explains (in many plain ways) what He is up to.
So we need to understand that we live in chapter 17 and that in chapter 19 everything is revealed. You are the butler, and everybody finds out the butler did it.
It is either to be the subject of honesty now, or the object of honesty later.
The hypocrite is the one who, above all men, strives to be the one who “gets away with it.” But the Lord tells us here, and in many other places, that there is no such thing as getting away with it.