I am a true Nigerian. Born in Nigeria to fully Nigerian parents, schooled and lived all of my life in Nigeria. Even when I am holidaying outside of Nigeria, I am in a hurry to return home. I also got saved in Nigerian and I am a part of the church of Christ in Nigeria. I don’t now about your country but one of the biggest problems of the church in Nigeria is hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy, according to my Webster’s dictionary is “a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion”. Anyone who acts in any manner that can be described with the sentences immediately above is a hypocrite.
When one pretends to be what one isn’t, the person is not real and in my country we say the person is “fake”. Having this “fake” people in the church is a problem to the church as an institution and to the body of Christ. They are so “fake” that even when they come before God in prayer they are not sincere.
When we get born again, God accepts us just as we are. He does not need us to be wonderful for Him to come into us. When He saves our souls and as we yield to Him, He begins to do a work of transformation in our lives. He did not save us because we are good people but because we can’t be good without Him. He wants us to be honest at each point about our state. God already knew Adam’s state when he called out to him in the Garden of Eden
Genesis 3: 8b NLT – “…So they hid from the Lord God amongst the trees. Then the Lord God called to the man, where are you?”
God can see all things so he knew that they had hidden from Him and also knew where they were but He still asked them where they were and hoped that they would tell the truth which they did.
God did not bring us into the church to compare ourselves with ourselves so that we do not become envious of one another. Neither did he save our souls for us to pretend to be what we are not. We do not need to obtain by false pretences what God is able to give us. Whatever one gets by pretending to be something other than what they are was stolen because it was obtained by falsehood (whether it is a position of leadership, money, spouse etc).
Hypocrites have lost sight of God and are indeed very short sighted. They cannot see beyond what they want to achieve; all their ambition is very selfish and they are selfish. They are definitely menpleasers who do not care about the destructive power of their acts of hypocrisy..
Gal 1:10B NLT – “if pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ’s servant”
Hypocrites please men so as to achieve their own purpose. No one can be a hypocrite and yet please God. I am convinced that hypocrisy is orchestrated by a host of demons. We must not allow them continue to rule our lives and conversely, the church. It is time to love God sincerely and destroy this bane of the church.
Another bullseye!!! The Yorubas call it "ABOSI" and the Hypocrite "ALABOSI". This is truly one of the banes of the Church of Christ today.
ReplyDeleteMay the Lord grant our leaders the spirit of discernment to see through all the hypocrites who hang around them, who having yielded themselves to working with the wisdom of the world (nicely adorned with the right Christianese language and image and appearance), soon enough, take the inexorable descent from "earthly" to "sensual" and eventually to "devilish" or "demonic"(Jam. 3:15),all for their selfish and ambitious ends. Unfortunately, sometimes, these hypocrites succeed in dragging down the leaders into their abyss.
May the Lord turn the counsel of every hypocrite around the leaders of the Church of God into the counsel of Ahitophel!!! Amen.
Absolutely. I say a big Amen to that prayer by anonymous
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