Lip-Service Won’t Cut It!
Matthew 15:1-9
November 19, 2006
There are a number of things in my life that I try to avoid, if at all possible.
For instance, I try to avoid pot-holes in the road.
I also try to avoid things like the tornado I mentioned a couple weeks ago, as well as any form of spider – real, fake, or imagined…
I try to avoid things that would bring me into temptation to sin against God or my family.
And of course, I try to avoid anything like pig intestines or sauerkraut that tries to pass itself off as “food.”
I think you know what I mean.
Another thing I try to avoid is hypocrisy in my life.
Hypocrisy is basically trying to look like a Christian without really trying to be one – or at least one that thinks that Jesus should be the boss of a person’s life.
They want to give the appearance of loving Jesus, but don’t want to actually be committed to Him to the point where it would get in the way of living for themselves.
And so I strive to make sure that who I am on Monday is the same person you see here on Sunday.
My hope is that I would never be accused of being a person who is good at “loving Jesus” on Sunday, but lousy at it the rest of the week.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always successful in my goal to completely avoid hypocrisy, and it could be that some of you have witnessed something in my life that is contrary to what Scripture would say is something that characterizes what a follower of Jesus would do.
And the thing is, there is really no excuse for hypocrisy, no matter who is involved with it. It’s sin, plain and simple.
My guess is that I’m not alone in this room in telling you that I’ve been a hypocrite from time to time.
I think if we all were to examine ourselves, we would have to admit that hypocrisy has crept into each of our lives from time to time.
Maybe you claim to love Jesus but you cheat on your taxes – or your spouse.
Maybe you claim to love Jesus but your love is confined to between 9:30 and noon on Sundays, because the rest of the week is yours.
Or you claim to love God but you treat others like trash, in spite of what Jesus says about how we’re to treat others.
Or maybe – just maybe, it’s something entirely different, but for you, your soul aches when hypocrisy rears its ugly head, and you cry out in your spirit because you know it’s wrong, but you feel powerless to do anything about it.
The problem is that people see right through our hypocrisy, and in the case of some, it may turn them off to Jesus completely.
And with eternity in the balance, we can’t afford to be giving them excuses to reject Him.
So just how do we go about avoiding hypocrisy in our lives?
What does it look like to live a life that’s not marked by living a double life, spiritually speaking?
Well, let me tell you right up front that the way to do that is what I’m addressing as the main point of this message for today: To love Jesus is to live for Jesus.
That is what I want you to take away from here today. To love Jesus is to live for Jesus.
We’re going to look at some false ideas of what it means to love Jesus, as well as some thoughts on what loving Jesus looks like in everyday living.
Our passage of Scripture for today gives us the principles we want to look at, so please turn with me to…
Matthew 15:1-9 (p. 693) –
1 Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 2 "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!"
3 Jesus replied, "And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? 4 For God said, ’Honor your father and mother’ and ’Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ 5 But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, ’Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,’ 6 he is not to ’honor his father ’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. 7 You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
8 "’These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
9 They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ “
To summarize, the religious leaders were freaking out because the disciples didn’t wash their hands.
They weren’t worried about germs. It’s not like they panicked because the disciples had just scratched their armpits or picked their nose.
The issue was that there was a tradition that washing hands made them ceremonially clean so they could eat. Not washing made them unclean.
And Jesus gets in there face about that and about the mindset that said, “Our laws and traditions are more important than what God actually says about stuff.”
I’ve said before that one of the priorities of Jesus was to honor His Father. In this instance He saw an example of how those who were supposed to be the “best” at honoring God were actually dishonoring Him, and Jesus won’t stand for it.
You can insult me, and while I’d be hurt and offended, I’ll get along okay. But if you say something about my dad, you’re going to get an earful.
Insult my wife in my hearing, and you’d better hope that the ground is soft, because you’ll be hitting it in a hurry!
The Pharisees and teachers of the law made a couple crucial mistakes when it came to defining what it meant to love God.
I think that looking at these will help us get a handle on all this.
First, they thought that religious activity was the same as loving God.
They thought that going to the temple, offering sacrifices on occasion, or whatever took care of loving God.
But Jesus makes it clear that religious activity does not equal loving God.
Second, the Pharisees and religious leaders thought that holding onto religious tradition was the same as loving God.
They ate just the right way, washed their hands just the right way, wore their clothing just the right way, or any number of other traditions that had a religious purpose, at least on the surface.
If you’ve ever been to a Catholic service, you will see people doing a couple things as they enter: they dip their hand in holy water and make the sign of the cross, and they kneel briefly before going into the pew.
Both of these are acts of submission – saying that they are submitting to the lordship of Christ in their lives.
But I can tell you that few people who do these actions are serious about making Jesus their boss.
They were fine traditions – on the surface. But they didn’t accurately reflect what they were meant to symbolize.
Jesus says that real followers of God have their hearts in such a condition that living for Him is the natural result.
In other words, to love God was to live Him – not just put in some token religious activity or tradition that has no real meaning.
To Jesus, the trappings and religious activity of the religious leaders were empty attempts to disguise hearts that were actually far from God.
Now before we get too hard on the Pharisees, we need to consider the fact that the mistakes of the religious leaders in worshiping God are being made today in our worship as Christians.
Really? Yup.
For instance, people today make the mistake of thinking that religious activity is the same as loving Jesus. They go to church, give money, and maybe even pray and read their Bible.
Religious activity can be fine, if it’s done as an outward demonstration of an authentic, real love for Jesus. Unfortunately, that is not the case many times.
Oftentimes, it’s more like, “Well, I’ve sat through church now, so I’m okay with Jesus because He knows I love Him since I go to church whenever I get around to it…”
Second, people make the mistake of thinking that loving Jesus means holding onto traditions that have long ago lost their real meaning and substance.
Usually they do this by using phrases like, “We’ve always done it that way before.” Or, “We’ve never done it that way before.”
Now just like with religious activity, religious tradition can be fine. Tradition is good if it aids in serving God, but when a tradition becomes the end instead of the means to the end, we run into trouble.
If we’re not careful, we can become people who view religious activities and religious tradition as defining what it really means to live for Christ.
But again…To love Jesus is to live for Jesus.
Jesus says that lip-service to the Father doesn’t cut it. And neither does lip service to the one we claim to follow as our Savior and Master.
So if to love Christ is to live for Christ, just what does that mean? What would it look like in every day life?
Let me give you just a few suggestions:
> First and foremost, it would mean that obedience to Christ comes before personal preference and convenience.
John 14:21 –
“Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him."
Jesus equates love for Him with obedience. That’s not to say we earn His love with our obedience, because we’d all be doomed!
Jesus is saying that we display our love for Him to those around us by our obedience.
And a side benefit of this is that we gain a greater knowledge of God through our obedience.
> It would mean that we put Jesus’ priorities ahead of our own.
Luke 9:23 –
"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
What does “deny himself” mean? It means that if the priorities of Jesus conflict with one of your priorities, Jesus wins. That’s the bottom line.
> It would mean that we live a life of trust:
Matthew 6:33 –
“…seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Here are some things you need to trust God about:
-That He knows what’s best.
-That He has our best interests at heart.
-That He will provide our needs as we live for Him.
> It would mean that we meet persecution (no matter how big or small) with God’s strength rather than running away or denying Christ.
Matthew 10:26-33 –
29 “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny ? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
32 "Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.”
We’ve discussed this before, but we really have no idea what persecution is all about here in America.
But we can get our fair share of snide comments, dirty looks, people yelling, or talking about us behind our backs, or whatever.
That’s never any fun. And if we want to avoid all that, all we need to do is deny we love Jesus.
But that’s the coward’s way out.
Jesus said that if we love Him, we’ll face persecution. It’s part of the package.
But if to love Jesus is to live for Him, then we’ll take what comes our way, with the help and grace of God to make it through.
Notice something here: Jesus says, “God said…” and then says, “But you say…”
Folks, if that’s not indicative of how the world is today, I don’t know what it.
And I say with shame that that is the attitude of many who call themselves followers of Jesus.
“I know what God says, but I’m going to do my own thing anyway, because it’s what I want to do, and God just wants me to be happy, and He loves, and He knows the way I am, and He’ll understand…”
But you know what? God does understand – but that doesn’t mean He approves. If He calls something sin, it’s sin. There is no heavenly “agreement” between you and God that lets you sin and just expect to get away with it.
So I’m saying to you and to anyone else who will listen, don’t claim to love Jesus if you’re not willing to live for Him.
In a good marriage, the spouse puts his or her own personal agenda on the back burner for the sake of the other.
Only a selfish spouse lives for their own needs ahead of the other. That’s not a good marriage – it’s a lousy one, and those who witness such a marriage would say that the selfish spouse does not really love the other one.
There might be an emotional attachment, and they may say they love them, but there is nothing showing in the life of the person to demonstrate a real love by putting the other person first.
If you claim to love Jesus but continually put yourself ahead of Him, then it’s my honest contention from Scripture that you don’t really love Him.
Does that make sense?
I’m not talking about the occasional slip. I’m talking about a lifestyle of living for Jesus 24/7/365.
But here’s something you must absolutely understand, and if you don’t get this, you’re going to miss something very important:
You simply cannot live out the things I just discussed without the help of God Himself. If you try to live for Jesus on your own strength, you will fail miserably.
You’re going to beat your head against a wall because you won’t be able to make any real, lasting, significant progress.
So here’s the key: Let God help you!
Philippians 2:13 (Living Bible) –
For God is at work within you, helping you want to obey him, and then helping you do what he wants.
Now isn’t that cool? God doesn’t just throw us on earth and expect us to do what He wants.
First of all, He knows that on our own, we won’t want to do what He wants us to do, because we’re selfish people.
Second, He knows that even if we wanted to do what He wants, we wouldn’t have the strength to do it on our own.
So here in this verse, we have God helping us with both of those. How could you not want to be in with a God like that?
I’ve got an idea: if you really want to show God how thankful you are this Thanksgiving, how about committing yourself to really living for Jesus.
Get past the lip-service of the Pharisees and religious leaders and the average church-goer in America.
Say to Jesus, “Thank You for giving Yourself so I could have my sins forgiven and so I could spend eternity in heaven. Out of gratitude for Your sacrifice, I’m committing myself to love You by living for You. I need Your help to do that, so I’m asking that Your Holy Spirit would fill me, so that I’ll want to live for you and so I can have the strength to actually do it.”
One of the biggest complaints that the world has is that the Church is full of hypocrites.
Normally when someone says that to me I say, “Don’t let that stop you from coming to church – there’s always room for one more!”
The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of hypocrites in the Church.
So can you imagine what the reaction would be if they were to see you doing everything you can with the help of God to be an authentic follower of Jesus in every area of your life?
And what would be their reaction if they came across a whole church full of people who were doing everything they could with the help of God to be authentic followers of Christ in every area of their lives?
They would see imperfect people acting out of a real love for Jesus.
People who aren’t satisfied with “lip-service” love for Jesus.
People who have what’s called a “holy discontent” with the status quo of their relationship with Christ and want to love Him even more.
And maybe, just maybe – they might see that Jesus really is worth believing in and following themselves.
This would bring glory to the Father rather than the dishonor that hypocrisy brings.
And it’ll bring the blessings of God that He showers on those who are serious about loving Him with their lives and not just their lips.
Let’s pray.
