- Oct 17, 2022
- 3 min read
"I know of nothing which so stimulates my faith in my heavenly Father as to look back and reflect on His faithfulness to me in every crisis and every chilling circumstance of life."
W. Phillip Keller
I am constantly confronted by hypocrisy in others that should also shine a light on my own hypocrisy. BUT often I fail to remember that I am still human like everyone else. Sometimes I forget that I am no different from anyone else. And, at those times, it is easy to see the hypocrisy in others BUT ignore the hypocrisy in myself.
I haven’t been a member of any group absent of hypocrites. There are hypocrites within all groups. And while, in my past, I used to see that as a flaw of the group or the ideology or the principle or the belief or the system, I now see that the presence of hypocrisy is just a feature of having humans involved in the group, ideology, principle, belief, or system. I used to point to the hypocrisy and blame the thing rather than placing blame squarely on myself and every other human.
There is no hypocrisy in YHWH. There is no change in YHWH. He is constant and faithful to His Word. And in my past I spent a lot of time letting human hypocrisy separate me from spiritual constancy. I allowed myself to point at men and women and use their failure, their hypocrisy, their inconsistency as a reason for me to not follow The Way of the Lord. And that was foolishness, on my part, at best. I was letting other people stand between YHWH and me because I thought I was somehow better than those people. I was filled with the pride and self righteousness of my own constancy and faithfulness when that was not the case. I was and am hypocritical still. And that isn’t because I try to be a hypocrite anymore. It isn’t because I intentionally try to be duplicitous and inconsistent. It is merely a case of my own humanity.
Self righteousness can be a struggle. I like to think that all this work I am doing somehow changes my brokenness BUT there is that brokenness no matter what. There is that fallibility. There is that hypocrisy. And I spend a lot of time trying to work on that which often leads to more self righteousness by believing my own hype. Buying into my own self image.
And I need to work a lot more on that humility aspect. I need to work on humbling myself a lot more. I need to remember daily that it is not my work that is getting anything accomplished. It is YHWH that is allowing me to learn and grow in wisdom and truth. There is nothing I am, nothing I was, and nothing I will be that is without Him. And in the daily world of living among humans, I tend to forget that as much as I try to remind myself.
In this week ahead I am going to work on getting my own feelings out of His Way. When someone has a problem with me, I should stop moving into fight mode and into introspection. I am going to focus on what their words reveal about my actions rather than what their words reveal about them. I am going to seek that wisdom this week moving forward in The Way of the Lord.
Shavua tov.
Shalom to your home. Bless your being. The reign of YHWH is now. Be a blessing to YHWH and others.