Best. Sermon. Ever.: Being A Secret Christian

Well, good morning. If you will, turn with me. We're going to be in Matthew chapter six and as is our custom, we like to read God's word together out loud. Yes, I now need these—so you all can roast me for them like my family does later on, but somebody has been shrinking my Bible.

So let's read God's word aloud together. Matthew chapter six, verses one through 18.

Take care not to practice your righteousness in the sight of people to be noticed by them. Otherwise, you have no reward with your father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets so that they will be praised by people. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your charitable giving will be seen in secret. And your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they will be seen by people. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward in full. But as for you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you are praying, do not use thoughtless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. So do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then in this way, our father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive other people for their offenses, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive other people, then your father will not forgive your offenses. Now whenever you fast, do not make a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they distort their faces. They will be noticed by people when they are fasting. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward in full. But as for you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face so that your fasting will not be noticed by people but by your father who is in secret. And your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. — Matthew 6:1-18

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Fake News and Authenticity

Fake is maybe a word we've heard a lot of, too much of in the last couple of years. You're familiar, of course, with fake news. I remember there was a story that broke a couple of years ago because a major headline had been broken by the Denver Guardian newspaper. This was right during the 2016 election cycle. It said: "FBI agents suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead at apparent murder slash suicide." This became national news instantly, but very quickly people began to ask questions. The Denver Guardian—what's the Denver Guardian? What they found out was the Denver Guardian was a creation of a guy in California, 40 years old, wife and two kids. Completely made up, had a website with current weather reports and everything, looked absolutely real. Fake news.

Many of you are familiar with deep fakes. Deep fakes are when someone takes an image, a video and puts someone else's face on there saying something that they wouldn't say or creating a fake video of someone. This is actually one of the real talents of our associate pastor, James Sutton. He has done this with me over and over again. I have been the Tiger King. I've been on Noah. That was on our website for a while, actually. I will never be able to run for public office. If there are videos you see of me, you should question all of them.

Or the term catfishing. I didn't know what catfishing was until recently. Catfishing is when someone online starts a relationship with you to try to manipulate you in some way, either to get you to buy something or to fall in love with them. So you think you're emailing back and forth with a Nigerian prince who is asking you for money, but it turns out it's a guy in New Jersey. Like, that's catfishing. So fakes.

Real versus Fake in the Sermon on the Mount

We're working our way through the Sermon on the Mount and the section that we just read a moment ago, Jesus is concerned about fakes. Jesus is concerned about what is real and what's fake, what is authentic and what is for show.

We just did a sermon series on the Lord's Prayer a couple of years ago, so we went through it bit by bit. I'm going to skip that and focus our attention this morning on these three parables that Jesus tells.

Three little vignettes of the way people do religious activities so that other people see and the danger that that presents to our souls. This is a warning passage. Now, if you're going to take notes, here are my three points today: The God that's for real, how to become real? That's where we're going this morning.

So, am I for real? Jesus gives us three examples here. The first is giving and then praying, and then fasting. In each one of those, someone's doing a religious activity, an act of righteousness Jesus says, but it's not for God, it's for other people.

Giving to the Poor and Needy

Let's look through these really briefly. First, giving to the poor and needy. Jesus gives the image of someone begging. The person gives in such a way that there's this like fanfare around them. Now, as best as scholarship can tell, there was never an instance that was happening regularly in society where someone was giving and someone else was playing the trumpet in the background. Right? This is a hyperbole. Jesus is trying to make a point.

We have a version of this in our culture today. You can go to lots of public institutions and you'll see names of families written over the library, the gym, like all the different parts of these art museums, college campuses, all kinds of public institutions where someone has given a lot of money and they name the wing after them or the building after them. I'm not saying that what's in that person's heart is "I want to have my name on a building," but there's certainly some form of that in our culture today. Right? Giving to be seen.

Prayer

The second example is prayer. Some context for this: like modern day Muslims, first century Jews had prescribed times during the day for prayer, during which you would pause what you were doing and you would turn toward Jerusalem and more specifically toward the temple. Stop what you're doing and pray at a lot of times during the day and what Jesus is describing is that person who schedules their day to make sure that the allotted times happen when they're running errands. You're out in the marketplace and suddenly it's a time to pray and they stop everything and pray and it's very public. Right? That's what Jesus is giving us a picture of and it's about again being seen.

Fasting

Third example is with fasting. If you're not familiar, fasting is to go without food as an act of religious devotion so that you grow a hunger inside of you for God. You're hungry for God. Fasting can be for a meal, it can be for a day, it could be for a longer period of time. And of course, going without food does make you feel weaker. But Jesus is describing the person who calls attention to it by the way that their outward visit looks to other people.

Let me give an example. Somebody who normally wears lots of makeup and they show up at work looking really disheveled one day and you're like, "Hey, what's wrong?" "Oh, I'm fasting, right?" That's what's kind of in view of this. Again, it's to be seen by others.

The Meaning of Hypocrisy

There's a word that Jesus repeats over and over again that we use a lot: hypocrite. That's actually a Greek word. So you already know some Greek this morning. Congratulations. But that word doesn't mean what we mean when we say hypocrite many times. It's come into our language as a pejorative term meaning somebody who acts one way and says something different, right? That's what we think of as hypocrisy and it is, but that's not what Jesus is talking about. That's not his definition of hypocrisy.

His comes from the Greek stage. First century Israel was a fascinating time to live. It was a very confusing time to live as well. If you're familiar with the New Testament, you know that Israel was under the rulership of Rome, the Roman Caesar, and that was a very oppressive governmental regime over the top of not only Israel but lots of what is called the Roman Empire. But what's fascinating is even though Rome held the throne, Greece held the culture. This is because Alexander the Great centuries before had conquered all that region and Greek thought, Greek culture, Greek entertainment had become the standard. This is why your Bible is not written in Latin, it's written in Greek. So even though Rome had the throne, Greece had the hearts.

The Greek stage was their major form of entertainment. Jesus is referring to Greek plays, Greek performances. This is like the Netflix of their day. Everybody knew this. Everybody was talking about this. So a person who is an actor on the stage of a Greek play didn't wear makeup, they would wear a mask.

In fact, have you seen those two masks that are above a lot of theaters, a happy one and a sad one? Those come from Greek tragedies and comedies. A person who is an actor on the Greek stage was called a hypocrite. That was the title for that. It didn't have a negative association with it. Somebody could say, what do you do for a living? I'm a professional hypocrite. That actually is the right usage of that. That person played a part. They acted on stage. They were different on stage from who they really were. That's what that term means.

So Jesus is saying, beware, be careful of playing a part, of wearing a mask. And what we see here is that it's so dangerous. And if I can be really transparent in front of you, this is probably a sermon that applies a lot more to the person standing behind the lectern this morning than the people listening. Because it's the danger of someone who's playing a part for a particular reward, for the applause of other people, for the good reputation with other people, for being thought well of, to be seen.

Let me think about this for a minute. I don't think that anybody sets out, intends, wakes up in the morning saying, I want to be a hypocrite today. I don't think that's how this usually goes. No one gets up and says, I want to deceive people into thinking I'm more mature than I am. I don't think that's my job description for today or I want people to notice how holy I am. I want to plan my day creating deep fakes and fake news around my maturity. I don't think that's what we do actually.

Rather, I think most of us fool ourselves. That's where it starts. We've been around Christians, around things of the church for long enough that we know the language. Something that at one time was really meaningful and deep in your life has become habit or distant or cold. Let me give you an example of this. How often do Christians say the words, "Hey, I'll be praying for you"? I'm sure that at one point that was intentional and that was heartfelt and maybe at times it still is. But a lot of times we use those words and we know that's the right Christian thing to say when someone is vulnerable about something hard that they're going through. "I'll be praying for you." But do we mean it? Is that just a rote response because we know that's what you're supposed to say?

See, Jesus is pointing us to authentic faith, genuine piety, depth. This is all over scripture. In fact, he quotes from Isaiah 29:

These people, they honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. — Isaiah 29

Hypocrisy, Jesus style, is playing to the crowd. It's empty devotion to God, empty worship.

When I was a younger pastor, I was in Philadelphia and there was a very famous older pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church, James Montgomery Boyce, who had a big pastor voice that I wish I had. But he said this one thing with regard to this passage that is so convicting and I can't get out from underneath it. He says, "I believe that not one, but one prayer in a hundred of those who fill our churches on Sunday morning is made to Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Instead, they're made to other people or the one praying himself."

I mean, wow. As a pastor, I can't get out from under that. There's a measure of duplicity or performance in everything that I do. Is that ever absent? No one sets out to be a hypocrite. I think over time, what happens with many of us is what was real and deep and earnest at one point becomes habit or becomes rote. It becomes stale and more dangerous. It can become manicured. It can become performance crafted so that other people see it. You're playing a part. You're wearing a mask.

Of course, Jesus doesn't say and doesn't mean here that you should then stop doing anything with regard to religious devotion. He doesn't say, "If you give to the needy, you can't give unless it's with perfect motives." He's like, "When you give"—assuming that this is a continued pattern, you're going to continue doing these things—"but when you do so, that should come from a place deep within you. That should come from a place that's between you and God."

It doesn't mean you should hide our good deeds, never be caught in public. Let's give an example. Let's say you're a person who loves having people over into your home. You're like, I love having college students after church over for lunch. That's a great thing. But somebody in church finds out about it and you're like, "Oh no."

Now, I can't do it anymore because my secret's out. That's not what Jesus is talking about here.

Many of you had to read the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller in high school, anybody? Okay. Good. It's about a man named Willie Lohman who is sort of an everyman character. He's a salesman. That's his job. And he is constantly talking to his sons about how to succeed in life. He tells stories from his past about all his successes in business and he's always scheming for the future about how he's going to get ahead.

But one of the master moves in the play is that Arthur Miller never tells us actually what Willie Lohman sells. We never find out. And your English teacher in high school would point this out. That's because we know what Willie Lohman sells. He sells himself. He's selling himself. That's what's on sale.

And the same is true with hypocrisy. The hypocrite is selling something—himself, herself—selling an image, selling a reputation. And we can summarize Jesus's three little parables this way: Are you for real? Are you wearing a mask? Are you playing a part? Are you selling something? Is any of this real?

Again, like every part of the Sermon on the Mount, don't miss this. These are not words of condemnation. Instead, Jesus is fighting for us. He's fighting for our hearts. These are not words of condemnation—go away you hypocrites. These are words of invitation. Jesus is inviting us to something better, something deeper.

And so this is actually a very kind question from the Lord: Are you for real? Is there substance to you? Or are you just doing the activities?

And let me show you why that's such a gracious question. Why that's such a kind question? It's a gracious question because God is real. The person who's playing the part for the benefit of other people is entirely not engaging with or seeing or having in mind that God is actually right here.

God Is Real, God Knows You, God Loves You

Can I remind you of several things this morning? God is real. Do you know that? That may be the most obvious statement I have ever made behind this lectern, but I have to make it. The God of the universe is real. He is not a collection of all of our hopes. He is not a figment of all of our imaginations. I didn't make this up. We didn't make this up. Somebody else didn't make this up. The God of the universe is real.

Number two, the real God knows you. Did you hear all these statements that Jesus makes in this passage?

Your father who sees what's in secret will reward you. — Matthew 6:4

Your father who sees what's in secret will reward you. — Matthew 6:6

Your father who's unseen, your father who sees what's done in secret will reward you. — Matthew 6:18

What is he saying? Your father sees. God sees what is in secret. You can't pretend. You can't. God sees. He knows what's behind the mask. He knows who we really are. God knows and sees us. Do you know that the real God knows you?

Third, do you know that the real God knows you and also loves you? The real God knows you and loves you. Notice that in 18 verses, Jesus makes sure to use this. He makes sure to tell us: God is your father. He's not using a generic word for God. He's using a relational category for God so that we know the God who is real, who knows you, is your father, has fatherly care toward you, loves you. This is what the real God is and is like.

The reality is that the problem with the hypocrite is the hypocrite is not secure in the love of God and therefore is looking for security in other people's approval. The hypocrite is looking for other people to see. That's what they're hoping for. That's what they're playing for.

You know that the real God sees you and knows you and loves you? And God wants to be with you. God wants to give Himself to you. Not just in like a historical way—like, we all know about the cross here, right? Every Christian in the room be like, yes, the cross is the ultimate expression of God's love for us. Jesus died for my sins and rose again. Hallelujah. That is great news.

But the God of the universe continues to want to give Himself to you. He continues to want a vital, living relationship with you every day.

So let me just think about this. The God who made rhinoceros loves you, knows you, wants to give Himself to you. The God who made RNA, the God who made those images we've seen on the James Webb telescope from space—there are incredible images. They're supposed to be about the beginning of the universe where you can stick a dime on it and knock out a billion stars just by covering a little bit of it. That God loves you, knows you, wants to give Himself to you.

To do religious duties for other people, it's pretending that God isn't real.

And so the question we've got to ask is: Is there substance to me? Is the substance of my religious practice just to get things from other people?

I mean, you remember the story I just reminded you of—Willie Lohman, the salesman? I doubt you're going to go home and read this anyway, so I'm going to spoil it right now. At the end of the play, he kills himself. There's a suicide at the end of the play. It's a tragedy, but Jesus is saying there's a greater tragedy. There's a greater tragedy: if all you want is applause and performance for other people, the tragedy is that you might just get it. And that would be tragic beyond imagination—that that's all there is.

Saint Augustine, an early church father from the fifth century in North Africa, pointed out that nearly everything else that we do for God can be done for some other reason besides love for God. To be seen by others, to be respected by others, to be praised by others, to fit in to a church family, to be a leader in a group. But the only motivation that will lead us to pray in secret is love for God.

So here's my question: Do you love God? Do you love him? You know, hypocrites pray, but they don't love God. They love themselves and they want to give other people an opportunity to do so as well. The hypocrite is someone who doesn't seek God for God, doesn't love God, wants something from God or from other people. Do you love God? I'm not asking, do you like God or do you like church or do you like our church? Do you like how we do things here? Do you like language about God? Do you like theology about God? Do you love God?

The hypocrite looks for fool's gold. That's his reward. But the authentic person, the real person that Jesus is calling us to and inviting us to become, is a person whose reward is God. What's the reward in each of these scenarios—in giving and praying and fasting—like the smile of the Father? I enjoy God because God enjoys me, and that's what I'm living for. That's my reward. That's what I want.

How Do We Become Real?

So let's turn and ask this: how do we become real? Do you know what the motto is of the state of North Carolina? Anybody? Esse quam videre—which is where Videre Chocolates gets their name downtown—it means to be and not to seem. I wish we'd gotten that for a motto for our church. That's a really good one. To be. Integrity, authentic, whole, real—not to seem. Seem is mask, playing the part, playing for applause.

So here's the question: how do we become real? And can I just be really transparent? I don't entirely know. I'm on this journey myself. I can tell you some things I know from this passage, some things I know by way of wrong turns. So let me give you five applications for today.

First, recognize that becoming real is not automatic. You know, becoming a Christian, believing in Jesus for salvation—that doesn't mean you're suddenly an authentic, deep, transparent, real person in the way that I'm trying to separate these two things. I'm telling you, your pastor is a hypocrite. Right? The cross—the cross is our justification. This is what results in the salvation of sinners. Hallelujah. We preach that all the time. That's how you come to have a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. But there's something more that I'm calling, that I believe Jesus is calling us to here. There's something more that's not automatic.

Of course, you can be a fake, superficial Christian. Lots of us do it all the time. Lots of the church is filled with miserable Christians—deeply unhappy people who are not finding their delight in God, who are, yes, saved by grace. But Jesus is inviting us in sanctification to something deeper, and it's not automatic. It's easy to be a Christian with a divided heart. I'm a good example of this. Probably many of you are as well. But the process of becoming real is something the Spirit does in us over a long period of time, and it involves deep change within us.

So let me point this out in this passage. Did you hear this phrase that's repeated over and over—in secret? In Greek, it's "en to crypto." It's where we get "decrypt," right? Something that's confusing or that needs to be a mystery to be solved. It needs to be decrypted. So this phrase "en to crypto"—in secret—is said over and over. And that phrase is where God's pushing us: are you a Christian in secret? That phrase is actually used in other places in Scripture.

In Romans 2, it says this: "A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one en to crypto—inwardly. Deep. Circumcision is circumcision of the heart by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a person's praise is not from other people but from God—deep down in the inward parts." — Romans 2

I can say it this way: God wants you to become a secret Christian. Not a private one where it's like, this is just me and I don't really—it doesn't touch any parts of my life.

No, a secret one. Where it's deep within. It's down deep in the inner parts. A Christian when nobody's looking. A Christian when there you don't stand to gain from that in any way.

So here's the question. I want our whole congregation. This is what I'm crying out. I'm like, Pinocchio, I want to be a real boy. That's what I want all of us to be like. I want to be real.

Like I want this deep down and you have to recognize first, it's not automatic. Second, means living life, becoming real means living life coram deo—before the face of God.

Brother Lawrence: Practicing the Presence of God

Have you ever heard of a man named Brother Lawrence? A couple of you. Well, for the rest of you, don't worry about it because nobody knew who he was when he was alive anyway, either.

His real name was Nicholas Herman, born to peasant parents in the Loire Valley of France in the sixteen hundreds. When he was a young adult, he took monastic orders and took the new name of Brother Lawrence. He wasn't particularly gifted in all his ways. They put him in charge of the kitchen and he spent years in the kitchen serving in this monastery.

After he died, they discovered this man had written a lot about a secret life with God. His book, really short, is one of the best-selling published books in existence. It's called Practicing the Presence of God. His whole thing was just realizing he was trying to live life as if the face of God was right here. God was that real to him. Living before the face of God.

I highly commend this book to you. It won't take you very long to read, but it's this ongoing sense that God sees, God knows, God loves me right here.

Becoming Real Means Being Yourself

Third, becoming real means not trying to be somebody else. Somebody you're not. I think some of our faking and masquerade is that we think of somebody else who's an amazing Christian and we feel like an impostor. We feel like we wish they had their gifts or their personality, their skills, their disposition.

I've done this over and over, to be honest. In 2002, I went out to plant a church in Philadelphia with one of my best friends, a super gifted guy named Steve. Just really dynamic, charismatic guy. And I spent the first years of that church plant wanting to be Steve. Trying to be Steve, trying to be cool, trying to be free and funny and charismatic. And I'm just not.

Years later, I remember going to talk to a counselor. There was a guy in our church who was super emotionally alive and vibrant, just this really raw guy named Matthew. I love Matthew. I remember talking to this counselor who knew both of us. I'm like, "I just wish I could be Matthew." And he's like, "Jeff, you will never be Matthew."

And it was one of the most devastating and freeing things anybody's ever said to me. Because God doesn't want you to be someone else. That's not what it means to be real. Jesus knows the real you, loves the real you, wants to give himself to the real you. Not somebody else that you're playing a part of.

There's a story that Pete Scazzero tells in one of his books. Rabbi Zuzia, a Jewish rabbi, when he was an old man said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Why were you not Zuzia?'"

Søren Kierkegaard says, "The true vocation for every human being is the will to be oneself."

Learning to Pray

Fourth, becoming real means learning to pray. I skipped over the Lord's Prayer, the disciples' prayer in this passage on purpose, like I said, because we covered it recently. But it's no accident that Jesus calls hypocrites to pray in secret. He invites us into a relationship with God in secret, in communication with God.

I love how Eugene Peterson in his paraphrase, The Message, takes verse six. If you go home, I really encourage you to look up this verse—verse six. This is what he says. This is what we're being invited to:

"Here's what I want you to do," says Jesus. "Find a quiet secluded place so that you won't be tempted to role play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God and you will begin to sense His grace." — Matthew 6:6, The Message

You see how different that is from the hypocrites' prayer for other people to see?

You know, if I told you, "Hey, we got a surprise just for you this morning. We brought in, we flew in last night, one of your oldest, dearest friends you haven't seen in years. I know it's been COVID. You've fallen out of contact. They're right behind this door. We've set apart a whole day for you to spend together. You got money for lunch and dinner. It's a whole day open just for the two of you to spend time together."

I mean, how many of us would be like, "Well, I was gonna go to the grocery and I had some games I wanna play on my phone this afternoon"?

But the Lord of the universe wants to be with you and opens himself up to be with you. It's one of the most amazing truths of Christianity and it sets it apart from any other religion in the world. The God of the universe wants to be with you. He wants to listen to you. He wants to spend time with you. If I was texting this to you right now, use all the hand clap emojis, right? The real God wants to be with you.

Lots of people pray in all kinds of circumstances and all kinds of religions. Lots of people pray to get blessings from God. Lots of people pray to lower their blood pressure. Lots of people pray who aren't Christians just to get God's favor, to ask for things. But a Christian prays not because we are trying to get God's favor but because we already have it. We pray just to enjoy God.

Becoming Real

So my last thing is: becoming real means enjoying God. Enjoying God's love for you.

Did you ever hear or read the children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit? It's sort of a—I think this is where Toy Story got this whole idea from. This is the OG Toy Story. So it's about a bunch of stuffed animals who live in a kid's bedroom. And of course, this being a kid's book, the animals can all talk and come alive at night.

So there's this one main character, the rabbit, who is a new arrival to the kid's bedroom and is trying to understand from some of the other toys: how do you get to be around here for a long time? How do you get to be really loved? How do you become real?

And so the Velveteen Rabbit asks the oldest character, the oldest stuffed animal in the room, which is this ratty looking old horse stuffed animal that actually was owned by the boy's uncle. He's not only old, he's kind of ugly. His brown coat was bald in patches and he showed the seams underneath and most of the hairs on his tail had been pulled out to make necklaces with. But he says lots of wisdom. And this is what he says:

Real isn't how you're made. It's a thing that happens to you. When a child really loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but really loves you, then you become real. It doesn't happen all at once. You become—it takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you're real, most of your hair has been loved off. Your eyes drop out and you lose—you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are real, you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand.

May God give us grace as a community of Pinocchios to learn to rest in and enjoy the love of God that we might become real.

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Let's pray together. Father, I pray for myself and I pray for our congregation. That we would be people who more and more know that you're real, know that you see us, know that you love us, and are learning to enjoy and rest in that and becoming more real ourselves. Lord, we confess we don't really know how to do that. I pray, Father, by your power and by your grace that you would more and more transform us, that we might love you and know you and be transformed into your likeness. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.