March 13: Guard against sin

Steve Smartt is pastor of Moultrie Baptist Church in St. Augustine.

“He made free use of Christian vocabulary. He talked about the blessing of the Almighty and the Christian confessions which would become the pillars of the new government. He assumed the earnestness of a man weighed down by historic responsibility. He handed out pious stories to the press, especially to the church papers. He showed his tattered Bible and declared that he drew the strength for his great work from it as scores of pious people welcomed him as a man sent from God. Indeed, Adolf Hitler was a master of outward religiosity—with no inward reality!” (quoted from Today in the Word, June 3, 1989)

What an incredible example of whitewashed sin! And yet, though ours may be far less extreme, we can easily fall to a similar self-righteous condition, not realizing the depth to which we have fallen. Thus, the concern of Jeremiah for the fallen Judah should caution us today that we should guard ourselves against all temptations of sin. Any attitude toward wickedness other than a hatred of its appeal is spiritual adultery and must be rejected in order to protect our fellowship with God. Sin is dangerous, no matter how benign it might appear.

For all appearances, Judah’s religion was still intact. They spoke and behaved as if their religion was alive. Yet, their lives were laced by hypocrisy and their hearts were cold to the conviction of God’s Word (1-5). They had employed a superficial religion that sounded pious, but was false in its expression (2). With cold hearts, they refused to heed to the correction of God’s judgment, and only increased their wickedness (3-5). There existed in them a hypocrisy that exceeded in sin.

C. S. Lewis explains the conflict of such hypocrisy that threatens us also in The Four Loves. He wrote, “We consciously or subconsciously put forward a better image of ourselves than really exists. The outward appearance of our character and the inner reality (that only God, we, and perhaps our family members know) do not match.” Therefore, we must guard against hypocrisy, carefully observing that our lifestyle matches our profession of faith.

As the apostle James declares, “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” The motive of adultery is to give our devotion to another. This is the hidden ugliness of hypocrisy. Though God had blessed the people of Judah and had provided for their needs with His own loving care, they had taken His love and rejected His call to faithfulness by sharing their devotion with their lusts. Accordingly, to love the world is to reject the love of God and to commit spiritual adultery against Him. 1 John 2:15 says, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” When we allow anything in our lives to challenge our devotion to God alone, no matter how virtuous it might seem, we have committed spiritual adultery against His love.

Therefore, beware of God’s wrath. Though we think ourselves secure, we must guard against a complacent heart that slips into a state of denial (11-12). The people of Judah had taken God’s mercy for granted. But as Paul warned the Galatians, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows” (Gal 6:7). When we choose to blind ourselves to the conviction of the Holy Spirit against sin, we perpetrate a false security and, as a result, become ensnared by sin’s delusion.