Christian Counter Culture 6
A Christians Walk: not hypocritical but real.
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
Get real Dad! Thus far in the Sermon on the Mount we have seen the essential elements of Christian Character in the Beatitudes, the influence for good Christians can exert by being Salt & Light, and the need to accept the full implications of God’s Law with dodging anything or setting artificial limits. Christ’s Righteousness is
Righteousness unlimited! It penetrates beyond our actions and words to our heart, mind and motives – to master us even in those hidden secret places. So Jesus now continues his teaching on righteousness as chapter 6 begins: beware of doing your righteousness before men
(lit). The same word is used in 5:6/20 but here the emphasis shifts.
Righteousness up to now has ben related to kindness, purity, honesty and love: now it concerns such practices as giving, praying and fasting. From moral ‘r’ to spiritual ‘r’ recognised in the translation:
Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. (6:1)
So Jesus R was a coin with two sides: moral and spiritual. Some speak as if they imagine their major duty as Christians lies in the area of spiritual activity, whether in public (church going) or in private (my quiet time). Others have reacted so sharply against such an overemphasis on piety that they talk about being dechurched. For them church has become the secular city and prayer a loving encounter with a neighbour. But there is no need to choose between piety and morality, spiritual devotion in church or private and active service in the world, loving God and loving our neighbour, since Jesus taught that authentic Christian righteousness includes both. The clear and insistent call of Jesus is to be different! Our

righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees (because they obeyed the letter of the law, while our obedience must include our heart) and greater also (in the form of love) than that of the pagans
(because they love each other but our love must include our enemies as well). So Jesus draws the same two contrasts: comparing to the ostentatious Pharisees he says: You must not be like the hypocrites
(v5). He then moves on to the mechanical formalism of the heathen and says: do not be like them (v8). Different to Pharisee and Pagan, religious and unreligious, church and world, not conforming to the world (a familiar latter note of the NT). It is not so well known that
Jesus saw (and foresaw) the worldliness of the church itself and called his followers not to conform to the nominal church either, but rather to be a truly Christian community distinct in its life and practice from the religious establishment, an ecclesiola (little church) in ecclesia. The essential difference in spirituality as in morality is that authentic Christian righteousness is not an external manifestation only, but one of the secret things of the heart.
The fundamental warning Jesus issues is against practising your piety before men in order to be seen by them. At first this seems to contradict: let your light so shine before men that they may see….
In both verses he speaks of doing good works before men and in both the object is stated, namely to be seen by them. But in the earlier case he commands it and in this one he prohibits it. The contradiction is only verbal not substantial: the clue lies in the fact that Jesus is speaking against different sins. It is our human cowardice which made him say: Let your light so shine..’, and our human vanity which made him tell us to beware of practising our piety before men. Show when you are tempted to hide and hide
when you are tempted to show!! Our good works must be public so that our light shines: our spiritual prowess must be secret lest we

boast about them. The end result is the same in both cases: reserving the glory for God!!
And so to three examples of Spiritual righteousness: Giving, Praying
& Fasting. Jesus expected all his disciples to do all three as He does not say if but when (v2, 15, 16). He took it for granted that you and
I would do all three: Duty to God: PRAY seeking Gods face, acknowledging our dependence on Him. Duty to Others: GIVE.
Serving your neighbours especially of in need: alms (Acts 3) & Duty to ourselves: FAST to deny and so discipline oneself. Jesus does not raise the question of whether His followers will engage in these things, but assumes they will, so he teaches them why and how to do.
The three paragraphs that follow are identical in pattern and contrast: He sets out the hypocrite’s way of being religious and ostentatious: they will receive the reward they want, the applause of men. He then contrasts the Christian way, which is secret, with the only reward being the blessing of God, the Father, who sees in secret.
1.
Christian Giving (v2-4) The OT has much to teach us on compassion for the poor. ELEEMOSUNE means literally a deed of mercy or pity. God is merciful and his people must to kind and merciful too. Jesus obviously expects His disciples to be generous givers but generosity is not enough: Jesus is concerned with motivation (the hidden thoughts of our hearts): like the moral teaching of the previous chapter Jesus drills down deep into my heart. My secret thoughts: so not so much what my hand is doing: passing over cheque or cash) but what my heart is thinking when my hand is doing it! Are we seeking the praise of men, preserving anonymity whilst quietly congratulating ourselves, or desiring the Fathers approval alone? Jesus chastises the Pharisees (for they love the praise

of men more than the praise of God. John 12:43). So insatiable was their appetite for human commendation that it spoilt their giving. Jesus pictures a pompous Pharisee on the way to put money into the temple box – trumpeters playing a fanfare – attracting a crowd! An amusing caricature! To stand with a penny in one hand and a trumpet in the other is the posture of hypocrisy! HYPOCRITES: orator and actor who treats the world as a stage on which he plays a part, laying aside his true identity for a false one. No harm in the theatre you might think but religious hypocrites deliberately set out to deceive people. Like an actor, pretending, yet not like an actor: they take a religious practice which is a real activity and turn it into a theatre of make believe: all done for applause! Christian
Pharisaism is not so amusing: we may not employ a trumpeter yet we like to blow our own trumpet! It boosts our ego and draws attention to our giving. Jesus says they have their reward: they may get applause but nothing further is due to them, nothing but judgment on the last day! The Disciples way is very different: it's a way of secrecy: the right hand (active) handing over the gift and the left hand not watching! Not only are we not to tell others but we are not even told to tell ourselves: we are not to be self conscious in our giving. In case we fall into self-righteousness because of the subtle sinfulness of our hearts: the act of mercy becoming an act of vanity and altruism being displaced by a distorted egotism. The old David must die: Crucify the self-centeredness of the old life and replace it with the uncalculating generosity of the new life. If we keep accounts then we need to plan our giving so we are bound to know what we give so don’t close your eyes when writing the cheque yet as soon as it is decided and done forget it. Christian giving is to be marked by self-sacrifice and self-

forgetfulness, not by self-congratulation. v3 suggests we should be satisfied with having God as our only witness and so v4 results. Some people rebel against this teaching of Jesus.
They neither want nor expect a reward of any kind from anybody, they say. More than that, they say Jesus is inconsistent: how can he forbid the desire of praise from others or ourselves, and then command us to seek praise from
God? One form of vanity for another? But when people say that the idea of rewards is distasteful to them I suspect they are harking back to school prize giving but the contrast is not between a secret gift and a public reward but between those who neither see nor reward the gift and the God who does both. What then is the reward the Father gives the secret giver? It is neither public nor necessarily future. It is probably the only reward which genuine love wants when making a gift to the needy, namely to see the need relived.
When through his gifts the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, the sick healed, the oppressed freed and the lost saved, the love which prompted the gift is satisfied. Such love brings its own secret joys and desires no other reward. So giving is neither before men (waiting for the clapping to begin), nor even before ourselves (our left hand applauding our right hands generosity) but ‘before God’, who sees our secret heart and rewards us with the discovery that, as Jesus said, ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’.
2.
Christian Praying (v5-6) In this second example Jesus depicts two men at prayer again contrasting hypocrisy and reality.
What he says about the hypocrites sounds fine at first: they love to pray. But its not prayer they love or indeed the God they are meant to be praying to. No they love themselves and the opportunity which public praying gives them to parade

themselves. Of course the discipline of daily prayer is good
(Dan 6:10 Jews 3 times a day) and its not wrong to stand and pray (that was the usual posture), nor was it necessarily mistaken to pray on the streets as well as in the synagogues if their motive was to bring God out of the holy places into the secular life of everyday. But Jesus uncovered their true motive: that they might be seen by men: behind their piety lurked their pride, they wanted applause and they got it in full.
So today Hypocrisy is levelled at churchgoers that they go not to worship but to gain for themselves a reputation of piety.
The giving of praise to God (like arms to men) is an authentic act in its own right. An ulterior motive destroys both! How do
we pray? More next week but put simply: go into a room and shut the door (away from disturbance, distraction, praying eyes, shut in with God). Pray to the Father who is unseen in the secret place: the Father is waiting to welcome us. Nothing destroys prayer like a side glance to human spectators; nothing enriches it like a sense of the presence of God. Psalm
27:8 We seek Him in order to acknowledge Him as the person
He is, God the creator, Lord, Judge, Heavenly Father, through
Jesus our Saviour, we bow down in humble worship and trust.
3.
Christian Fasting (v16-18) These verses of scripture are commonly ignored and I suspect that some of us live our
Christian Lives as if they have been torn out of our Bible! Daily
Prayer/Sacrificial Giving but not fasting. Evangelical
Christianity’s emphasis on the inward response of heart and spirit can ignore an outward bodily practice like Fasting. The argument against goes like this: its OT, His disciples did not fast, it’s an RC practice which when added to the superstitious view of the Mass……….but as ever it’s easy to be selective in our knowledge and use of both scripture and church history.

Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights / of His disciples he said, when the bridegroom is taken away than they will fast /
Here again he tells us how to fast on the assumption we would
/ Acts and the epistles have several examples of Apostolic fasting. So we cannot dismiss fasting as either an OT practice abrogated in the New or a Catholic practice rejected by
Protestants. What is fasting? Total abstinence from food, also going without food partially or totally for shorter or longer periods. Break-fast: the night is a period in which we don't eat for self-denial or discipline. Three examples of fasting are: A. FAST = humble ourselves before God (Psalm
35:13, Isaiah 58: 3/5), an Expression of penitence over past sin: weep and fast (Nehemiah 9:1/2, Jonah 3:15). Still today when we are convicted of sin and moved to repentance it’s not inappropriate as token of penitence to mourn, weep and fast.
Also when we are depending on God for future mercy: prayer and fasting is crucial when we are seeking God for special blessing and direction. Bible examples. B HEALTHY FASTING:
Hunger is basic human appetite but Greed is Basic human sin.
Self-control is meaningless unless it includes our bodies, which are a temple of the Holy Spirit! C INCARNATIONAL
FASTING: deliberately going without in order to share what might have been eaten (or its cost) with the undernourished
(Job 31:16). Modern applications include the 16 th century abstinence from meat: fish eaten on those days. Instituted not by church but by state to support the fishermen, hence my Friday Fish and Chips! Plight of millions on our TV screens:
24 hour famine World Vision / hunger lunch / miss a meal / avoid overweight: forms of fasting which please God and express solidarity with the poor. Penitence / Prayer / Selfdiscipline / solidarity / Love are all good reasons for fasting:

whatever reasons Jesus took it for granted that fasting would have a place in the disciples life: does it in yours? But don’t draw attention to yourself: the hypocrites did by looking dismal and disfiguring their faces, they neglected personal hygiene and covered their heads with sackcloth and smeared their faces with ashes (hence the origin of Ash Wednesday): they looked outstandingly holy: all so their fasting could be seen and known by all. But when you fast: anoint your head, wash your face, do normal things so no one will know you are fasting! The Father who sees in secret will reward you.
So in summary we must choose God for our audience. As Jesus watched people putting their gifts into the temple treasury, so God watches us as we give. As we Pray and Fast secretly, He is there in the secret place. God hates hypocrisy but loves reality, which is why it is only when we are aware of His presence that out Giving, Praying and Fasting will be real!
Pastor David
February 8 th 2015