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Podcast: Are You an Evangelical, a Pharisee, or Both? (Michael Reeves)

February 20, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Modern-Day Pharisees and the Cure for Hypocrisy

In today's episode, Michael Reeves talks about the Pharisaism that all-too-often takes root in our churches, our homes, and, ultimately, our hearts, challenging us to see how the sins of pride and hypocrisy are an ever-present threat to us as God’s people—but also how God can save us from ourselves as we turn to him.

Evangelical Pharisees

Evangelical Pharisees

Michael Reeves

In this clear, compelling call to reformation, Michael Reeves helps believers reject pharisaism and embrace gospel integrity through biblical revelation, redemption, and regeneration. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:21 - What Is Pharisaism?

Matt Tully
Mike, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast today.

Michael Reeves
Great to be with you, Matt.

Matt Tully
We talked a number of months ago about your previous book with Crossway, Gospel People, and this new book is sort of an interesting partner to that first one. Obviously, the title itself is so provocative—Evangelical Pharisees. The book itself is also provocative, but I think that leads to maybe the first assumption people could make about the book from the title, that it’s just another one of these screeds against evangelicals. It’s another book complaining about hypocrisy and failures in the church, something that we all have seen on display in so many ways over the last number of years. And someone might wonder, Is that really helpful? Do we really need another book like that?

Michael Reeves
This is absolutely not an attack, and I hope coming off the back of the book Gospel People, which came out last year, where I was arguing that properly understood evangelicalism—to be people of the gospel, that is—is central to Paul’s argument in Romans. So I want to argue for the importance of being gospel people. This is not an attack on that at all. I couldn’t do that. But rather, this is a call for reformation because what I found is when I wrote Gospel People. I felt not that there was a turn of heart against gospel people at all in me when I was writing it. Rather, I felt that I think many readers would read that and say, Yes, absolutely. I wish those people over there would read this. And I think a lot of the issues that we have today in evangelicalism come from the fact that we need to work the gospel more deeply down into our own lives, and that’s what I’m seeking to do. It’s not an attack on being people of the gospel. I’m not attacking evangelicalism. I’m not calling out all evangelicals as Pharisees or anything like that. But it’s to say I think there is a problem with the gospel that we who affirm the gospel have in that we’ve not worked it down into our heads and hearts sufficiently. That’s what I want to help readers.

Matt Tully
Do you resonate with my sense that there were bits in this book that are very penetrating? They made me feel almost uncomfortable as I thought about the implications for what you were saying. Do you resonate with that? Did you feel that as you were writing it?

Michael Reeves
Yes, absolutely. I was deliberately writing it, aware that I think some of the problems in evangelicalism are because there is a smug satisfaction in our own orthodoxy and in our own righteous, moral behavior and lives. I don’t want to turn that into an attack to say actually, all your theology and your morality is wrong. I’m not saying that. Rather, I’m saying I think underneath that self-satisfaction there is a spiritual hollowness that needs addressing, and that comes through a deeper engagement with the gospel. And that’s where the reformation that our church needs—that our lives need—will come from.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about the title and this orienting idea of the Pharisees and Pharisaism, which is, again, one of the ways that you describe evangelicals and evangelicalism oftentimes throughout the book. So, who were the Pharisees, what is Pharisaism, and why do you view that as a helpful way to think about our problems today?

Michael Reeves
The Pharisees were a sect in Jesus’s day that many of us will be familiar with. They’ve become cartoon villains in many ways, which makes the idea of what Pharisaism is hard for us to get our heads around and hard for us to translate and see that actually. We might be guilty of that problem because you take the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and you think, Here’s the good guy and here’s the bad guy. I cannot be the bad guy. He’s so obviously bad. I wanted to step back from that to say actually, it’s a much more subtle thing. Something that unlocks the nature of the problem that was there in Pharisaism was Jesus’s statement in Luke 12. Importantly, it was a statement he made to his disciples—not to the Pharisees themselves, but to the disciples. He said, “Watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees.” This is why the book is not an attack against people of the gospel. It is doing exactly what Jesus is doing in Luke 12, to say, “Watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees.” Those who are seeking to be disciples of Christ can themselves find themselves infected by this Pharisaism, by this hypocrisy. And that hypocrisy is basically a lack of integrity to the gospel. A lack of integrity is something a little bit different from a lack of orthodoxy. I wanted to show that I’m not simply saying let’s make sure we all sign up to our church’s statement of faith and to our denominational confessions, because I think it’s possible to do that and in our hearts and lives not actually live in the grace and truths that those confessions are articulating. I wanted to say that the answer to the problem of this lack of integrity we have is an alignment of both head and heart in those truths of the gospel.

Matt Tully
So what would you say to the person listening whose response right now is, I’ve heard this before. We have categories for how my theology has to match my life. My life has to match my theology. Head and heart have to go together. Why is this any different than that?

Michael Reeves
I think the difference is that when phrased like that, people are often saying, I need to be living out my theology. What that can look like is I’ve got my theology, and then I’ve got the outward performance in my life that must flow out of that theology. What I’m trying to do is to say let’s go a level deeper. Not to look so much at your performance, though your performance will manifest the deeper issues, but let’s look underneath the performance to see your affections. What do you love? What do you hope for? What do you glory in? What do you treasure? What do you value? And it’s those questions that really pick out the problem because the heart of Pharisaism and the problem of hypocrisy is actually to do with what you love.

Matt Tully
And that’s where that term hypocrisy becomes so important because the Pharisees and we—following in their footsteps, so to speak—we often, at least verbally, can vocalize the right outward actions that we should be doing. But the issue is that those don’t match the inward. How would you unpack why hypocrisy is so central to this Pharisaism?

Michael Reeves
It’s central to the problem that Jesus saw in Pharisaism because in the Pharisees, they looked to be orthodox. They were people of Scripture, they believed themselves to be pious, but what Jesus saw in them is that all their beliefs and hearts and lives were actually denials of the gospel. And that’s the problem with hypocrisy that I think we can think, We’re orthodox, good, gospel people. And yeah, there’s this slight problem of hypocrisy in our lives and in the church, but it’s an unideal situation. Hey, we could do a little bit better. And what I wanted to say is no, no. This is a problem with the gospel. Hypocrisy is a denial of the very central truths of the gospel. That’s what I wanted to press into here, to say I think what we see as minor moral blips going on in the church today and in our lives today are actually manifestations of something really worrying—a neglect of and even a rejection of the gospel.

10:32 - The Moral Trail of Pharisaism

Matt Tully
I want to get into a couple manifestations of this pharisaical spirit that you call out in the book, but before we do that, you say that Pharisaism leaves a moral trail. What does that trail look like? What do you mean by that?

Michael Reeves
The trail that Pharisaism and hypocrisy leaves—this is probably what’s most familiar to people—is the spiritual hollowness both in our own lives and more broadly in the church. Just a lack of depth to prayer life but also the tribalism we see in the church I think is tightly connected—the factionalism we see in the church. The Pharisees were a sect and proud of being a sect. This is tightly connected to this problem of hypocrisy. Treasuring of substitutes for Christ. Wanting to put our hope in something other than Christ, and therefore joylessness in Christ. Prickliness of demeanor of me wanting to preserve the image of my own holiness and righteousness before you. Both cowardice and toxicity of culture. People so often around the Pharisees were said to live in fear of the Jews. So when we have a culture of fear, that’s telling us we’ve got a culture of hypocrisy. So some of those things from tribalism to spiritual hollowness to fearfulness to a culture of fear, joylessness—all these things are the moral trail and manifestations of the deeper problem of hypocrisy.

Matt Tully
Is this a book that you think could be written for any generation of Christians at any time because these are the problems that the church is facing consistently and universally? Or is there something about our day to today, something that you would say makes this problem of hypocrisy in the church more acute today than some other point in history?

Michael Reeves
The fact that Jesus says “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees” shows that this is going to be an ongoing problem for the church. But I think it is a particular problem for today in that there seems to be a stage, a development, of problems that very often happens in the church throughout church history. Elsewhere in Matthew, when Jesus says those words, he says, *Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees." And I think that’s an interesting little observation there, that it seems to be that primarily the problem is hypocrisy—the leaven of the Pharisees—but that can then lead you into the problem of the Sadducees. The problem of the Sadducees was they’re simply not a people of Scripture. They’re denying essential truths of Scripture. For example, resurrection is the classic debate with Jesus in the Gospels. And so I think we might be at that place in the church today where, having had the riches of gospel teaching for a long time, this problem of hypocrisy sets in. But then that slides into an outright denial of God’s revealed truths. Therefore, it’s something that this generation has to deal with now if we are not to slide into outright, overt gospel denials. This is the subtle stage before it becomes blatant.

Matt Tully
That’s fascinating to see how those are connected. Do you see that there’s a linear progression there, that Pharisaism, if left unchecked as this hypocritical rejection of the gospel, tends to lead towards a more outright rejection? If so, how does that progression tend to work?

Michael Reeves
The problem of Pharisaism is one that’s rooted in what you love. So, it will deny the gospel in certain essential ways, but those ways that it does so are subtle. Pharisaism deliberately wants to avoid detection. It’s mask-wearing. It’s making a pretense. It will always make the show of being orthodox and righteous. It’s a problem of the heart with what you love. I think of the end of John 12 where John writes their problem is they love the glory of men more than the glory of God. So it’s a problem in what they love that’s leading to these subtle denials of the gospel. But then there seems to be an almost automatic progression that once the heart is set on trust in and love of something else other than the glory of God, there’s no point maintaining the facade of trust in God for that much longer. So what will happen is the next generation raised in that Pharisaism will become Sadducees. They’ll overtly deny the truths of the gospel.

Matt Tully
That’s something that I think we sometimes hear. A cultural narrative that we hear around the church today is that younger generations have grown up in the church and they’ve seen the hypocrisy of their parents’ generation. They’ve seen the hypocrisy of church leaders who abuse their trust and their power and didn’t live out these gospel realities in their own personal lives, all the while proclaiming something from the pulpit, so to speak. And that then disillusions them with Christianity. They start to abandon the theological and moral principles of Christianity because it all just feels like it’s a farce. Is that related to what you’re talking about here?

Michael Reeves
Absolutely it is because what that younger generation is doing is spotting something real, which is that the moral and the theological are connected. So, when we say, Oh, hypocrisy, this is just a moral problem we can sort out, there’s nothing theological here, it’s not to do with our denial of the gospel, what that younger generation is saying is, Because of the moral problem, I’m going to reject the theology. It’s actually a wise insight that they’ve seen. They say, The theology has already been rejected. I’ve seen that in my parents. I’m just going to have integrity to a new situation.

17:32 - Pharisaism and Biblical Knowledge

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about a couple examples of this Pharisaism and how it manifests itself in these subtle, insidious ways in our lives as Christians. You argue in the book that evangelicals are often pharisaical when it comes to the Bible. You summarize this attitude that we can have, which is treating Scripture as an end in itself. I wonder if you could unpack that for us a little bit.

Michael Reeves
Primarily, I’m looking at Jesus’s interaction with the scribes and Pharisees in John 5, where Jesus says, You diligently study the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but you refuse to come to me to have eternal life. And so what they’re doing is they’re thinking that the mere study of the words of Scripture is itself life-giving rather than seeing Scripture is given to provide life by taking us to Christ in whom is life. So if we are not led on to Christ, then we’ve missed the whole point of Scripture. And what that then does is it provides this subtle problem where you see the Pharisees are diligent students of Scripture—even masters of the text. They’d love expository preaching. They look so conservative theologically, and yet there’s a profound problem. Their whole understanding of the gospel is skewed by this because they think, What’s the essential problem we have? Ignorance. Not sin, but ignorance. Therefore, the solution is not Christ, but biblical knowledge. Therefore, it’s actually a skewed vision of the gospel that they’ve got, but it looks so very orthodox.

Matt Tully
You write in the book one of the most hard-hitting bits that really struck me and I want to think more about. You say, “Where others [other religious traditions] go on pilgrimages and perform penances, evangelicals perform their regular Bible-reading rituals. Sometimes it’s so crude a superstition that we could do it just as well with the book turned upside down.”

Michael Reeves
Because we are brought up, rightly within evangelical churches, knowing the word of God is our daily manna, it is our daily bread. We want to be daily taking this on. If we’re not feeding ourselves with Scripture, we’re not growing. All that is absolutely true. But what you can take away from that is thinking merely the reading of the text automatically does you good. So it becomes this Protestant version of the Catholic idea that merely by taking the bread and the wine into my mouth, I’ve received grace. And so if I just pick up my Bible, I’ve done some good to my soul. I’m not just observing that in other people. I feel the danger myself that I can feel that I know just by habit I need to open my Bible every morning and read it, but I can then very easily, when tired, when busy, I can just be going through the motions, not realizing that the point of Scripture is that I may come to Christ to have life, not merely soak in information. And you see this, I think, in evangelical preaching sometimes. It can reinforce that idea that a sermon can really look like a download of biblical information. And so what we really want to take out of a sermon is more biblical knowledge, please, because the problem is ignorance; it’s not sin. It’s not that I need to repent and turn to Christ. It’s just I need more biblical information, meaning we become like the Pharisees—more proud and not more repentant.

Matt Tully
When it comes to Bible reading, oftentimes when we kind of get into the weeds of how do I actually do this more consistently—and it’s coming from a good place, a good desire—we get into conversations about habits and about habit formation and how there’s a level of discipline that is required. Even the common refrain that you’re not always going to feel like you want to do your Bible reading and you’re not always going to come with the purest motives, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. How does your caution, your warning against viewing Bible reading in this hypocritical and legalistic way, fit with maybe just our experience of trying to make a habit out of actually reading the Bible?

Michael Reeves
The issue is just as it was for the Pharisees: What’s the end? What’s the goal here? Reading your Bible as a habit is a great thing to do, but if you think just having read your Bible is the end goal—Done! That will have done me spiritual good—you are in a profoundly dangerous place, and you are in danger of being a scribe, not a disciple of Jesus Christ. And so you need to see the point of reading Scripture is the real end goal, Jesus says, of coming to him to have life. And so a test will be this: Are you, in coming to Scripture each day, are you praying, Lord, open my eyes that I might see wonderful things. Open my eyes that I may see the glory and beauty of Jesus, that I may trust him, that I may love the glory of God more than the glory of men—is that the goal? What’s the end in Bible reading? And the same is true in preaching as well. If the preacher thinks the end of, the goal of preaching is simply so that people might know their Bible better, they’ve made the mistake of the Pharisee. We need to see that yes, let’s have rich expository preaching, opening up the scriptures. Absolutely, let’s do that; but with the goal that people might see the glory of God in the face of Christ, that they might love him and trust him.

24:17 - Pharisaism and *Sola Scriptura*

Matt Tully
Another facet of our hypocrisy that you call out, when it comes to the Bible, is our tendency to add to Scripture. I can already hear the Crossway core type crowd who’s probably listening to this—We believe in sola scriptura. We believe in the authority and preeminence of Scripture alone for our lives. And so we might think that this is not a danger for us, adding to Scripture. And yet you say there are some subtle ways that we, as orthodox evangelicals, can do this. What are some examples of that?

Michael Reeves
I think particularly for those who think of themselves as sola scriptura (Scripture is supreme for me and I'm a plain-Bible Christian), the danger is that you can read the Bible and assume that your cultural presumptions are a good way to interpret Scripture. And therefore, you don’t realize that actually, while you are saying, Let me not hear the voices of historians in the church and theologians over there with their funny, non-biblical ways, actually, you’ve got your own funny, non-biblical ways, but it’s just you’ve not been made aware of them. And the problem with Pharisaism that’s so subtle is that these traditions help create a culture where when we’ve turned to something other than Scripture alone, it’s so hard to see it. You can always spot someone else’s culture, right? Someone else’s culture is just obvious, but you never have a culture because everything that you think is just so self-evidently right and obvious. And so what we need to do is allow Scripture to critique our own culture, and that is a much harder thing for us to do. It’s very easy for us to get embedded within a culture that hasn’t allowed itself to be critiqued by Scripture.

Matt Tully
So how do we actually do that? What does it look like to allow Scripture to critique our own culture—a culture that we grew up in, a culture that we’re comfortable with, a culture that we genuinely feel like maybe has really good insights into what the Bible’s actually saying?

Michael Reeves
Well, essentially it is about deeper, ongoing engagement with Scripture. But there’s something important in hearing the voices of those who are outside our culture who are speaking about Scripture to do that. I always love the advice of C. S. Lewis who said that for every new book you read, read an old book. Or if you can’t do that, for every third book you read, make it an old book. And his point was not that people from a different time from ours would be necessarily more right on everything, but they’re right on different things and wrong on different things. And where they’re wrong, it’s more immediately obvious to us; and where they’re right, they’ll bring out things that aren’t obvious to us. So I look at times in church history where everyone in a generation just seems to have a complete blind spot on an issue and no one’s seeing it, and that will be true of ours. And so it’s helpful to be in with people of another generation and outside of our geographical culture as well. To say, what are they saying when they’re opening up Scripture? So that we are testing everything by Scripture, but we are hearing different people apply Scripture to our lives. That will help us see, Actually, my reading of Scripture, maybe that was more culturally driven than I thought.

Matt Tully
You write in the book, “Yet evangelicalism’s (unevangelical) ‘no creed but the Bible’ biblicism itself creates traditions.” What are some of those traditions that some of us from that kind of mentality might unintentionally perhaps have imbibed?

Michael Reeves
If you think of another Christian or another evangelical circle on your own, you spot a culture there that is not immediately your own. And some of those cultures can be ones where they’re very much, Scripture is supreme with us. And yet you look at them and you think, If that’s the case, why do you dress differently and talk differently to me? Because you all seem to just have this way of behaving and relating, and you’ve got your buzzwords and your shibboleths that we don’t really use in my circle. So, you look very cultural, and often it’s because there's an influential leader who’s very good as a teacher of Scripture. But every leader will have their own particular quirks and styles, which isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s just they like dressing in a particular way, but people want to be like them, and so they dress like him. And so you see the creation of a culture, and in that culture seeking—for example, to emulate the leader in how he speaks, his mannerisms, his tone, his dress code, all that—they become blind to the fact that that’s okay. That’s just a cultural mannerism. That’s how he likes to do things. But it can start becoming one with proper Christian lifestyle orthodoxy so that, Oh, people who don’t dress like that or use that particular phrase, they’re rather suspect. They’re not able to see the difference between what is a tradition within their culture and what’s a gospel truth.

Matt Tully
Can you think of an example of a cultural tradition that you found yourself enmeshed within that you’ve over time come to appreciate is tradition that has value but isn’t maybe as central as you once thought it was?

Michael Reeves
One I think of is the influence of Martin Lloyd-Jones in Britain. Martin Lloyd-Jones was a wonderful biblical expositor but he had his own particular way of speaking and way of dressing. Many people influenced by him wanted to be like that. It was the kind of logic that people use when they say, Hey, if I smoke a cigar and drink some brandy, I’ll be just like Winston Churchill. I’ll be as courageous and dynamic and world-changing as Churchill. All I need is a cigar and some brandy. And similarly, people thought that with Lloyd-Jones. A whole generation began to imitate his quite distinctive manner of speech and very 1920s dress code.

Matt Tully
And no cigars and no brandy particularly.

Michael Reeves
No, there were definitely no cigars and brandy there. But again, the problem is looking at the superficials. It was really looking at the outside of things. How precisely do we go about this, not what was the heartbeat and the deep conviction that drove Lloyd-Jones? And I think there’s a classic way in which we build up these traditions, that we look at the outside of things. How did that leader dress or talk, or just some of the superficial things we copy. And we think by copying the superficial we become like them, when actually what makes those great men distinctive is the values and integrity and convictions they had.

Matt Tully
Is it possible for some of our traditions to be connected to things that aren’t even purely superficial? Could it be matters of emphasis or priority given to this important doctrine or this other important issue? Can that be another way that we sometimes fall into traditions that don’t necessarily directly map onto the gospel as central?

Michael Reeves
Yes, absolutely. That, again, you could take a great teacher who will emphasize the gospel, but he’s got his own particular distinctives, and it’s very easy to then follow that and not be able to see that distinctive on say, when will Christ return or the nature of baptism or church government or whatever it is, because we so appreciate the ministry and the effect their teaching has on us, we take it on wholesale, not able to see actually, that man’s teaching on justification by faith alone, that’s central gospel material. His teaching on baptism could be helpful, but we can agree to disagree on that. And that’s not a gospel issue at the same level as his teaching on justification by faith alone. And when we conflate those, that’s when we start creating a tradition.

Matt Tully
And those can become pharisaical and those can become legalistic, in the worst sense of the word.

Michael Reeves
Absolutely.

34:08 - Pharisaism and Redemption

Matt Tully
One other big area that you hit on in the book when it comes to the ways that we can be pharisaical relates to the issue of redemption—our doctrine of redemption, our disposition towards what it means to be redeemed. You have another one of these provocative statements in the book. You say, “Taken out of the parable and into our churches, a Pharisee would be applauded as a model church elder, a pious paragon of godliness.” What are you getting at when you say that, and how does that relate to our understanding of redemption?

Michael Reeves
I was thinking there of the Pharisee in Luke 18 in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, who we tend to dismiss as this caricature or archvillain. And what we actually see there is a man who is praying. He thanks God for grace, so he believes in grace. He behaves uprightly, saying he’s keeping all the commandments. Now, these are things that look very good. Let’s not quickly dismiss him as the baddy we know he turns out to be at the end of the parable. These are things that we applaud. And so a prayerful believer in grace who lives righteously—that’s exactly the kind of person that we want involved in our church ministries, in our church lives. But what we see in that man is that underneath that superficial exterior is precisely the opposite. In praying to God, he’s doing it not because he depends on God, because his very view of grace is skewed. He thinks God is gracious because he himself has merited that grace. So it’s not truly grace at all, though he uses the language, and therefore he believes in a God who is ungracious, who is very functional and contractual in how he deals with us. And so you see, that Pharisee doesn’t love God at all. He’s using God to parade himself as righteous and to win himself heaven. He’s utterly selfish. Not worshiping God, but dependent on his own performance. He’s actually worshiping himself, not God. And so he’s not loving the Lord and loving his neighbor; he’s loving himself. And you see in his treatment of the tax collector—“I thank you, God, that I’m not like other men, especially this tax collector”—he’s hating his neighbor. And so underneath that very impressive exterior—and we’ve got to acknowledge this—an impressive exterior is hiding this devilish rot. He hates God, he hates neighbor, and yet it’s so wonderfully cloaked. There’s the problem of hypocrisy. Here’s a man who doesn’t see any need that he has for being redeemed. He thinks he’s great.

Matt Tully
Even though he has the language of redemption all over his lips.

Michael Reeves
Yeah.

Matt Tully
The hard thing, too, is because I think we hear a parable like this, and everything you just said is true and we kind of think that maybe in his mind he knows all that consciously. He’s thinking about that. He’s thinking consciously, I need to hide all these other things. I actually believe that I don’t need grace, but I’m going to say the word. But I think something that you also draw out in the book is how insidious this hypocrisy can be in our hearts, in that we actually deceive ourselves so often. We aren’t, in some sense, intentionally seeking to be hypocritical in this stuff.

Michael Reeves
Absolutely. I don’t think anyone really is ever setting out to be hypocritical. The reason why it’s so difficult to diagnose is that it’s not an intentional setting out to be something which you are not. The very nature of hypocrisy is deceptive, even to yourself. And this is the problem with the Pharisees. They were not only blind to who God is, but they’d become blind to who they were. That Pharisee in Luke 18 didn’t realize his own need for redemption. He didn’t actually see his own dirtiness or need. He wasn’t even seeing the problem. And that, I think, is the really scary thing with hypocrisy, that those who are most caught in it are the most blind to it. They think there’s not a problem.

39:25 - What Now?

Matt Tully
We don’t have time in our interview today to dig into a couple of the other ways that you explore our hypocrisy in the book. You look at regeneration and how we think about that in our own lives, and then even our disposition towards God himself is affected by this. But maybe as a final question, What do we do? How do we actually seek to address and uncover and then root out this hypocrisy when, as we just said, it can be so subtle and we’re so prone to self-deception? Speak to someone who kind of feels a sense of helplessness when it comes to this.

Michael Reeves
Well, that’s precisely why this book really is a call to reformation, in that I’m seeing hypocrisy is the opposite of faith in the gospel. Hypocrisy is a lack of integrity that doesn’t have that basic trust in God. But if hypocrisy is the opposite of faith, what we need as the solution is faith. Now, where does faith come from? Faith comes from the word of Christ given to us (Rom. 10). And so the solution is the gospel. The problem with hypocrisy is precisely a denial of the gospel. The solution to it isn’t, Let’s try to clean up our act a bit, which is often where the problem goes. The solution is the gospel itself. I think the passage I would like to leave people with is John 3, where Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You must be born again.” Nicodemus doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand the need for a radical change of heart. But then Jesus goes straight on to this uncomprehending Pharisee, who doesn’t understand what it is to have a radical change of heart, and he says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that all who look to him may believe in have eternal life.” The solution to those who have this problem—that they may realize, I may be even blind to the nature of my problem, and that scares me and I don’t see the way out—the solution is Christ crucified. Don’t turn in on yourself to try to improve your behavior. The solution is the gospel of Christ and his free grace. Turn out and look to him, and there is liberation.

Matt Tully
Beautiful. Mike, thank you so much for helping us to perhaps see a little bit more clearly for the first time the ways this pharisaical spirit, this hypocrisy, infects us even as gospel people, to quote your previous book. We appreciate you taking the time.

Michael Reeves
Thanks, Matt. Wonderful to be with you.

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