How to Spot a Hypocrite

6 · Alcantar highlights Paul's focus on the heart's loves rather than mere external behavior

And notice that this list isn't just about the outward stuff that we do on the surface. It is about the inward reality of what's going on in our hearts. Notice that in four different instances, Paul addresses what the heart loves. So lovers of self, lovers of money, and then not lovers, loving good, not loving God. Doriana, a commentator on this points out that in Paul's letters, he mentions what you love nearly a hundred times. Because Doriani summarizes, evildoers suffer from disordered loves or false loves, meaning we do not love the thing that we were made to love. We do not love the right thing. So it's almost like a. A planet that. That go or solar system that. That rather than the planets being happy to spin around the sun, the sun becomes a black hole and everything is sucked into it. We were made to orbit around who God is. Orbit in right relationship with one another. But then sin twists everything and destroys everything.

7 · Alcantar walks methodically through Paul's vice list, offering concrete definitions and contemporary examples for each trait

So that's the outline. Now the sketch. So imagine a police sketch artist. They have the outline drawn and they're going to fill it in. Now, each one of these is not meant to be exhaustive. Like, these are the only ways you can be a lover of self, or these are all the ways you can be a lover of self, but rather they're. Paul is going through this hit list and saying things like this. Do you see? And as we go through this list, I want you to notice two things. First, there's all this stuff going on on the surface, but often he'll talk about what's going on in the heart, that you love the wrong thing or don't love the right thing. So what you're meant to see is underneath this love of self, there's all of these other ills that leak out eventually. So let's go through this list. Then they will be lovers of self, then lovers of money. That means those who are given to reckless spending or miserly hoarding. As Jesus said, you can't love both God and money, and they can't be in the same place in your heart. Those who are proud, those who see themselves as better, and those who can't but help and let others know it. Right? You just had somebody pop into your mind, right? Just like the person at your office or your school or your family that all of a sudden, yeah, they're like, yeah, I'm better at you than this. Like, oh, cool, thanks, man. Like, that's. That's it. Proud, arrogant, meaning those who won't listen to others, who. Who won't take advice, who always think they know the best way to do things, abusive people, those who hurt others, exploit others, manipulate and take advantage of others, those who are. This is an interesting one, disobedient to their parents and all the teens got a little uncomfortable. What this means is those who refuse to be submitted to appropriate authorities in their lives. So it's not just teenagers. It's anyone who has a, an. An authority instituted by God in their school or job or life. And they're just like, no, I'm not going to listen to you. Not going to listen to anyone. Why? Because they're only listening to themselves. I'm in charge, right? And then what does it lead to? Ungrateful. So those who are often kind of this world swirling black hole, everything's been sucked in, they're still not grateful. There's not. They're not satisfied. They. They. The irony of our culture is that objectively speaking, according to the scope of world history, even Americans who tend to be lower income tend to have more material comforts than most people, nearly everyone else in world history. And Americans are still always looking for that next thing. Never satisfied with what they have. Unholy. Those who treat the holy things of God with a cavalier attitude or profane them or just treat them with no respect. Heartless. Meaning those who don't have any compassion for others, no love for others. Unappeasable. Those who end up in conflict but never want to really reconcile. They just want to score points. They just want to dig in. Those who are slanderous. Those who delight in spreading false rumors or often half truths about others in order to tear them down. Well, why would they do that? Well, by tearing others down, they seek to elevate themselves without self control. Those who have no control over their emotions, their impulses, they always blame others for what they do. This made me do it. That made me do it. You made me do this. Brutal. Those with that literally, the word is beastly. Those who just are roaring and raging and, and are in a sense, you see a beast on, on the war path, trampling everything in its path. Not again. Notice the affection here. Not loving good. That the things that are right and true and just, they don't do anything in their heart. They don't desire those things. Treacherous. Those who betray, those who backstab, those who deceive others, those who hurt others. Reckless. Those that don't live with any care or concern for others or how their actions might affect others. Swollen with conceit. Those who are. And the word here is literally puffed up, right? You've, you've probably seen a physical example of this at some point where you know, there's a meeting going on and somebody comes in, you know, how are you? You know, and you're just like. I don't think that's your. Are you relaxed right now? Totally relaxed. You know, it's just that's, that's it. Swollen, full of themselves. And then notice the. The. The final conclusion, back to the affections, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, meaning they do not love what they should, and they love too much what they shouldn't.

8 · Alcantar identifies the chilling danger: these vices can coexist with an appearance of godliness

The expositor's commentary says that Paul's point is that sometimes as the church confronts the world, the world then creeps into the church. And here is the chilling thing. This is the thing about this list that scares me. Because you think, okay, based on this list, yeah, we would never make that person a leader. We would never follow that person. But notice what Paul says that Nick next. They have the appearance of godliness but deny its power. Oh, that's scary. All of a sudden, this starts to get scary because Paul says, you can be all of this and still appear outwardly godly, right? This, this person can go to church and can even go to church faithfully. And maybe right now, you're looking at the person next to you, you're like, is it you? You know, don't look at it. Don't. Just look straight ahead at this point in the message. Because here's the reality. You. You can go to church and still be this person. You can listen to Christian radio and still be this person. You can sound spiritual, you can read books, you can have the right answers, you can donate to charities. You can talk big about God and country. You can talk big about helping the poor, like Jesus. You can do all of that and have it only be in appearance, because here is the reality. You cannot fake some of the outward stuff of Christianity, but you cannot fake what you love. And the reality is this. What you love, what you prize, what you cherish, despite your best attempts to. To appear godly will leak out into these areas of your life. It leaks out. It's almost like try to try to hide a black hole. Sooner or later, stuff starts getting sucked into it. You're like, what's over there? Nothing. It's like, you know. And all of these areas get bent. From work to money, to relationships, to sexuality, to reconciliation, all of it begins to be warped.

9 · Alcantar introduces Paul's command—avoid such people—but immediately redirects the congregation away from a witch-hunt mentality

And Paul, in light of this, has a simple command. Avoid such people. Avoid such people. Now, I want to give four categories of application here. The first is you're thinking, okay, here we go. Get the badges out. Let's hunt these people down. But first point, I want to encourage you in light of the context of second Timothy. Look in the mirror first. Look in the mirror first. Remember two. 22, Paul tells Timothy. Timothy, you. I'm going to describe some bad behavior. But you, you, Timothy, flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace. You, Timothy, start with. With your self.

10 · Alcantar shares his personal experience of studying the passage throughout the week, revealing his initial self-righteousness and subsequent conviction as he recognized traits of the hypocrite in himself

So here's what we have to do. Listen, I. I was telling Manny this morning of the first service. I've had to. To be in this text all week, and it has been uncomfortable because my initial reading of the list, I'm like, man, that person sounds like the worst. And then I began to walk through sort of each. Each phrase and I'm like, well, maybe a little bit. I do look a. I am a little ungrateful at times, you know, And I, yeah, I sometimes don't have appropriate compassion for others. And yeah, sometimes if I'm in a conflict with Jen, I just want to be right. I don't want to resolve the conflict. And yeah, I can lack self control at times. And yeah, I can, you know, and all of a sudden you start to go through the list and you're like, oh, my goodness. It's the feeling of seeing a wanted poster and going, is that, Is that me? That looks like me, right? And I mean, that should be the effect. It is the effect. I think if we're looking at ourselves rightly.

11 · Alcantar calls the congregation to identify one specific area where disordered love is warping their lives, warning against excusing it or merely faking compassion

And so let me encourage you. Is there perhaps one area of this that you begin. You have begun to see. Yeah, you know what that is bent. That is warped inward. And I need to give attention to that. I need to not excuse that. I need to not say, well, a lot of people are like that. No, I need to look at that and say, well, that, that, that's an issue, that's a problem. And if left unchecked, that is going to begin to consume more and more areas of my life. And the way to fix it is not just to try to seem more compassionate. Right. You can't. You could try to seem compassionate for a while, but really what you have to do is you have to go, man, I gotta love God more than myself. Because when I love God more than myself, I begin to love those made in God's image. And when I do that, compassion follows, right? We gotta reorder the loves in our heart. So we first look in the mirror and second then look out for this leader.

12 · Alcantar diagnoses the church's tendency to judge leaders by worldly metrics—charisma, success, results, platform size—rather than character

Now, one of the challenges of the church, and I don't mean just our church, but the church broadly in America, is that we often judge leadership by the same qualities the world does. We ask questions like, do they seem successful? Do they have charisma? Do they get results? Is their ministry or church growing? Do people give them attention? Do they have A lot of views on YouTube. And what happens is when we see that, we're like, you know what? Nobody's perfect, right? They might be proud or arrogant or brutal, abusive, but, you know, they're getting results. And that's a dangerous thing, brothers and sisters. It's a dangerous thing when our views of leadership begin to be warped to look like the world around us. And so let me just say this. My burden at Cross of Grace is that we reject the celebrity culture of our world. We do not want a celebrity culture in our hearts or in our church. We don't want to go after. Well, they get results. They. They look smooth. They look. You know, they're. They're like, deal was joking there. We tend to gravitate in the world toward, okay, that person looks put together. They look impressive. Sure, we're going to follow them, right? If. If it's funny. There's a. There's a statistic out that. I'm not going to tell you how I know this, but actually, I will tell you. Statistic out that often people who end up leading companies tend to be over 6ft tall, which is a hard thing for me. Hard, Hardbeat for me. Well under six feet. But why? Because they're taught, like. It's just like, they looked at, like, let's make him our leader, right? That's what happens with Saul. This is what we do. We follow the patterns of the world. And. And we need to feel that pull. And then here's my burden for us at Cross of Grace, that we be within our church, within this outpost of the kingdom of God, that we not be like the world, but we. We look for character first in those who lead at Cross of Grace, we look for character first. We want it to be the first thing we look for. We want it to be the thing we give most attention to. We want to follow people who have godly character. Because here's the reality. Often in our celebrity culture, everybody will have a favorite preacher or band or thing or person, and it's like, oh, they get a lot of views. They seem effective. They seem popular. Here's the reality. We don't actually know them, right? We don't know. Is their character commendable? I. They seem nice, right? I think the scriptural pattern is that those who have the most influence in our lives should be those whom we. Whose character we can commend and. And see and want to be like. That is the way leadership should work in the church of Jesus Christ. And so let me encourage you. We do not want we want to reject the world's model and we want to prize people of character. And let me just say, look, let's encourage one another in this way. If you see someone leading in your group or ministry or team that their character is commendable, commend them, encourage them, press, help them press forward by God's grace. All right, look out for this leader.