Psalm 139:1-6
1 LORD, You have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I stand up;
You understand my thoughts from far away.
3 You observe my travels and my rest;
You are aware of all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue,
You know all about it, LORD.
5 You have encircled me;
You have placed Your hand on me.
6 This extraordinary knowledge is beyond me.
It is lofty; I am unable to reach it.
Romans 11:33-36
33 Oh, the depth of the riches
both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
How unsearchable His judgments
and untraceable His ways!
34 For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been His counselor?
35 Or who has ever first given to Him,
and has to be repaid?
36 For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.
To Him be the glory forever. Amen.
Hebrews 4:12-13
12For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. 13Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
Related Text:
Psalm 94:1-11
Proverbs 5:21
1 Chronicles 1:18-25
2 Chronicles 16:9
John 3:19-20
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If You Play Hide-and-Seek with God, He Always Wins . . . Always
No matter what we do, no matter how we act around this group of friends or that group of co-workers, no matter what our motives are to go to church, be pleasant to our family, or even help those in need, God knows. He knows why we do what we do.
If you’re anything like me, you try to present the best of you. There’s nothing wrong with this, not really. In it’s innocence, it’s really just trying to be pleasant to those around you. Like for example: You’ve had a horrible day at work and nothing has gone right, and stuff is just piling up everywhere, but you choose not to be rude to or cuss at the person in line ahead of you that’s keeping you from checking out and getting home to see your family because they don’t know how to operate the self-checkout machine. You’re not letting your negative circumstances control your interactions with others.
But this can become a problem super quick when we aren’t spending time developing our relationship with God. What happens is that we begin to hide stuff from others. It’s kind of like an evolution of our attitude. We go from avoiding holding a grudge or avoiding the chip on our shoulder to hiding the grudge and hiding the chip. If we aren’t careful, we will go from not allowing negative circumstances affect how we interact with others, to hiding all of our bad stuff, or hiding our hate or bad attitude, and putting on a mask to appease whoever it is that we are around. This is where the word “hypocrite” always comes into play.
When we begin hiding stuff, we also begin hiding our sin. Our sin is a natural thing to hide when we find ourselves in this downward spiral of hiding and hypocrisy. We try to act like everything is perfect, including us. We can almost hide it from ourselves. What I mean here is, we hide for so long, we pretend for so long, that we begin to lie to ourselves. We buy in to our own “performance” around others and before long, we don’t take our sin seriously. We may even stop asking for forgiveness, because it just doesn’t feel important to us anymore because we have bought into the performance that there isn’t anything we need to ask forgiveness about. Then, since we’re “ok”, we begin to try and “fix” others. Or, if we can’t “fix” them, we’ll at least talk about how they need to be fixed. Basically, we’ve turned into a crappy Christian.
So how do we avoid falling down this mountain of hiding and faking? I think that it starts with our devotion to God. We have to recognize that we cannot hide anything from God. We cannot fake out God and pretend enough to convince Him that we are somebody we aren’t. We have to be humble before God and realize that He sees everything we do and He knows all about our motives and our attitude. He knows who we are and He knows exactly why we do everything that we do. Let me stress that spending time with God, spending time reading His Word, not giving up on our relationship with God, and trying daily to live for Jesus will give you the strength, love, joy and humility to recognize and avoid hypocritical behavior. When we spend time with God, when we are truly devoted to living for Jesus, we will produce the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). It won’t be fake and it won’t be covering up anything. It will be natural, sincere and evident to everyone that we interact with.
