Lips, Hearts and Lives - Isaiah 29:13

Lips, Hearts and Lives Isaiah 29:13 Introduction The video is cute and funny, mostly because it has an element of truth. Far too often we are guilty of trying to take the speck out of someone else's eye, when we have a log in our own (Matt &, Luke 6). And while it is dangerous to go around making rules and proclamations, it is also necessary to have standards. Still, what is more important is living up to the standards. What is even more important is living by God's standards. Jesus said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments," (John 14:15). Listen, my friends, lest we be found on the wrong side of the most important issue. We must be concerned about the things of God, and we must always be returning and refocusing our attention on him. If we are not careful, we will fall short, not because we have not been zealous, rather, we will fall short because we have been attempting to serve God and please God by following human traditions, rather than by following the pure, simple, word of God. There are three closely related and interdependent ideas that I want us to talk about today: 1. Hypocrisy - Pretending to be something you are not. From the Greek - told of an actor, wearing a mask. 2. Lip Service - Saying one thing while living another. 3. Human Traditions - Worshiping something other than God while claiming to honor him. Look with me at Isaiah 29:13 These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. This passage gives us, perhaps, the best definition of what it means to give lip service. We say one thing, and do another. Our lips are moving, but our hearts are not falling in line. And this is the crux of belief. When we believe God, when we believe in Jesus, our actions begin to align with our words, because our hearts have come into line with our lips. Still, if we are not careful, even when we are sincere, we can be sincerely wrong. We do this simply by honoring the traditions of men rather than the commands of God. We have a form of godliness, but deny its power. We believe what people say about the Bible without testing the spirits to see if they are from God. We fall prey to human traditions, religion, rather than the truth. Jesus Exposed Lip Service This passage of scripture is very important, so important, that Jesus, himself, quotes it as he exposes the lip service, the hypocrisy, the idolatry of the religious leaders of his day. Let's examine his accusation (Matthew 15:1-8, Mark 7:6-13). Jesus uses just one example of how the religious leaders of his day had countermanded the teachings of God and were holding to the teachings of men. It was the violation of 5th commandment: "Honor your father and your mother." Here, Jesus condemns their human tradition which allowed them to divert funds from support of their aging and elderly parents in order to support the "Temple". If you dedicated this or that to God, then you were free from having to look after your parents in their old age. Typically, this is not the only way that we view dishonoring our parents. We look to the respect of parents, "Yes, Ma'am. No Sir." And we look at the rebellion in which many young adults engage as dishonoring one's parents. But, Jesus believes and teaches that we owe a debt of honor to our parents that endures as long as they are alive, and we must fulfill it, not only when we are young, but also when they are old and feeble. It is in this context that Jesus labels the religious leaders of his day as giving lip service to God, as being hypocrites, as being idolaters. Not because of their duplicity. Nope. They were practicing exactly what they preached. These people were lying because they were teaching what was the opposite of God. While trying to justify their actions as pleasing to God, they were violating the commandment. They were following human traditions, not God's instructions. In another similar passage, Jesus calls the religious leaders "white washed tombs," (Matt 23:27), because they had the appearance of being clean, while on the inside they were corpses. The outside looked good, but the inside was rotten. Is Your Faith Lip Service? You see, or perhaps you don't see. Maybe none of us really see, ourselves. It is quite easy to see the lip service in others. Far too often, however, when we look in the mirror, we only see the us that we want to project, and not the real us, the one that says one thing, but does something else. And here is where the rubber meets the road, as it were. Are we living consistent lives? Do we practice what we preach? Does our witness line up with our rhetoric? This is not about our gatherings on Sundays. This is about our Monday through Saturday lives. It is easy to get dressed up in our regal best for an hour or two or three, but it isn't so easy to live every day, all day. Yep, and there will be times when we fall short. But, do we even try? There are a lot of people who simply give up trying. They tried religion. They tried being good. But they found that their heart wasn't in it. Then, they just quit trying. Eventually, they just lowered the standard. They quit pretending. "I don't want to be a hypocrite." They lived like they wanted, and hoped that their lack of lip service was going to be good enough. Of course, they still have the problem of idolatry, following, worshiping, something other than God. They are guilty of worshiping self, of following their own desires and becoming gods unto themselves, making up the rules as they go along. These words from scripture remind us that there must be consistency in our lives. What is outside, must, of necessity, also be what is inside. And, they also remind us that God is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. It is possible to be in complete alignment inside and out, and still be aligned to human traditions, religions, philosophies. This alignment is good, psychologically. However, it simply isn't enough spiritually. We can never be enough without allowing God to come into our lives and transform us inside and out, aligning us not only with ourselves, but with him, and hence with our best selves, our true selves, the person that God really created us to be. His people, his followers, his family. 1