Hypocrite

At the Jesus in the City parade I decided to take a shortcut: instead of going with the parade around the many downtown city blocks, I decided to take a shortcut and meet the floats on the way back. As I walked through the shortcut I got a bit tired and thirsty so I bought a cool drink. It was a sunny and hot afternoon so soon I was thirsty again and the sweat on my forehead started to bother me. As I reached the end of this shortcut street and met up with the floats of the parade I saw this man who was playing the role of our Lord, Jesus Christ: he was barefoot and wearing minimum clothes under the hot sun. Being tired and annoyed by the heat I immediately thought, “Is he crazy? I would never do that!” Then almost immediately I thought, “Thank God Jesus Christ died for me so I don’t have to do it!”

Such raw human thoughts caught me by surprise because for years I have been expressing my commitment to our Lord Jesus Christ (through prayers and Christian songs) telling Him that I love Him, and that I am willing to do anything for Him—even if it means persecution and death! Yet, here I was thankful that my Lord—whom I claim to love and willing to die for Him--died in my place because I was bothered with sweat! As I started to think about my hypocrite heart (I say “hypocrite heart” and not “hypocrite mind” because my mind knows what it wants to do, but it is my heart that makes claims and commitments it is unwilling to keep) I remembered how a while back I had a foot infection, and so I went to the doctor and after the treatment I asked him, “Doctor, will this leave a scar?” I was concerned if a scar—no bigger than a quarter inch in diameter--will be “visible” on the bottom of my foot (how often do people see the bottom of our feet anyway?!), and I claimed that I was willing to take the pain and the scars of the scourging Roman wimps on my back for the sake of Christ! Then I remembered how I spent thousands of dollars and years of my times on my braces—as if I am not going to die and rot, as if my teeth are eternal!

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There is a 10 minutes walk from the bus stop to my evening job and I enjoy that walk so much because the area is so quiet and peaceful that I always walk the distance rather than take the shuttle van. And I try to walk slowly to extend this 10 minutes walk to over 15 minutes. In those 15-20 minutes I pray my most sincere prayers and often times those prayers are audible if you are close to me. Last week as I was walking and praying I decided to think more about my hypocritical life, and soon I found myself telling God the truth about me. The truth is that for the last 12 years of my “Christian” life I was never a true worshipper of the Lord:

For the first 4 years I did not know much about Christianity and my life was characterized by lust. At the same time I had a crush on a lady who was my idol.

Then God freed me from lust just like that, overnight, and few months later He freed me from my obsessive crush on that lady and soon after that I started taking the Christian life seriously because I was afraid I would fall back into the slavery of lust (not because I loved Him but because I loved myself and loved the new freedom from sin I had). And so soon I became a “Christian” legalist full of bitterness, and lacked joy and peace. I knew what it meant to be saved by grace, but I had no idea what it meant to live by grace. In those years, as I worked in a warehouse, I wanted to please God more than anything and yearned to know His will and obey Him. I cared about His blessings more than I cared about loving Him for who He is. In those four years I fell in love with a close friend and soon she became an idol too—along with the dream of being happily married to her. So in those four years I had more than one idol that kept my soul “fresh” and energized: I had my self-righteousness, I had my false humility (which was more of a low self-esteem), I had the love of a woman who I was fascinated with. This went on for about 4 years.

Then within few months I got accepted into university, I lost the woman I loved, God freed me from my legalism, and I bought a camera! So for the next four years I had higher education as my idol (it so much replaced my low self-esteem as an idol), and rejection and pain occupied my mind more than everything else combined. Soon I started attending the university gym and physical health and appearance became another idol. And photography became kind of an idol too! This was the spiritual story of my life for the next four years.

Now that I graduated and working two jobs: I have idols in the form of worries about making and saving money, buying a car and getting my own place, getting married, etc.

Then if my life story goes like most people in North America: in few years I will have the worries of a wedding, being “happily” married, having “healthy” children. Then I will worry about their upbringing and then I will worry about the friends they hang out with, and their education. Then I will worry about them getting married, and then I will have my grandchildren as my idols. Then I will look forward to retirement and just relaxing—and that would be my idol--and few years later I will die. I will have just another grave and another tombstone, and I will be just another rotten corpse.

My life is truly characterised by worshipping idols, and hypocrisy is the best cover up for it. I do not remember a week where I worshipped the Lord only--He always had competitions. Actually, He was competing with my idols. I never for a whole day loved Him for He is, that is: to love Him because He is worthy of my love. And most of those idols in my life are not extraordinary things that forced themselves on me, no, it is just that my human heart has this endless capacity to make an idol of anything—to idolize and attach itself to anything and anyone except the One who deserves my worship and intimacy. That is what made Job so extraordinary because when all important things to him (his family, his wealth, his health, his fame and power, the respect of his wife and friends, God’s blessings, and his reputation as being righteous), things that could have been idols to him, were taken away from him, he said:

“ Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
may the name of the LORD be praised.” (Job 1:21)

Job was not a man who only trusted and feared the Lord, oh no: Job loved the Lord!

The popular 21 century American preacher A. W. Tozar said, “Christians don't tell lies – they just go to church and sing them.” Well, I do not tell lies—I just live them. No one described me better than the Lord Jesus Christ when He said in Matthew 23:3, “So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.” The perfect inscription on my tombstone should read: A true idolater. A hypocritical Christian.

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There is something else I thought about the other day while walking to work. For years I prayed and cried for something I wanted God to do. But God in His infinite love and wisdom did not give me what I had asked for! If He did allow it to happen then I would have been absolutely miserable for the rest of my life! And you know what? Five years later while I was talking to Him about it I realized He did it because He loved me, and I thanked Him! Five years later I thanked Him! You know, if a stranger holds a public door for me for 2 seconds then I would thank him whole heartedly and without hesitation, yet I waited five years to thank my Saviour and Heavenly Father for freeing me from an absolutely miserable life! This is a perfect example of the idolatry of self-centeredness: my pain, my dreams, my hopes, my desires, my self-worth, and so on.

I also thought about something I pray for my future wife to have, and that is: for her to have a quiet spirit. I do not mean she speaks little or does not tell jokes, but not to have a restless spirit—to be resting in the Lord. The reason I pray for this is that many women I come across have restless spirits, and this restless spirit leads them to set goals and pursue them impatiently. For example, I know women who married men simply because they reached a certain age and that they had set a goal they should be married by a certain age; in other words a man entered a marriage based on love but his wife married him for no reason other than he was the most available man at that time! And the cycle continues: after they get married they become restless until they have their first child, then they become restless until they buy a house. In other words their whole lives are characterized by jumping from one idol to another. Then I realized what a hypocrite I am by asking my wife to have a quiet spirit, when I have not attained it myself—nor have put any meaningful effort into obtaining it!

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With all my idolatry God, in His mercy and love, did not treat me as I deserve. Often times I come across people who say that they can’t believe in God because He is a cruel and unjust Judge. But from my personal experience He seems to be the opposite: He is a very loving and just Father. I do not know where I would be today if God is not loving, but I do know that I will end up in hell. In the first few years of my Christian life I thought God mainly responds to us according to our obedience, but as I am growing older in my Christian walk and look back at my life I realize that is not true: God mainly responds to us, His children, like any parent would do and that is according to His love—and what an infinite source of sacrificial and enduring love He is!

I just described to you above what a deep well of idolatry my heart is, even though on the outside I might seem like a “good Christian”. And if God has overlooked all my other sins and just considered my idolatry alone and treated me according to that, then I would be in a whole load of terrible today. Yet, God treated me according to His love: He watched over me, and protected me—even when in my ignorance I asked in prayer for those things that will harm me. It is like when the apostle Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:13:

“Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.”

Why was God good to me? I do not know any reason except that He is good. It is like our Lord said in Matthew 5:45, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” God does not say, “Oh, this man sinned! Let’s starve him to death!” No, He sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous; He is patient because He desires that all may come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ as Saviour and be saved.

“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

Sometimes I like to think about the reason God has been good to me as in Genesis’ account of the creation. For example it says in Genesis 1:3, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” He created light because He wanted to. Why is He good to me? Not because I deserve it, but because He wants to—because God is love. That is why another way to summarize my life is this: Fadi’s unfaithfulness. God’s faithfulness.

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There are just two more things I want to say about idolatry. The first is that the opposite of idolatry is intimacy. And intimacy is not reading the Bible, worship, singing praise songs, attending church, fellowship with believers, preaching, serving, or even trust and obedience; those things can increase intimacy and can be the product of intimacy but they do not necessarily mean intimacy. The best action that can describe intimacy is the word “rest”; that is: to rest in the Lord. The reason I say action is that resting is difficult when we have “so much” to do. We are driven to do this and that and resting in our world is often times equivalent to losing. Even prayer is not intimacy if you do not do it with a restful heart. Let me tell you how I imagine intimacy:

Suppose that I am married to a woman whom I am in love with and she is in love with me. Suppose she is a housewife and I am employed outside the home. I come home from a very tiring day and I terribly miss my wife; she too had a tiring day and misses me too. I enter the house and I sit on the sofa. What do you think I want my wife to do for me? Bring me a cup of cold water? Prepare me food? Give my shoulders a message? No, I will desire none of those things. The thing I would want the most is for her to come and sit beside me, resting her head on my shoulder, and wrapping my arm around her. I want to rest in her presence. That is what intimacy about.

Now if God stripped away everything dear to us, then out of need and loneliness we would start to spend more time with Him—we would become more intimate with Him. But this type of intimacy does not show true love. True intimacy is driven by love and not need of things; true intimacy is driven by the need to be with the one you love.

The second thing I want to say is this: often times our lack of intimacy with God is because we simply do not care anymore. Sin, of course, leads to lack of intimacy with God because God is holy and He abhours sin. But often times we simply do not care for being intimate with Him anymore. Strangely I found that I can love God but not like Him. It is very strange to say that I can love but not like a person but it is true. Sometimes because of disappointments with God (mainly because of unbiblical expectations we had of Him) we grow bitter toward Him. And even though we love Him by obeying Him, we become less fond of Him as a person (not as a human, but as an entity with a personality)—He starts becoming to us more of a good King than a loving Father. To protect ourselves from further hurt we stop caring for God or against God—we become lukewarm. And that means we stop expecting good from God and that is a very damaging thing to our intimacy. Let me tell you a story:

For the last year or so I did not ask anything from God in prayer: I just stopped expecting goods things from Him (for many reasons which I will not get into now). Then about 4 months ago I was listening to John Piper and he said something like, “Requesting things in prayer is not just something God wants us to do! Oh no, He commands us to ask!” I thought to myself, “Oh wow! It’s been so long since I asked anything from Him!” So I went to pray and it was a very difficult thing to do because I was breaking an emotional and spiritual protest against God. I simply asked Him to help me find a job because I had just graduated from university and I needed to find a job. That same week I got an evening job which I like, and next week I got an interview to a very good morning job that has to do with my university education and a couple weeks later I got that job too!

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For the year 2012 I really want to start to get to know God...intimately! Not just know about God, but know God. I remember Paul Washer saying something like, “I am tired of knowing someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew God! I want to know Him personally!” Is there idolatry in your life? Some hypocrisy too, may be? Do you know God, not just personally but intimately? Do you even care to know Him intimately? And the answer is not a “yes” or a “no”; the answer is the answer to the question: What is your priority? If we are willing to become more honest then we can even ask: Does getting to know God intimately even make it on the list of the top five priorities in our life?

(Toronto, ON; summer 2011.)