All Christians are hypocrites. Don’t get mad at me. Kenny’s been saying it for weeks. And he’s right. Look it up.

Hypocrite: a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings (Webster).

That’s us. The Bible says we should be like Christ, and none of us are. At least not all the time. Sure, we are like Him when we forgive somebody or help someone in need. But anybody can be like Christ once in a while. Nobody can do it all the time. And the Bible even says that too, so thinking that we can only contradicts a different stated belief. It’s a real catch 22.

As Christians, we’re like those little kids from the 80s and 90s singing that they wanted to be like Michael Jordan, except we want to be like Jesus. None of them actually were either, but nobody called them hypocrites.

But there is another definition from Webster: a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion.

One of my regular sins is judging people who fit that description, which is ironically, yep, hypocritical. Jesus was pretty hard on this kind of hypocrisy though, so I guess I thought it was OK for me to judge them. But He didn’t confront them because their sin was worse than mine. I think He opposed them more because they were misguiding the people who were seeking Him.

Non-believers by definition don’t know Jesus. They may have heard the story, but they don’t know Him. We are the only tangible thing they have to see who He really is. They assume how we treat them is how He will treat them, since we are like Him and all.

When we judge the sins of others and ignore our own, we lead the outside world to think that you have to be perfect or God is out of reach, just like the Pharisees. And just like they did, we stand in the way of the ones looking for the same peace, joy and love that He gives us. Despite our hypocrisy.