Are you Praising on Sunday only to Poison on Monday??

    My wife and I were talking to our daughter tonight and we got on the subject of how some people in a church can treat others one way in the church house and then see them outside of church, and its like they don't have a clue who you are, so basically we got on the subject of hyprocisy. She got what I was saying to her about how treating people two different ways for appearances is wrong. We talked about clicks and how that can cause individuals to be hurt in a lot of different ways, and I believe she got it and understood it was wrong. 
   But while talking to her I began to wonder, why is it that we as children of God have such a hard time with such a simple concept like treating everyone as we want to be treated , but more than that, why we have such a hard time treating each other the way Christ wants us to treat each other.    
In Matthew 23:27-28 Jesus said " Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites! for ye are like unto, whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full if dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men,but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity."Now Jesus was talking to the religious leaders of his time, but I believe his message here is one for all of us to take to heart. Hypocrisy is the act of pretending to have beliefs, opinions, virtues, feelings, qualities, or standards that one does not actually have. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie.Now we all know that a lie,no matter how big or how small, is a sin, and we all know that "The wages of sin is death" (Rom 6:23).  
      I remember a song my grandmother played me many years ago by one of Country Music's favorite Outlaw singers of the 70's, Johnny Paycheck. In it he tells a story about how he is Dallas for a show on Saturday night and then on Sunday with a little time on his hands he decided he was going to go to church and commune with God and his people. Well he tells of finding this really big church, and the denomination doesn't really matter, and he could hear the singing going on so he decided he was going to go in. Now I don't remember the words to the whole song but I know he went into the church and didn't get to far in and he was met with opposition to the way he was dressed, his long hair and just his looks in general. Well he could see the choir and some of the people in it and guess what, a lot of those people who were looking down on him , asking or telling him to leave, and some of the ones praising God in the choir, were the very same ones who the night before were at his show drinking, and cussing and raising 9 tons of trouble because of the alcohol induced antics. So he went outside and sits down and talks to God about it asking how can this really be what your people are all about. This song is called the outlaws prayer and it has stuck with me all these years, maybe for this very reason. But think about it, how many of the "Church" will say one thing on Sunday morning and do a totally different thing the rest of the week. You may not drink but do you ignore your brother or sister on Monday that you stood beside on Sunday and told them how glad you were to see them. Do you stand in the choir loft on Sunday singing his praises , only to sing the worlds glory on Monday? Do you listen to the prayer requests, spoken in earnest for the church to pray over , only to call each other on Monday and say did you hear what they asked for. Are you Praising on Sunday just to Poison on Monday?? Brothers and Sisters I ask you to take a look into your own lives ,as does Jesus commands in Matt 7:4-5 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam [is] in thine own eye?Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.    Let us start a Revival in our churches, and let that Revival start in our own homes and our own lives by self examining how we act, and how we treat our fellow Brothers and Sisters in Christ.Then and only the can we have a true Revival in our Churches.

   May God Bless you and may you keep Him close in all you do.

Bill