Is it officially summer? It’s good to see so many of you because summertime, I think, is when the Christians show up.  If you’re here, you’re really pressing forward with God. This is the time that we’re going to be doing some serious confronting our own hypocrisy so we can move forward.

Open your Bibles to Matthew 6.  Matthew 5, 6 and 7 are the most famous chapters about Jesus in the world. These chapters include Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  In Matthew 1, Jesus is describing who we are as people of this new community, his community, the people of the kingdom of God.  And in Matthew 5, it’s about who we are in our relationships with each other.  Matthew 6 is about who we are within ourselves.  Now the people Jesus is really confronting here are hypocrites. How many folks in the house will admit you have some hypocrisy going on within?  I’ll put up two hands.  We must admit that we, as God’s people, are probably not God’s best advertisement.  I want you to understand what Jesus is saying in Matthew 5:20. We have to understand this sermon in the context of what’s come before.  Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the leaders of the law, by no means will you enter the kingdom of God.”  In other words, in the words of REM, “You’ve got to lose your religion.”  How many of you remember the song by REM,  Lose Your Religion?  Did you recognize the band playing it at the beginning of the worship celebration?  Now the problem with religious people and the Pharisees whom Jesus is speaking to is that they tend to emphasize or focus on orthodoxy - right beliefs.  We become the judge of people having the right beliefs. If the Pharisees believed people didn’t have the right believe, they were deemed heretics, and could be killed or murdered.  That was what the crusades were all about.  Christians played the Taliban in the Crusades.  Or in Massachusetts, if you were deemed to be a heretic, you could be burned at the stake and if you didn’t have the right orthodoxy, you could rightfully be put to death.  Even Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant movement, had to hide out in a German castle for a year because the Pope, the leader of the church, put a price out on Martin Luther’s head. The Pope deemed that Martin Luther and most of the theology that Protestants hold today, was heresy. 

Now Jesus is saying, we must go beyond the religious who emphasize orthodoxy. It’s not so much about right belief as it is about right being. The word for that is orthopraxis - right being.  You’ve got to be the Gospel before other people will believe the Gospel, sisters and brothers.  Look at the metaphors Jesus is using, “You’re the salt of the earth”, the Bible says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good. You’re the light of the world.” Seeing is believing; hearing is not believing.  I tend to be a skeptic when I hear the promises of marketing folks, who promise what their products will do for me.  Their products will change my life. Take this pill, and you’ll lose weight.  Take this pill and it burns fat.  Are there any skeptics in the house? I travel a lot so when I travel, it’s with a roll bag because I don’t have time to deal with lost luggage. It’s amazing what I can put in one roll bag for a week.  Michael Pollard, who is in the front row today, travels with me and manages all our stuff on the road. He also handles all the media. We often have to dress in the morning for a conference we’re going to speak at that night, so we have to be careful not to get anything on our clothes.  During our last trip, we saw a Skyline Chili. I love Skyline Chili;  I love the three-way or the four-way with beans.  But when we speak, I leave the beans out.  So, you try to be careful while eating but then you come out into the sunlight and you see these sauce splashes on your shirt.  So Michael and I were eating and Michael gets a big, messy glob on his shirt. We don’t have any time to change until we get to the next place.  So he pulls this little thing out, it’s called a Tide Pencil or something, and it’s like magic - the spot disappeared right before my very eyes!  I said, “I need one of those.”  That’s called viral marketing - seeing is believing. That’s what God’s whole plan for this community of people will be. It’s called viral evangelism.  Seeing is believing.

In Matthew 5, it’s about how people will see us in our relationships.  Some people look at Carolyn and me, we’ve been married 38 years, and they ask, “How did you make it work with him?” Jesus, right?  We all have the same problems and the same struggles as everyone else but they look at our relationship and say we’re normal. What’s the secret?  It’s called viral evangelism.  Now a lot of times people will ask, “Are you religious?” No, I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.  Problem is, most people who say that don’t understand what they mean.  But that’s exactly what Jesus is saying, you’ve got to lose the religion and become truly spiritual. 

Let’s begin in Matthew 6:1 to learn about who we are to become.  Jesus is really getting into the nature of true faith.  “Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness in front of other people, to be seen by them.  If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”  In other words, we do it with some kind of external motivation.  We do it because it’s the expectation. Like when you start dating someone that goes to church, you go to church with them.  As soon as you get married, you quit going to church.  You know how that works. You do it to please your spouse; you do it to please your parents.  There’s some external motivation. Jesus continues, “So when you give to the needy, don’t announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others.  Truly, I tell you, they’ve received their reward in full.”  In other words, don’t expect anything from God for what you have done because you’ve already received everything you’re going to receive.  Jesus says, “But when you give to the needy, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving may be in secret.  Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” 

Now as we read through this chapter, we see the true nature of faith.  Jesus begins here with the work of faith, giving to the needy, the broken or the poor. There’s many other kinds of poverties besides economic poverty.  Next week we will move into the heart of faith, which is prayer. The following week we’ll move into the discipline of faith, where Jesus uses the example of fasting.  But what he’s getting at, what he’s attacking and confronting in Matthew 6:2, is our hypocrisy.  There is hypocrisy in all of us. Hypocrisy in Greek means actor.  In other words, playing a part on a stage, impersonating somebody, playing the part of somebody else, kind of like a Las Vegas impersonator.  How many people have tried to make a living impersonating Elvis Presley? That’s exactly what a hypocrite is, pretending to be someone on the outside that you’re not on the inside.  What Jesus is getting into in Matthew 6 is the root of faith.  Now what is so sobering here is the assumption he makes, because he says our righteousness has to exceed that of religious people.  The assumption he makes is that religious people are already giving to the poor.  He didn’t say, “If you give.” he said, “When you give.”

When we get to Matthew 6:5 next week, it says religious people are already praying. Not if you pray, but when you pray. No matter where they were, religious people were praying five times a day.  And then when we get to the sixteenth verse we’ll read that religious people are already practicing the discipline of fasting. Not if you fast, but when you fast.  Is this not sobering to you since Jesus says our righteousness must surpass what these religious people are already doing?  All religious people understood that if you had a relationship with God, you had to be responsible for the poor.  There are over 2,000 verses in the Bible that deal with our responsibility to the poor.  But Jesus is also saying that we should not be doing these deeds of service before other people. In Matthew 5:16 he says, “Let your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and as a result of seeing your good deeds, they are going to glorify your Father because of it.”  So what he’s saying is that people paid attention to what you did with the poor. 

Last year, a production company came in from California and did a live broadcast to churches around North America about your work in Darfur. PBS came twice this year and did a national program on your work in Darfur. Two weeks ago, Duke University wrote an article on you and what you’re doing in Darfur for their online magazine. That’s called viral evangelism - when people see you but they don’t give you a certificate for what you did.  They look at you and see the presence of God’s love on planet earth.  You become a mirror of what God’s doing, a reflection of God’s heart in the world.   Jesus is talking about getting into something deeper here and that we need to go beyond what religious people are doing.  Religious people are already giving to the poor.  Go to Acts 4:32  Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God sent the Holy Spirit to earth.  Jesus said to his disciples, “It’s to your advantage I go away.  If I go away, the Father will send a helper.”  Up until this time, religious people understood what they were suppose to do in the world out of their own energy and efforts, and they tried to make a commitment to do it.  Now through the Holy Spirit, through this new community, this kingdom of Jesus Christ on planet earth, we won’t be acting out of our own efforts.  We will literally be empowered by the Holy Spirit to embody the character of God on this planet.  So they will not see our love, they will experience the supernatural love of God.  We have a description of this community in Act 4:32, “All of the believers were one in heart and mind.”  It didn’t mean they were all Republicans or all Democrats.  They disagreed on those little non-important, non-eternal kinds of things, but they were together on God’s purpose.  Verse 32 continues, “No one claimed that any of their possessions were their own but they shared everything they had.”  When you’re born again, born of the Spirit, all of a sudden you have a new understanding about your stuff.  My stuff is not my stuff, and it’s not the government’s stuff. Its God’s stuff.  I’m not an owner of my stuff; I’m a steward of the stuff to serve God’s purpose in the world.  Because the community has this understanding and they’re sharing their resources, it shows that caring is “compassion with feet.”  When they’re sharing their resources with everyone in need, we see viral evangelism.  Continuing in verse 32, “With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.”  Why? Because seeing is believing, sisters and brothers.  Now we go on, “God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all.” No longer is it religion with me doing my best to do what God wants me to do; it’s the gift of God’s Spirit working in me just like with Jesus.  This is why Jesus said, “The things I do, you will do and even greater things.  For there were no needy persons among them.  From time-to-time, those who owned land or houses sold them and brought in the money from the sales.”  The Bible doesn’t say they sold all of their stuff.  The apostles understood the management of their resources, and they had more than they needed so they sold stuff to meet other people’s needs.  In Acts 4:36 there is an example of one of the brothers, Joseph, who says he sold a field that he owned, brought the money in and put it at the apostle’s feet.  Again he didn’t sell everything he owned.  He took one of his assets, and he used it for God’s purpose to serve a need. 

Because the Spirit is in our life, we have to be born again to be this way; we have to to grow.  A lot of people think they’re born again, but they remain spiritual infants all of their life.  They never commit themselves to growing.  It’s all of a sudden; I became committed to the concerns of God’s heart.  It’s not an external force.  It’s not the government who comes along and tells us, “We’re going to take this much of your money and use it to serve these kinds of purposes.”  It’s internally motivated.  No one forces us; this is what makes it the miracle of God.  This is the difference between Communism and the New Community of God’s people.  Communism is when money or things are taken from me, and the New Community of the Spirit is when it’s an internally motivated desire to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the world.  We see the contrast in Acts 5 with another couple who were members of this New Community, Ananias and Sapphira.  “Now Ananias together with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property.”  It didn’t say they sold everything that they had.  They sold some of their assets.  “With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.”  Now this was his asset, you know, to be the manager of as God intended.  God didn’t tell him he had to sell it.  With religion you’re forced to, you’re mandated to.  But with the new birth of the Spirit, you are internally motivated; it comes from your heart.  Ananias is giving the appearance that he’s like everyone else.  He’s being religious. He wants to appear like he has the compassion, sacrificial love of everyone else, so he acts as if he brings everything from the sale to give.  Peter said,  “Ananias, how is it that Satan so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and you have kept for yourself some of the money you have received for the land?  Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold?  And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal?”  In other words, no one can make you do this.  You didn’t have to do this.  You were impersonating; you were acting a part of someone that you’re not. Peter continues, “What made you think of doing such a thing?  You have not lied just to human beings, but to God.”  What we see here is a contrast between religion and a relationship.  People who have a relationship with God don’t do it because they have to.  They do it out of devotion.  They do it out of the love for God.  The word says the love of God compels us.  It’s like being in the seventh year now of working in Sudan.  You know you will hear it big in the fall.  For three months here at Ginghamsburg we really emphasize our work in Sudan.  But I’m out there doing it every week. 

When you start something new, like when we started Fort McKinley and we offered the free breakfast, it was easy to get down there and cook breakfast at 6:30 in the morning. When we saw all these people come in, it was so uplifting. But after a year and a half it gets a little old, getting up at 6:30 in the morning.  The newness of something wears off.  You can only continue to do it through the Holy Spirit.  You can only do it when the love of God continues to compel us forward.  It’s only when we align our lives around the matters of God’s heart and your relationship with God that you do it out of desire.  Religion is when you do it out of duty, when you do because you have to.  Here’s an example: how many parents in the house?  Ok, you know exactly what I mean; you work all week, you come home, you’re tired and someone calls you and says they need you to be an assistant coach to help out with your daughter’s or your son’s little league team.  Here’s what it looks like when they’re young; two nights a week for practice and two games a week.  The head coach that I worked with for years from the time our kids were in tee-ball, would always want to have a picnic once a year for the kids. So, we would have to haul one of the grills with a propane tank up to the Tipp City Park. I had to clean out the back of my car. Since the grill is heavy to lift in and out, I scratched my car and had to spend $150.00 for a paint job to fix the car.  I used to pitch to my son for hours; I did it all the way through college for him.  I remember one time; he said to me, “Dad, I’m kind of in a slump.” So, Carolyn and I drove nine hours to Philadelphia, and I pitched to him. It was snowing, so for two hours I pitched to him under the  expressway in Philadelphia.  Jonathan graduated from college six years ago, and my shoulder hurt up until two months ago.  How many parents can relate to this?  Driving to Philadelphia for nine hours, and pitching for two hours; what was the motivation?  Love!  It was desire. 

Let me give you a different scenario.   We may need somebody to show up at 6:30 every Sunday morning at the Fort to help cook breakfast. Or, on Monday night we need people to help at the food pantry, and with Gateway Community.  “I do not have time, I’m too tired.”  What’s the difference?  What’s the difference between those two motivations?  “God please, I don’t want to but if I have to, okay, I guess I’ll do it as an example for the children.”  “Honey, can’t we just give the church one week? One week is all I ask.”  “Oh Jesus, if I have to Lord Jesus.”  What did Jesus say the greatest commandment is? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength.”  Jesus said, “You’ve got to get beyond this religion of have to, of duty and get to that place where it comes out of love; out of devotion, out of want to, or I don’t need it.  I don’t need it, nor does God see it.”  Can I be honest?  Can we talk here?  I don’t want you to start throwing Bibles at me.  I’m not all the way there yet.  There are times that I still do things for God out of gut devotion and duty.  So here’s what I do;  fake it until you make it!  I am not talking about lying like Ananias and Sapphira, we have to be honest.  I need your help, prayers and support; but I’ll tell you what, for me, I’m just going to keep faking it until I make it. I’m going to fake it until I make it all the way to heaven and all the way to eternity, sisters and brothers.  Here’s what it comes down to, just keep doing what’s right until your heart follows.  Don’t wait until you feel like it.  Fake it until you make it. 

One of the practical steps for me of how this works is to respond to a need.  Just find a need and fill it.  There are four trips left to the Gulf Coast by the end of this year.  The next one is in August.  How many of you have been to the Gulf and worked?  There are four trips left.  All the FEMA money will be  gone at the end of this year, so all of the churches are trying to get as much done as they can by the end of the year.  Then we’ve got to pray and figure out what comes next because there is still so much work to be done there.  But just find a need and fill it. 

The second thing is make a commitment to community.  When we get into prayer next week; Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father.”  You’re never going to make it in this Christian life if you try to do “My Father” and make it all about you.  I’ve got to be connected to community.  I need you.  I need to see the practical working out of faith in your life.  You wouldn’t believe how you all keep me going, how that inspires me.  It’s in community that God’s bigger purpose for my life is clarified.  Kim Miller is not sitting there right now, but Kim, came to this church 17 years ago and just sat and worshiped. I say this with the highest respect for Kim.  Kim has a high school diploma; she was a seamstress and a licensed practical nurse.  She came forward at that time and asked our music director,  “What can I do to help?”  The music director said, “Well, Kim, here is what we really need, we need someone to help out with children’s music” and Kim got involved. See what happens when you connect and commit, find a need and fill it and connect to community? What is more amazing is that Kim discovered her greater God purpose.  Kim became the Creative Director at Ginghamsburg.  Kim organizes the team that comes up with all of this creative art work.  Guess how much this cost?  Nothing!  Kim calls it mud and spit.  You know how Jesus healed the man, the blind man with mud and spit?  She said the only thing we spent money on for this worship decoration was the candles.  Kim has people doing iron work and all of this other kind of stuff.  She wrote a book called Redesigning Worship, and people from all around the world buy her book. She was recently in New York doing a conference. How did she do it?  Found a need and filled it. Connected to community and the greater purpose of God. 

Here is the third thing we have to do and that is fake it until we make it.  Just keep doing what’s right until your heart follows.  It is exactly what Jesus means when he says “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”  Keep remembering that you’re playing before an audience of one.  You’re living your life every day before an audience of the One and that’s who you’re playing to.  Amen

Will you bow your head with me?  I want you to pray for the person on your right and left.  Just take a glance at them, and pray for the person on your right and left.  Father God, bless them, bless them, bless them.  Free them, free them, free them.  Empower them, empower them, empower them to be all that God has created them to be.  We pray this in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and all of God’s people said.  AMEN