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Mosaic Study Guide

24 January 2010
Teaching Series: Christians Behaving Badly
Teaching One: Christians are Hypocritical and Intolerant
Texts: Luke 15.1,2; Matt. 7.3-5

Matthew 7.3-5
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

Luke 15.1,2
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
        
The Dark Side
We resist labels at Mosaic because we think them divisive and harmful. 

Lumped Together
These  tolerant and thoughtful persons don’t seem to understand that within Christendom there is a growing movement of people who love God and people and want only to live their faith in this world in the most beautiful way possible for the benefit and blessing of everyone. 

I Love the Church
Now I want to be clear.   I do love the church.  And I am not going to spend four weeks beating up on the church. . . .  Some people, quite frankly, use their bad experience as convenient proof that the Way of Christ is for phonies, when it is their own brokenness and darkness that motivates their resistance to Jesus. 

Listening to the Critique’s Voice
“Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, antichoice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe” (UnChristian, 26).

The Big Three:
Christians are antihomosexual.
Christians are judgmental.
Christians are hypocritical.

This is what a new generation really thinks about Christianity. In short Christians have become famous (infamous) for what they oppose rather than what they are for. 

Christians Are Hypocritical
Most often Jesus used the word hypocrite to describe the Pharisees, the bad boys of the New Testament.

The Pharisees
Everyone is tempted to fake it and needs to become real. 
Jesus invites us to face the truth about everything. 
“Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort” (Fred Rogers). 
Christ-followers are grace junkies. 

The Big Three:
Love, Humility and Authenticity

Tolerance and the Way of Jesus
Tolerance is to love, as a grain of sand is to a desert.  Love overwhelms tolerance.