Is the church full of hypocrites?  Absolutely!  Go to any church and you’ll find liars, adulterers and a list of sins so long I won’t even try to name them all.  Being a Christian does not mean never having sinned.  In fact, it means the opposite: it means knowing that everyone needs remission of sins. To be clear, remission is the act of deliverance from sin.   By definition, a Christian is one delivered from sin.  Because of this, all Christians are sinners, but they have been redeemed.

Being redeemed does not mean that Christians do not struggle with temptation to sin again.  Jesus told us not to puff up our chest and dare the devil to give us his best temptation. He said to ask that God deliver us from temptation.  Christians do struggle with sin, and this includes hypocrisy.

When someone asks, “is the Church full of hypocrites,” I sometimes wonder if they are actually asking if the people in the church are hypocrites BECAUSE they are Christians.  Of course not!  Hypocrisy is found among atheists, Buddhists, communists.  In short, it is a flaw in the human character. When critics point out there are hypocrites in church, it is kind of like the old joke where someone yells, “we’re all gonna die!” in a manner that insinuates something terrible is about to happen, when they are actually just saying that death is a certainty for everyone.  Christians are not hypocrites because they are Christians, they are imperfect people who acknowledge their imperfection.

Can you name any group as large as Christians, according to NPR around 2.2 billion, that does not have members involved in all of the above mentioned sins?   Perhaps rather than ask if this group or that group sins, we should ask what do men need because of their sins?

What do you think?