The fear or the awesomeness of saying to God, your consolations in verses 6 and 7 are not as reassuring to me as the safety I can procure for myself by hypocrisy.

Therefore I will choose to deny the Savior.

That's fearful.

That should be feared.

We should fear to put ourselves in that position.

Fear what God's reaction to unbelief would be.

Our current series is following Jesus in a divided world.

I'm Dan Kruver.

In this episode of Light and Truth,

the division that John Piper addresses from Luke 12 versus 1 to 12 is the divided

self, which we call hypocrisy. And as we'll see, the antidote to hypocrisy is fearing God alone.

This message was originally delivered at Bethlehem Baptist Church on Sunday evening, February

6, 1983.

Now, I have some questions, and we'll deal with this first paragraph first.

Why is hypocrisy called leaven?

The leaven of the Pharisees.

Do you think of any reason why Jesus should designate this characteristic of the Pharisees as leaven? Yeast. One of the characteristics of leaven is that it spreads. If you put a little yeast in dough,

it spreads out and takes over the whole dough. So the implication would be what? How do you apply that?

Where does it spread? From where to where?

Spreads throughout the whole of a person's life. Maybe it starts with your sex life and you don't tell anybody about those thoughts that you

have. Then it goes to your finances maybe. You don't tell anybody that you didn't report those

honorariums. And then it goes to your church life and you don't tell anybody about the feelings you have, et cetera,

...