Hey, welcome today to all of our life churches and our family at Open Network Churches all over church online. We love you guys.

You're a part of our family and we're honored to have you with us. If you're new with us, we're in a message series called Relational Vampires.

What does a vampire do? A vampire sucks your blood and we're talking about as followers of Christ, how do we love the people that suck the life out of us?

Today, I want to talk about a particular type of person that we love, God loves, but they can be really difficult to deal with, especially for those of us who are followers of Christ.

I want to talk about how we love and treat people who are hypocrites. I want to show of hands in all of our different churches. I wonder how many of you know a hypocrite, raise your hand, raise them up, put them down.

How many of you are sitting by the hypocrite? Do not raise your hand. Do not raise your hand right now at all. Just pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about.

The number one complaint from non-Christians about Christians, what do you think it is? They're all a bunch of hypocrites.

This is a theme that we talked about a few months ago in the message series, what would Jesus undo? I don't want to repeat what we talked about there, but I do want to build a foundation and then we're going to hit it from another angle.

Where does the word hypocrite come from? This is actually a word that was used even before the birth of Jesus in Greek theaters, and what the word, whoopal cradis means, it means a stage actor, or it means one who wears a mask.

It's a person who on the outside portrays one thing, but inwardly they're not living the life that they're portraying outwardly. Jesus had no tolerance for hypocrisy.

In fact, if you read in Matthew's Gospel, Matthew 23, again and again, he hammers on it seven times, he says, whoa to the hypocrite, whoa to the hypocrite, whoa to the hypocrite.

And then he says this about their outward lifestyle. He says in verse 28, outwardly, you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

How do you deal with the hypocrites in your life? You all have seen them. It may be your buddy at life group who comes in, acts all normal, eats the chips and dips, prays at the end of the time, and everyone there knows.

He's cheating on his wife, and act like it's really no big deal at all. It could be the Christian kid at school. The kid comes to switch on Wednesday nights, lift up, lift his hands up to praise Jesus, and then parties on the weekend and cheats on the test during the week.

It could be your boss who proclaims Christ with his or her lips. But then he treats his employees horribly and leaves the business with no integrity at all, and everybody seems to know it.

What is your role in a situation like that? Do we have a role or should we just stand back and be prayerful? How do we respond? What do we do?

How do we love those who proclaim one thing, but inwardly they're living something way, way different? What I want to do is build a foundation, and then we're going to talk about how we love them.

The first question I want to try to answer is this, why are they acting like that? If they're portraying one thing and they're living something else, we want to try to discern why, because why they are helps determine what we do.

Let me say it again, why they are acting that way helps determine what we do as followers of Christ. Why are they acting like this? It could be one of several reasons, let me give them to you.

Number one, maybe they don't really know God. Maybe instead of being a hypocrite, they've just never been spiritually born anew. In fact, first John 2.4 says this,

whoever says I know God, but does not do what he commands is a liar, the truth is not in that person. In other words, just because they go to church, just because they claim to be a Christian, just because they think that they are, doesn't mean that spiritually they've ever been made anew. Maybe they just really genuinely haven't been transformed by the grace of Jesus.

In fact, it was Jesus who said this, he said not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter into my kingdom. Only those who do the will of God, just because they claim Christ, doesn't mean they've been transformed by him.

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