In this video, Clint Loveall and Michael Gewecke discuss the Gospel of Luke, specifically focusing on Chapter 12. They explore the theme of hypocrisy and the danger of hiding behind masks. They emphasize the need for Christians to examine their own hearts and live authentically in the light of Christ’s teachings. This thought-provoking conversation challenges believers to confront their own tendencies towards hypocrisy and embrace genuine faith. Join Clint and Michael in this insightful discussion as they delve into the profound message of this passage.
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Transcript
00:00:01:08 – 00:00:33:10
Clint Loveall
Hey, thanks for joining us on a monday. As we continue through the Gospel of Luke, We are in the 12th chapter, starting the 12th chapter. And I think not that the 11th chapter didn’t have some great stuff in it, but it also had some challenging stuff. And that will be somewhat true in this chapter too. But I think some of the material in this next chapter is going to feel a little more devotional, a little less out there in some cases, maybe probably no less challenging, though, in some of this.
00:00:33:10 – 00:01:00:31
Clint Loveall
So let’s jump in and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about a little bit. Verse one of chapter 12. Meanwhile, when the crowd gathered by the thousands so that they trampled on one another, he began to speak first to the disciples, Beware the yeast of the Pharisees. That is their hypocrisy. Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered and nothing secret that won’t become known.
00:01:00:36 – 00:01:30:42
Clint Loveall
Therefore, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light. Whatever you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the house tops. So this is an interesting scene because we’re told that there are so many people that they’re beginning to step over one another. It’s just crowd one another. And yet in the midst of that chaos, Jesus has this almost intimate word with the disciples.
00:01:30:47 – 00:01:59:53
Clint Loveall
And and we are just coming off as we closed Chapter 11. We’re just closing, just coming off a section in which Jesus has had very strong language for the hypocrisy of the religious people of his day. And here he summarizes that, warning his disciples of their hypocrisy, the yeast. And again, Jesus uses that as a sign of something that raises the dough that spreads.
00:01:59:58 – 00:02:48:25
Clint Loveall
And then he has these really interesting words. Michael Nothing covered that won’t be uncovered, nothing secret. There won’t be known. If you said it in the dark, it will come to light. And if you whispered it behind closed doors, it will be proclaimed from the house stops. And that is that is a challenging, maybe even frightening word. The idea here, again, that that what Jesus does, what Jesus envisions, is a kind of faith that strips us to our core and sees behind all of our masks and all of our barriers and all of our walls and goes to the heart, goes to the true condition of who we are and the true evidence of what
00:02:48:25 – 00:03:02:55
Clint Loveall
we say and do. And this is one of those passages, you know, you can kind of just hear this as a word to the disciples, but if you really stop and listen to this, I think this is a this is a sobering kind of text.
00:03:03:00 – 00:03:26:45
Michael Gewecke
Well, it’s especially sobering in the sense that we know what is come before it and that this language has been used as a attack against those people who we would understand to be Jesus’s enemies. I mean, the place that we left the texts last time that we were studying together was indeed this word about the hostility of the Pharisees and the scribes.
00:03:26:45 – 00:04:07:48
Michael Gewecke
That verse 53, they began to be very hostile toward him, to cross-examining him, lying in wait. So when we turned forward and we move into Chapter 12 and we now see this as a teaching offered within the fold, this I think, should cause us to ask some questions of ourselves, because ultimately Jesus is making it very clear that it is the leaven of the Pharisees, but that that leaven can live inside the believer and that there’s a real danger that we might find ourselves in a similar circumstance in which we try to obfuscate, we try to hide, we try to build barriers that we can live behind in that, you know, we begin to live
00:04:07:48 – 00:04:35:27
Michael Gewecke
a kind of duplicitous life. And you don’t actually have to look very far in Christian history to find entire communities of Christian faith and life that does live upon this kind of two faced reality in which stuff happens in dark that would never be accepted in the light, people doing stuff who would in the light of day and in front of people, you know, say that this is sinful and shouldn’t do this and shouldn’t do this.
00:04:35:27 – 00:04:56:15
Michael Gewecke
And then at night, when they think no one’s watching, that’s exactly what they go to do. And the idea that this is not just a enemy problem, this is not just for someone outside the fence, but that this is a spiritual reality which must be measured for those within the community. This should be a sobering kind of text for Christians today.
00:04:56:15 – 00:05:04:19
Michael Gewecke
It should be devotional in the sense that this is offered as a kind of teaching to those first disciples.
00:05:04:24 – 00:05:37:34
Clint Loveall
I think the beauty of the transition here that Luke gives us is it it’s easy to look at the Pharisees, the religious leaders, the new stories of our day, the Christian history, the Christians through history, who have been guilty of it and see hypocrisy. The hardest place to see hypocrisy is in ourselves. And I think Luke gives us this moment, this kind of quiet moment with the disciples in the midst of this giant crowd.
00:05:37:39 – 00:06:04:58
Clint Loveall
Jesus has this very personal word for them. And as we listen in on it, a very personal word for us, and I don’t want to simplify this. I don’t want to minimize it or sort of make it cute, but we we all heard it growing up, Right. Don’t if you wouldn’t share it, don’t say it. If you don’t want people to know it, don’t do it.
00:06:05:09 – 00:06:35:55
Clint Loveall
Keep those to yourselves. You know, if if you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it at all. That kind of idea here and this is the deepest, most spiritual version of that to challenge the disciples then and now with the idea that there will be a day when our true motivations are known, when our true behaviors are known, it is easy to try and appear to be something.
00:06:36:00 – 00:07:04:37
Clint Loveall
It is far more difficult to actually be that something. But that’s the calling of Christ on our lives is to be that which we sometimes pretend to be. And so this warning that it’s all coming out so live accordingly. Make your decisions accordingly, make your judgments and choose your words accordingly. I think this is a this is a tremendously impactful idea.
00:07:04:42 – 00:07:07:03
Clint Loveall
If we sit with it for a while.
00:07:07:08 – 00:07:28:51
Michael Gewecke
You know, the text in many ways is a Christian primer to the theological concept of sin. And I think I make that case here because what we see happening in verse three this idea of the things that are being said in the dark will be heard in the light. The things whispered behind closed doors be proclaimed from housetop.
00:07:28:51 – 00:07:57:05
Michael Gewecke
Sin is, by its definition, an absence of goodness and absence of truth. It is darkness because of the absence of the light, and it is the nature of humanity that we are drawn towards this darkness. Because ultimately there is a kind of inherent temptation in that. But what Jesus is making clear is that the end of the day, the light exposes those dark places that we should expect that revelation.
00:07:57:19 – 00:08:21:07
Michael Gewecke
Jesus Christ himself, of course, beings the revelation of God, the revealed light of God, that the revelation will ultimately expose that brokenness within us. And so the ultimate question for the disciples is, will you be like the Pharisees and protect that part of yourself? Will you nurture the darkness? Will you live in sin and know it and then still grow that and nurture that?
00:08:21:21 – 00:08:44:09
Michael Gewecke
Or will you confess it? Will you be honest with you? Allow the light to expose that and then therefore confess and therefore find yourself in the arms of grace and forgiveness? This is in many ways a beautiful and simple telling of the salvation message. Though we might not always think of it in that way. But it’s an invitation to Christians to realize that there are real choices.
00:08:44:09 – 00:09:03:32
Michael Gewecke
Will we be like Pharisees who in this case exemplify those who keep the light of Jesus Christ from revealing that brokenness? Or will we be those who are courageous enough and humbly to let that light reveal what’s true and then to find grace on the other side?
00:09:03:39 – 00:09:34:35
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think Michael might even go so far to say not only a warning, but there’s a sense of confession here. There there is a sense in which this passage confronts us and forces us to admit that we can all be Pharisees. We all have that in us. We we all have a tendency and a temptation to to want to look better than we know ourselves to be and to try and present something which we might not always live up to.
00:09:34:42 – 00:09:56:44
Clint Loveall
And and I think that there is there is freedom in that confession, but there’s also serious responsibility in it as well and accountability. And so, yeah, not not not much not a long passage, but really powerful. I think if you listen to this one, it kind of kind of hits like a hammer.
00:09:56:49 – 00:10:29:31
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. And part of that hammer maybe is very contemporary, Clint, in the sense that that this word here hypocrisy is one of the chief complaints leveled against organized religion in our day, the idea that Christians have claimed that we should be something and then we publicly approve or publicly accept behavior or ideas or words that are radically divergent from the things that we claimed that makes this even more pressing.
00:10:29:31 – 00:10:48:52
Michael Gewecke
I think if we’re going to be honest, what it does is it calls Christians to account that instead of being fixated on focused on what others may or may not be doing right or what they may or may not be doing wrong, Christians would do very well to clean house. We would do very well to tend to the darker places of our own souls.
00:10:48:52 – 00:11:16:06
Michael Gewecke
And that’s not a comfortable call. It’s not a comfortable thing to be told that we have to be responsible for engaging in these places that we, by definition don’t want to go. But there is something about spiritual discernment. There’s something about spiritual maturity involved in that conversation. And I think we do well to not rush beyond words like this to the next words, because this is an uncomfortable section.
00:11:16:06 – 00:11:22:23
Michael Gewecke
It it’s uncomfortable because it was pointed and it because Jesus is wise and we should live in that.
00:11:22:28 – 00:11:50:24
Clint Loveall
Yet Jesus and the New Testament in general are never surprised when the world acts like the world. The word hypocrite means an act or one who plays a part. And that is no surprise to Jesus that there are people who do that. It is a disappointment. It it is even a thing that angers Jesus that Christians do it, that people of faith do it.
00:11:50:29 – 00:12:23:57
Clint Loveall
It is part of our struggle because we’re human. But Jesus is going to have harsh words for those who seek to appear to be something that they’re not genuinely trying to be. Those the words reserved for those people in Jesus, in the Gospels are almost exclusively harsh. And so this we will see this idea again. We’ll see a little bit of it in tomorrow’s passage.
00:12:24:01 – 00:12:29:49
Clint Loveall
But this is a this is, I just think, a really convicting kind of moment in the in the gospel.
00:12:29:51 – 00:13:00:45
Michael Gewecke
I’ll be very brief with this. But but your comment there, your use of the word genuine triggered for me a particular thought. So we’re just at the counter. We’re doing dishes together as a family just last night and our girls were supposed to unload the dishwasher and they started arguing with one another over the fact that the other wasn’t doing the stuff that they were supposed to do and they were keeping score and they were going back and forth at each other and they started telling each other what the other one was thinking.
00:13:00:50 – 00:13:23:55
Michael Gewecke
And I there was a moment where I said, you know, you guys don’t know what the other person is thinking as best as you think you do, you’re not in another person’s head. And I think that that we’re genuine is helpful. We are very quick to ascribe to other people. Well, you didn’t mean that or you didn’t say that on purpose or we ascribe what is or isn’t genuine to another person.
00:13:24:00 – 00:13:49:10
Michael Gewecke
This is by definition a hard text because it resists that, because it’s not about whether or not they’re genuine. It’s not about the hypocrisies. Jesus has already had a word with them that was just a few verses before this war. This for us and the genuineness of our action can only be measured between ourselves and God. And when we try to rush beyond that relationship, that’s where we get into trouble.
00:13:49:10 – 00:13:55:19
Michael Gewecke
Once we start attributing to other people. This is what’s genuine for you. I think that’s where we find ourselves in trouble.
00:13:55:24 – 00:14:11:33
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I imagine it would be a very humbling and probably direction setting practice in those moments of our life where we’re tempted to hide something, to think someday this will be out in front of everyone, right?
00:14:11:38 – 00:14:12:36
Michael Gewecke
This is going to be played.
00:14:12:50 – 00:14:19:18
Clint Loveall
That could that could that could be helpful. It would certainly be humbling.
00:14:19:22 – 00:14:38:03
Michael Gewecke
But we’re humbled to have you with us and glad that you stay with us to this point. We are thrilled. For those who are regular participants in these studies. We’ve now broken 600 subscribers on the YouTube channel and that is really amazing. We hope that you’ll continue along the journey of Luke with us. We’re certainly blessed to have you here.
00:14:38:07 – 00:14:43:07
Michael Gewecke
We look forward to seeing you next week or tomorrow. That next well and next week. But tomorrow.
00:14:43:12 – 00:14:43:55
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.