“One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched” (Luke 14:1). 
I was thinking yesterday (I know, always a dangerous thing to do when one is leading worship)...maybe we give the Pharisees in the Gospels such a bad image because we’re afraid we’re too much like them. Is that a shocking or unthinkable thought? Let me explain. Jesus never once criticizes the Pharisees for the things they believe. In fact, he once commended them on their belief (see Matthew 23:3). In this passage in Luke 14, Jesus even goes to eat at the home of a Pharisee; he didn’t necessarily mind hanging out with them from time to time. What Jesus criticized the Pharisees for was the emptiness of their faith. What they believed didn’t necessarily or maybe even usually get lived out. Their belief failed to translate into action—at least the sort of action God wanted out of them. They spent more time worrying about the rules than living out the faith. What upset Jesus when it came to the Pharisees is that their actions didn’t always match their words. They were, very often, acting their faith.
And that’s the thought that struck me yesterday morning. How often are we guilty of the same thing? We think more about the rules: how you look, what you wear, what you say, or how you behave when you come to worship. More than that, we come to worship, dress up (to some degree), put on a smile, sing pretty songs and shake a lot of hands without ever realizing or caring how many of us are broken and hurting inside. Some of us simply don’t want to be there. (Would it surprise you to know that there are days even pastors don’t want to be in worship?) We act, we pretend, we put on a mask and we go to church and everyone assumes everything is okay. Some of us don’t even believe what we say we do or what we hear from the songs, prayers and pulpit. And many more of us, even if we do believe it, fail to translate what we hear into any sort of action or response. We have even convinced ourselves that as long as we think and believe the right things, we don’t have to go any further. “Faith is private,” we say. So we act the way we think Christians are supposed to act, as long as others are watching us. We put on a show. And when we do that, we out-Pharisee the Pharisees.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, taught that there was no holiness but social holiness—in other words, there is no way to please God aside from getting our hands dirty and allowing our faith to be lived out. Heart and hands—living out what we believe because, as I’ve been known to say over and over again, we really only believe what we live out. We can think things all day, we can even tell others what to believe, but until we live it out, this faith hasn’t really captured our hearts and lives.
What if our hearts and our hands lined up? What if our belief was lived out? What if we rejected the way of the Pharisee and chose instead the way of the disciple? The church might just change the world if that could happen.