Sweet Exteriors (Friday Devotional)

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

- Matthew 23:27-28

When Matsy Flores brought the cake out, it was supposed to be a moment of celebration. After all, her daughter had just graduated from high school, and all their family and friends had come to the house to celebrate the accomplishment. It was a great day all the way around.

Then she cut into the cake. While at first glance everything had appeared to be on the up and up, the crackling sound the cake made when the knife descended into the icing told a different story. That’s because the Houston-area Wal-Mart they’d ordered the cake from hadn’t given them a custom vanilla cake. They’d given them a block of Styrofoam with icing on top.

During Jesus’s life and ministry, there was a group who were spiritually a lot like that cake—attractive on the outside, but ultimately phony. The scribes and the Pharisees, who often clashed with Jesus, knew the intricacies of God’s Law better than anyone, yet somehow managed to miss its point. Disguised as teachers of righteousness, in reality they were peddlers of self-righteousness, hypocrites more concerned with their reputations than their souls.

Those scribes and Pharisees are long gone, but their brand of faith lives on today. Sadly, many Christians are more concerned with the appearance of virtue than with authentic discipleship. They listen to the ‘right’ music, they read the ‘right’ books, they vote the ‘right’ way, but these choices are simply masks for who they are when no one’s looking.

Jesus made clear that he wasn’t looking for followers with spotless reputations—he wants redeemed sinners, not false saints, because being his disciple isn’t a matter of conforming to the image of whatever people say a Christian should look like, it’s about conforming to the image of Christ himself. Simply put, Jesus isn’t looking for Styrofoam Christians, no matter how nice they look. For it’s beneath the sweet exterior that God sees what we’re really made of.