Teaching

I don't dream very often, especially not dreams that have significance. Somehow in God's plan I've been placed in the non-dreamers category. Still, I do live by the power of dreams. Not dreams as in night dreaming, but the kind of dreams this Steven Spielberg quote talks about:

"I don't dream at night, I dream all day; I dream for living."

Once in a while though I do dream at night. I know God's Spirit is trying to tell me something when:

a) In the dream itself I'm fully aware this is a dream and I am actually participating with my will and emotions in a very conscious way. If I make the wrong choices, it grieves me, even in my dream and later when awake I take this very seriously and I seek God's forgiveness, because I believe this is the way God exposes hidden sins in me, i.e. things I haven't actually done or even said, but my carnal nature is tolerating or entertaining on a subconscious level. (Please, don't expect some heavy duty shrink talk here about subconsciousness, tough!)

and

b) After I wake up I remember vividly everything about these kind of dreams and they minister to me in different ways, sometimes for years.

I've also learned that the dreams I have are very much in sync with who I am otherwise. They are never predictive for instance. I am not into predicting and am very cautious about "predicters" (sorry, but not too many are a match when it comes to the high standard the Bible lays out, even in the New Testament, which is not about predictions in general.)

But today I had a dream.

In my dream I was preparing for a meeting at which meeting I was going to speak. I had invited people and was welcoming them to the building. There were tables all around and it seemed like a banquet of some sort was about to take place.
All of a sudden I looked and there at one of the tables, among my friends was this one person. He was wearing a hat. In real life I've never seen him wear a hat, especially this type of hat. The hat was one of those men's hats from the 20s, a bit of a gangster style, like on the picture to your right. (And no, that's not the guy from my dream, so stop being curious who he was!)

The guy in my dream was smiling but I couldn't see his eyes very well, because he had the hat tipped to the front, so it was covering the top part of his face pretty well. All I could see was that he was smiling smoothly and was engaging the people at his table in a conversation.

I realized he was there to stay for the banquet. He was going to spy and probably make his little cynical comments. Immediately, this began to stir me up on the inside. I felt angry! This same guy was someone I regarded as a friend for many years. I could see us getting older together and sharing joys and sorrows through the journey of life. But at one point he chose to simply disappear! That's right. One day he stopped answering his phone, stopped answering my emails and began to avoid me. He cut me off just like that, without any explanation.

It hurt to have someone I considered a friend just fade out in a moment, without even saying a simple good-bye or letting me know what is it that I might have possibly said or done to cause him to act in this way.

I have the tendency, like most of you reading this, to seek first the blame in me. I may even go for years feeling like I could have done better. I probably could have.

But sometimes it's not about that. It's about something those of us who tend to trust people more than they deserve it, need to learn the hard way - it's called HYPOCRISY!

I don't know if there is such a thing as "hypocrite alerts" in God, but if there is we better learn how to recognize them.

Now this is the hard part - Jesus taught us to love each other. I can't see myself loving someone and yet not trusting them and being suspicious of them. Still, at the same time, John 2:23-25

Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs which He did. But Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew all men and had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man. John 2:23-25 (NKJV)

People began to "believe" in him when they saw he had powers beyond the ordinary. The word there for "believe" is pisteuo (Gr.), translated as "to have faith, to entrust, to commit." Amazingly enough, that same word is used in the next verse about Jesus. The translators used "commit" as to differentiate the believing of people in Jesus from Jesus trusting them.

But let's read it with the Greek words in mind: "Many believed in him...but Jesus didn't believe in them." This what it should say! Or, "many trusted him, but He didn't trust them."

Do you get it?

The point here is that the trust, believing and having faith was one-directional! The people seemed like they were trusting Jesus, but he didn't trust them likewise, he didn't buy their "trusting" or "having faith" in him. He knew what was the real condition of people and the fact that many, if not most, are quite superficial in their "faith" or "trusting".

Now, isn't this amazing? I think it is. Because for Jesus this was a way of life. This was not the first and only group of people who were going to shout one minute hosanna and the next - crucify him! This kind of tension between loving people and yet not trusting them would follow Jesus to the very cross. In fact, even Peter fell in the same trap and acted as a total hypocrite when it came to saving his own skin!

And through his whole time on the earth, Jesus became like man in a sense of taking the form of a man, but he was the perfect Man, the Second Adam! There was no hypocrisy in him and yet he had to live surrounded by it all the time, this double-think.

I see Jesus impressed with people like Nathaniel, in whom he said there was no guile, people who spoke straightforwardly about what they thought.

Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! John 1:47 (KJV)

The word "guile" here is a translation of dolos (Gr.): a trick (bait), wile, craft, deceit, guile, subtlety.

One of the greatest gifts I received when I came to faith in Jesus was boldness - the ability, the privilege and the freedom to speak my mind! I've lost favor with some because of it, but I've gained a lot more, again due to my commitment to being a person and a minister without "guile".

Amazingly enough, Paul the apostle, who was known to be a straight shooter himself, was actually blamed to have been a deceiver.

But in all things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses,... 2Cor. 6:4 (KJVS)

By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true; 2Cor. 6:8 (KJVS)

Yes, there will be those who won't even blink before blurting out all sorts of defaming statements and lies about a minister of the Gospel, however honest and committed to honesty this minister might have been. You can't go around explaining yourself to everyone, trying to counter every lie and slanderous story that's aimed at your good name. Sometime all you have to do is take it and know how to take it.

But what you can do (certainly what I can and will do), is to spot the hypocrites on time! Those who like to join the banquet, the fellowship of your covenant relationships, the truly select few God has joined you with. These double-faced Christians will have no qualms about infiltrating your inner circle of trust, only to later on spill their poison on everyone else in some perverse attempt to make up for the wrong they assume you caused them.

They'll benefit from you as much as they can and when they're done, they'll throw you under the bus and will be proud of it.

So in my dream I struggled for a while what to do with one of those sick, narrow-minded hypocrites who were betting their whole strategy on knowing that I'm actually a softy on the inside and I'm not at all the tough kind of guy I appear to be in the public eye. Now he was banking on what he knew from his former first-hand experience with me and he was going to take full advantage of my softyness. Or so he thought!

I walked to the table, interrupted the nice, cultural and very smooth conversation he was having with the people at the table and said to him in a stern voice: "You have no business being here. Now you will follow me so I can show you the door." There was silence in the building but everyone was at peace. I felt I had the support and the trust of all whom I had invited to come to this banquet. They respected my actions. They didn't know all the details surrounding this person and to the uninformed this might have looked too harsh of a treatment. But these were the kind of people who had made their choice already. They knew there must be a good reason for me to be doing what I'm doing.

I escorted the man to the door, opened it and he walked out embarrassed. His arrogance and true nature were now evident all over his face. He was embarrassed not because he had realized he was doing something wrong and he was in a bad state of mind. He was only embarrassed because he got caught!

It felt good to come back to the banquet. Peace had returned and now something new was about to be unveiled. I had to have the right people in the right places first before I was going to talk about the place we were going to go to together in God!

So here's my challenge to you today:

* Do you know how to love and yet not to commit to people?
* Do you know how not to be naive when it comes to people's selfish motives and agendas?
* Do you know how to protect from hypocrites the spiritual environment and true Kingdom relationships God has blessed you with?
* Do you know how to stand up for what's right and risk being labeled "over the top" when all you're trying to do is the right thing?

Beware, there might be a hypocrite alert going off in the spirit right now and you might not be noticing it, all because of our wrong interpretation of what God's love is all about and our insane, un-Biblical obsession with being "nice" to everyone, when the word is not even in the Bible.

Creative Commons License
Hypocrite alert by George Bakalov is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at gohbn.com.
George P. Bakalov