The Men of Iron Minute

by Chad Zueck | Director of Content Creation

Shiny Happy People

You know the type! They are well dressed, well-spoken, and often charismatic. They thrive on being “on” and in control. Their appearance is their armor. Though they appear to be all put together, not everything is as it seems. These types have all the answers to the questions. Borderline know it all! The answers are dignified and dogmatic, leaving little room for alternative opinions or beliefs. The “my way or the highway” approach draws the weak and resists the strong. Their stubbornness looks like resolve to hold to the truth. The distance between them and others is smoke and mirrors. They’ve abandoned the faith but with a veneer of religiousness. They are sick. Faithful men of God grieve their lostness, and uninformed men of God admire them. They’re slick religious salesmen. They are selling a rules-based belief system that doesn’t know grace. These men may have been close to faith but have spiritual amnesia. Their type occupies every faith community, and their behavior is that of a Pharisee.

Jesus had many conversations with these hucksters, and with the brilliance of his verbal jiu-jitsu, Jesus left them tapping out to the Truth. In Matthew 23, Jesus had a sorrowful and pointed conversation with these Shiny Happy People (i.e., the Pharisees), calling them hypocrites while tearing down their false religious practices. The Greek word hypocrite came to mean an actor in the worse sense of the term, a pretender, one who acts a part, one who wears a mask to cover true feelings, one who puts on an external show while inwardly having thoughts and feelings of a very different kind.^[1] Jesus calls them sons of hell, blind guides, fools, robbers, self-indulgent, whitewashed tombs, full of hypocrisy and lawlessness, serpents, vipers, and persecutors and murderers of God’s people. Jesus didn’t play around.

By their priorities, their example, and their hatred of those who display simple faith, the Pharisees prevented people from getting to God. What made them hypocrites wasn’t that they had sinned, and what made them hypocrites is that they sinned and acted as if they hadn’t.

Most men don’t set out to become Shiny Happy People. They drift there after prolonged droughts of confession and repentance. Their pride forms spiritual cataracts that only heart surgery can remove. Take it all to God. He cares, and he wants to be your treasure.[2]

Be authentic.

Be repentant.  

Be a better man.

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