So I'm coming to the end of my little blog series on the dangers of hypocrisy.  And today I'd like to address the fifth and final major area of our lives in which hypocrisy likes to roost:  our attitudes toward knowledge.  For us, "Knowledge" could be educational systems or simply life-experience.  Whatever the criteria, we seem to naturally elevate or put down other people based on their level of knowledge.

This was certainly the case with the Pharisees, back in Jesus' time.  In fact, the main “commodity” that separated the religious teachers from the rest of the people was education.  Religious leaders in that time period simply spent more time reading and studying the Hebrew Scriptures than anyone else.  Thus, they were literate, while most of the population was not.  Unfortunately, they didn’t use their knowledge to help other people, but actually to reinforce their class system.  Jesus noticed this and called them out on it:  "What sorrow awaits you experts in religious law! For you remove the key to knowledge from the people. You don’t enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from entering" (Luke 11:52).

These days, there's a classic debate about what "qualifies" someone for ministry.  It just so happens that I had a conversation about this in Berlin about a month ago, together with some other pastors from around Europe.  Historically, our association of churches (Great Commission Churches) has not emphasized formal education (i.e. seminary training and theological degrees), saying that diplomas aren’t always the best criteria for determining who’s prepared to lead a church.  I’ve always kind of agreed with that.  But along the way, there’s become a different, subtle, “knowledge” filter where your ability to teach others comes from life experience.  One regional conference recently boasted that no one was permitted to take the stage and teach at that conference unless they had been leading a Great Commission Church for at least 30 years.  And while, again, there’s some wisdom in this -- and I can kind of go along with it --  it also started to dawn on us, as we were talking, that we’ve developed our own special filter to determine who’s “qualified” and who’s not.  And to be completely honest, I don’t think that filter is the same as God’s.  Even while trying to be vigilant about knowledge-based hypocrisy, we had simultaneously allowed a subtle sort hypocrisy to creep in.  Scary how that can happen, isn't it?

It really comes down to the Holy Spirit.  Not education, not experience:  simply the Holy Spirit.  Jesus explained that the antidote to hypocrisy in the area of knowledge is to rely on the Holy Spirit and not on any conventional wisdom or education.  In Luke 12:11-12, Jesus told his disciples, "When you are brought to trial in the synagogues and before rulers and authorities, don’t worry about how to defend yourself or what to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what needs to be said."  This is really cool.  It says that our most advanced systems of knowledge and learning are far inferior to the wisdom that the Holy Spirit gives.  And what Jesus said here actually came true in Acts 4.  Peter and John were put on trial, before the Jewish Sanhedrin, and Peter gave an impassioned speech, with the Scriptures specifically noting that he was filled with the Holy Spirit.  And in Acts 4:13, it says, “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus.”  The most important thing for us is to stick close to Jesus, and let him teach us through the Holy Spirit.

The more we can do this, the less we'll be susceptible to knowledge-based hypocrisy.  Like rooting out hypocrisy in any of the other four major areas of our lives, it's not always easy.  But it's definitely worthwhile.