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Today's Devotional

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! —Matthew 23:27 (NIV).

There is no sin which the Savior denounced more emphatically than that of hypocrisy. We fully assent to the denunciation; yet all the while most of us are unaware how largely we are chargeable with this very sin: not perhaps in its more offensive exhibition, but in the demonstration often made by us of assumed emotion and feeling, where the reality is not possessed by us, or possessed only in a subordinate degree. We sin to this effect both against God and man: against God, in our prayers and confessions; against man, in our protestations and displays. We need to pray against this sin every one of us.

O gracious Lord Christ, who sees how often I am chargeable with that leaven of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy, deliver me, I beseech you, from the insincerity which at times mingles with even my holiest affections; and grant that, walking in love, I abide also in the truth, to the praise of your guiding Spirit.

About the author and the source

In the preface to his Thoughts of Christ, Lord Kinloch declared that he had long thought the likeliest mode of combating religious infidelity would be to promote a perception of Christ’s human personality. His Thoughts aimed to do that. He was also the author of the hymn “Mansions for Me” and a judge for the Court of Sessions, Edinburgh, Scotland.