Pastor's Blog

Over the past couple of decades, I’ve noticed that Halloween is being celebrated much more conspicuously than it was years ago when I was a child.  As soon as fall arrives, many people decorate their homes with orange lights and a variety of spooky items.  It’s also apparent that the occult dimension of Halloween has become more prominent as well.  Satanic and demonic images pervade the entire celebration.

One thing has not changed about Halloween, however.  The costumes.  Kids still like to trick-or-treat, and adults still like to attend masquerade parties.  It can be a lot of fun.  There’s just something about dressing up in disguises that hide their real identity that appeals to many people.  Interestingly enough, however, that inclination to hide behind a mask is much more pervasive than being merely a once-a-year phenomenon.  For many of us, it’s a way of life, but our masks are not made out of plastic or rubber.  Rather, they are carefully contrived and maintained false facades, calculated to mislead others concerning who we really are.

One of the long-standing criticisms of us Bible-believing Christians and churches is that we are hypocrites.  Sure, that’s a convenient excuse for ungodly people to avoid getting serious about spiritual truth.  Nonetheless, their complaint is sometimes justified.  In fact, we born-again Christians still wrestle with the remnants of what the Apostle Paul calls the “old man.”  We all sense the frustrating disconnect between the ideal of sanctified Christlikeness and the reality of our struggle against the flesh.  Far too often, we find ourselves on the losing end of our battle against sin.

Embarrassed by and ashamed of our spiritual failures, we instinctively compensate by trying to represent ourselves as more righteous than we really are.  We resort to a variety of masks.  We become masters at cultivating cheerfulness to hide our normal churlishness.  Instead of showing others our frequent anger, we feign kindness.  We want others to see us as generous when it fact we’re really greedy and stingy.  We represent ourselves as virtuous when our minds are raging with lust.  We speak politely in public, but pour forth torrents of foul language in private.  We want others to believe we are avid Bible students and zealous prayer warriors when we rarely ever take time for a personal devotional life.  We wear our spiritual masks to church every Lord’s Day, only to put them on the shelf when we get home.  And it is there, at home, that those we love see us without our masks; and what they see is often pretty ugly.

What can we do to stop this masquerade?  The Bible has an answer, and it’s found in Hebrews 4:12:  “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”  You see, even the most mature among us cannot accurately evaluate our own thoughts or discern our real motives.  That’s because, as Jeremiah points out, “The heart [mind] is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9).  In other words, we can’t accurately evaluate the true condition of our souls.  But God can.  That’s why He has given believers the indwelling Holy Spirit, and the Spirit uses the Word of God to measure the extent of our hypocrisy.  It shows us who we really are and what really drives our behavior.

Our objective, therefore, should be to live as unmasked Christians.  We achieve this goal by the diligent, daily application of God’s Word.  As we read it, we see ourselves as we really are—underneath the mask—and find strength to remove the costume and live openly and unashamedly in obedience to that which God expects of us.  So as you see the kids with their masks this Halloween, look in your spiritual mirror and ask yourself, “What does my mask look like?”