The Whitewashed Tomb

Dear lovely people,

My Bible tells me in Matthew 23:27 (NIV) "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”

Bilonga the widely acclaimed force behind the fight against child trafficking was recently caught pants-down at the center of a human trafficking ring. Four days later, Mayor Bilonga appeared mortified before the public as he resigned from office. The story was a nationwide sensation, not because yet another political leader had fallen to such a hideous human trafficking scandal, but because Bilonga had made his name as a one-man army and Mayor by cracking down on all existing child trafficking syndicates all across the sub-region. It turns out that Bilonga’s great crime was not embezzlement as is common in this part of the world but, as headline after headline read, he was a hypocrite. He had showed one face to the public — a pious and morally righteous face — while the reality of his life was completely opposite.

I meet people all the times who tell me they have taken resolved to improve upon their lives. They will sing out all the positive messages they have gathered over the years things like; I will never give up; the winner never quits, the quitter never wins; success begins where failure ends etc. But when you take a closer look at the lives of some of them, you find them doing the exact opposite. They live double standard lives, they ensure that the world knows they are flourishing or living largely when actually they are perishing within from such self-imposed pretense.

In the opening quote, we find Jesus insisting that we must be more concerned for our inward reality than our outward appearance. He complained that the Pharisees “do all their deeds to be seen by others.”  He used graphic images to expose their rottenness: “For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence”. What good will it do any of us before God if we present a rotten heart in a pretty package? Most poignantly, Jesus compared such hypocrites to whitewashed tombs, “so you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

Taking your life to another level is a personal decision that should not be informed by how the world sees you or how you want the world to see you. In all that you do, stay true to yourself, your course and your heavenly father. Never be a whitewashed Tomb.