TALKING AND WALKING

Matthew 23:1-4
Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright © 1996, 2004 by Tyndale Charitable Trust.

Jesus Criticizes the Religious Leaders

1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees are the official interpreters of the law of Moses. 3 So practice and obey whatever they tell you, but don’t follow their example. For they don’t practice what they teach. 4 They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden.


To be ethical is to have a defined standard of right and wrong … good and evil. For the Christian, the standard is the Bible … the Word of God.

To be moral is to live according to the ethical standard of right and wrong … good and evil, which you have embraced. The Christian with morality lives by the standards laid out in the Word of God.

When our lives integrate the ethical standard and the moral practice, we have integrity. We not only talk the talk, we walk the walk!

Jesus called the teachers and Pharisees who only had the talk and not the walk hypocrites. Hypocrisy … the opposite of integrity.

LORD, help me not be a hypocrite!