The Unseen Guest

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed sepulchers, which outwardly appear brilliant to men, yet truly, inside, they are filled with the bones of the dead and with all filth.” Matthew 23:27

I have been guilty of superficial cleaning many a time. When guests are due to arrive, I dump all the clutter in my craft room, and then I am aghast when a kid opens the door, as kids sometimes do, and exposes what I have hidden inside! A "horror" guest would be one who opens drawers and peeks into the junk in the cabinets! But Jesus is always the unseen guest in our "home". He sees what is hidden in our hearts. He sees the clutter. He sees my resentment, my irritation, my envy, all those smelly things no one else sees!!!

Here in Matthew chapter 23, Jesus is speaking to the disciples about the Pharisees and teachers of scripture. He is quite disgusted that they are hypocrites and that they only "act out" their religion. They are like whitewashed tombs! "They try to look like upright people outwardly, but inside their hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness." 

In verse 26 of the same chapter, Jesus says the Pharisees are blind, “First clean the inside of the cup and the dish, and then what is outside becomes clean.” This reminds me of a Chinese restaurant in Paris of all places. We stopped for lunch there on our tour, and I glimpsed that the waiter had dumped all the used tea cups of the previous guests in a pail, and then started placing them on our table for us to use! Of course we hightailed it out of there in a hurry! 

Let us make sure that Jesus does not notice the same about us! Let us not only clean up the way we look and behave but make sure our hearts are pleasing to him as well!