The word religion has a bad reputation. Truly, religion that offers no change of heart is bad, but there is religion that changes a man’s heart before God.
Far too many people have forsaken the simplicity which is in Christ and have instead pursued the complexity and labour of religion (2 Corinthians 11:3).
The Bible mentions two types of wisdom: worldly wisdom (1 Corinthians 3:19) and godly wisdom (James 1:5). These distinct wisdoms oppose each other in several aspects including their relationship to hypocrisy. Man claims to live wisely and yet encourages something that counteracts true wisdom—hypocrisy. This is because God’s wisdom operates only when hypocrisy is absent. At first, this might seem quite difficult to achieve, yet righteousness is never accomplished through sinful means. The only way to demonstrate true wisdom is to do so with purity and mercy void of partiality and hypocrisy.
