Stott on Having a God-Directed View of Prayer

"It will be seen that the fundamental difference between various kinds of prayer is in the fundamentally different images of God which lie behind them. The tragic mistake of Pharisees and pagans, of hypocrites and heathen, is to be found in their false image of God. Indeed, neither is really thinking of God at all, for the hypocrite thinks only of himself while the heathen thinks of other things. What sort of God is it who might be interested in such selfish and mindless prayers? Is God a commodity that we can use to boost our own status, or a computer that we can feed words into him mechanically."

John Stott
The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...D.A. Carson on Holiness and Hypocrisy

"We human beings are a strange lot.  We hear high moral injunctions and glimpse just a little the genuine beauty of perfect holiness, and then prostitute the vision by dreaming about the way others would hold us in high esteem if we were like that.  The demand for genuine perfection loses itself in the lesser goal of external piety; the goal of pleasing the Father is traded for its pygmy cousin, the goal of pleasing men.  It almost seems as if the greater the demand for holiness, the greater the opportunity for hypocrisy.  This is why I suspect that the danger is potentially most serious among religious leaders."

D.A. Carson

A Word for Preachers

"All preachers are vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy.  In fact, the more faithful preachers are to the Word of God in their preaching, the more liable they are to the charge of hypocrisy.  Why?  Because the more faithful people are to the Word of God, the higher the message is that they will preach.  The higher the message, the further they will be from obeying it themselves."

R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God.