Ride-Along

My son is a Criminal Justice major and when he returned home from college this last summer he had a chance to do a ‘ride-along’ in our local police department. He chose to ride on the late shift since that is where most of the action takes place. As he was heading down Rt 7 with the officer in a patrol car, the officer kept an eye on the radar display to see how fast the surrounding traffic was moving. As he approached one vehicle in the opposite lane, the display indicated that the driver was slowing down. As he passed the vehicle, the officer said, “Watch this”, and flipped a switch on the display. The display changed and went from indicating that there was no vehicle ahead in the opposite lane to displaying the now increasing speed of the car they had just passed. “He thinks since we passed him that I can’t see him, but there is a radar cone mounted in the rear of this patrol car, too!”

How often do we think that we need to behave ourselves when we think God is watching, but once we get out of His sight that we can go back to our old ways? Our actions day that as long as we don’t drink alcohol, smoke, swear, gamble, fornicate or do something else sinful while we are in church, we can go back to doing those things on Monday morning. We think God can’t see us because we are not in church. The fact is that this is hypocrisy. “Hypocrite” is a word finding its root in the Greek language and basically means “an actor”, someone who puts on a face for a time and pretends to be something he or she is not.

The real joke behind all of this is that the only person we are fooling is ourselves. Our families know what we are doing, our friends know, probably the people at church know, and God most certainly is not fooled. His sight does not end at the church door. Portraying God as a cosmic policeman just waiting for us to mess up so He can catch us is not a good image really. He loves us, and has paid the ultimate price to rescue us from that very sin that we keep committing when we think he is not watching. So, if He already knows what you are doing and has paid the price so we don’t have to, why not give it all back to Him and accept what He is offering? That is true honesty, and what He has been looking for all along.