Facing the Music

In 1990, the singing duo Milli Vanilli won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist. They were very successful until it was revealed that they didn’t sing on their own album and lip synced a live performance. It was a scandal in the music industry, and their Grammy was taken away. Milli Vanilli had to face the music.

Jesus told a story known as the parable of the wheat and the tares in which a farmer planted a crop of wheat. But during the night his enemy came along and sowed tares, or weeds, among the wheat. The tare was also known as the darnel seed, which looks almost exactly like wheat in the beginning stages of growth. But after a while, it becomes apparent it is a weed that actually uproots the wheat.

The farmer said to his workers, “Let both grow together until the harvest. Then I will tell the harvesters to sort out the weeds, tie them into bundles, and burn them, and to put the wheat in the barn” (Matthew 13:30).

Jesus told this story to illustrate that the church also will have people who infiltrate our ranks, satanic plants who undermine the Word of God. We don’t know who is who, necessarily. They breathe the same air. They sing the same songs. They read the same Bible.

But here is what we need to think about: It is not our job to weed out those people. We don’t see a person’s heart. Our concern should not be who the hypocrites are; our concern should be whether we are hypocrites ourselves. Our job is not to weed out the others. Our job is to make sure we are the real thing, because there is coming a day when we all will have to face the music.