Strip off all pretences and assume your real condition before God, and He will totally change your life.

While God was giving Moses the Tablets of the Ten Commandments, at the top of Mount Sinai, the people were already breaking at least three of the Ten Commandments.

While Moses spent 40 days on the mountain, the people were anxious. So, they decided to make a golden calf so that an image of a supposed god could go ahead of them and guide them through the desert to the Promised Land.

How quick they were to betray the One who had taken them out of slavery for more than 400 years!

So, in the face of all that mess, something that angered God a lot, through the intercession of Moses, God decided to give the people a chance, but on one condition: God said, “You are a stiff-necked people. I could come up into your midst in one moment and consume you. Now therefore, take off your ornaments, that I may know what to do to you” (Exodus 33:5).

Removing the ornaments was a condition for God to talk to them and give them a chance to change so they would continue their way to the Promised Land.

Even today, people need to get rid of the pretences, the ornaments, and the masks they usually put on to give the impression that they are something, to hide what they really are.

The people, with their ornaments, thought they had hidden what was really inside them from God; they were hypocritical to God, fake, but true to the calf (because they unrestrained themselves and showed what was really inside them).

Likewise, the Lord Jesus could not, for example, do something for the religious ones in His time when He was here. Because the religious ones were all ornamented with their traditions and customs, with the religious “clothes”. They thought they were better than others, spoke beautiful words, knew how to quote the Law of God, and maintained strict customs towards the people, but they did not practice what they demanded of others. So Jesus couldn’t do anything for them because there was no repentance. Yes, there was a cloak of hypocrisy.

Also, the apostle Paul, speaking to the Christians in Ephesus, said: “That you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Ephesians 4:22-23).

For God to act in the lives of Christians at that time, Paul was saying: “You have to strip yourself of the old man”. In other words: “to take this ‘clothe’ from the old man”. “It’s not conversion if you change only the exterior and the interior remains the same.”

There are a lot of people who change their religion, but the interior is the same.

God is not impressed by religious theatrics.

God says: “You will take off your ornaments”. If you want to be saved, you must stop decorating your life with pretences and hypocrisy. Assume your real condition before God. Ask for mercy. Look for the change from the inside out. This way, you will have the chance to change your life. Do not be like the people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai before receiving the Tablets from Moses.

Watch the entire message in the video above.