via ThinkChristian as a comment to GospelDrivenLife. Read up kids. It's good for you.

Why is it so hard to avoid hypocrisy?

Hypocrisy is frustrating because the solution to it—confession and repentance—is so easy, yet we’re nevertheless willing to go to enormous lengths to avoid doing so. Think about it—if you’re a member of a healthy church community and are harboring a secret sin, you have a lot of good reasons to go straight to your pastor and confess that sin. You know that:

• God will forgive you.
• Your pastor, family, and church community will likely support you should you need help overcoming the sin.
• Your life will be immensely more enjoyable without the stress of hiding a sin from everybody you know.
• The longer you wait to confess it, the harder things are going to be when it is inevitably found out.

Yet despite these reasons to repent, we find it amazingly hard to do so. You might think that simple embarassment causes people to cover up their sins, but can that really explain our illogical aversion to repentance? In the case of especially serious issues like sexual addiction, we often pass up the chance to deal with the sin early on (when there’s much less embarassment or impact on the community), and instead let it fester for years until it finally grows big enough to wreck entire families. Christians know of the forgiving power of their God, and they also know about the consesquences of hidden sin, yet they choose to hide rather than confess it.