why you shouldn’t practice what you preach
You’ve no doubt heard the familiar moral encouragement to “practice what you preach.” We use this phrase as a culture to motivate people to match their actions to their words. But while the intention behind this saying is good, trying to practice what you preach will create all kinds of problems. Let me explain.
Let’s start with the obvious: there’s a lot of preaching in today’s world. Because of apps like Instagram and Twitter, everyone has a pulpit from which they can preach to others. Because of this, lots of people, whether their academics or activists or just an average joe, feel comfortable sharing their opinion of our culture and giving grand pronouncements on how to fix every issue we face.
The problem with all of this preaching, though, is that it’s rarely backed up by any meaningful action. That’s the whole reason we have a saying like “practice what you preach,” because most everyone doesn’t. People spend their lives preaching to others about what is wrong and what needs to be done but never get around to doing anything to help solve the problems their complaining about.
This tension between our love of preaching and our dislike of living out our ideals leads to two major problems. The first problem this causes is that it makes everybody self-righteous. They believe that since they have the right ideals they must be a good person. Because they have good intentions, whether it’s to solve poverty, reform the government, or improve other people’s lives, they believe in their inherent goodness.
But these good intentions, uncoupled from any real action to work towards them, create a self-righteous attitude. We judge other people’s actions against our ideals and see all kinds of ways that they fall short. People who live in their idealized world of good intentions quickly become arrogant, self-confident, and convinced that everything would be solved if people would just listen to them.
The second problem with trying to practice what you preach is the more serious one: no matter what you do you’ll never measure up to your ideals, leading to hypocrisy. You’ll preach about all of the things that other people should be doing to solve the problems of our culture but then will never find the time, money, or energy to work on them yourself.
Even if you do commit to practicing what you preach, you’ll find that putting your ideals into action is much harder than you anticipated. The world is a complicated place and solving long-standing and complicated problems takes a lot more than the ability to broadcast your ideals. As George Washington told Alexander Hamilton in the musical Hamilton as they tried to lead a young United States, “Winning was easy, young man, governing’s harder.”
This turns so many of the “preachers” into hypocrites: what they say doesn’t match up with who they are. Why is this the case? Because when they realize that their practices are not reflecting what they preach, rather than adjusting their ideals they rationalize their actions.
Faced with the dissonance between their ideals and actions, their self-righteousness causes them to come up with excuses to explain why they shouldn’t be expected to live up to their ideals. They say things to themselves like:
“Well, I really do want to solve this, but since I was stuck in a broken system myself and have all of this student debt, it’s understandable that I can’t do anything.”
“Well, of course, I care a lot about this social problem, but I’m not at a stage of life where I don’t have time to do anything in person, so the best I can do is to post about it all the time on Instagram.
“Well, I would love to be out there on the front lines, but my calling just so happens to be in this cushy corporate job, so unfortunately I’ll just have to complain about others from the comfort of my suburban lifestyle.”
“Well, I would be the first one to help if I could, but since this problem is caused by those people and not me, my only role is to point out their failures to them.”
These are common rationalizations for why people can’t practice what they preach. We point the finger at others and blame them for inaction on the major problems of our day, but then find convincing excuses for why we can’t do any of the hard work ourselves.
If you try to practice what you preach you’ll always end up with a culture full of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. People will spend their lives preaching to others about what they need to do, but will never do anything themselves. They use their idealistic intentions as a way to judge others while doing nothing to help.
Jesus had strong words for people who heaped large moral burdens onto other people but made little effort to follow their own rules. He said this in Matthew 23:
The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.
Jesus points out that the Pharisees preached, but they never practiced what they preached. They came up with all kinds of things other people had to do, but never felt these rules applied to them. And so while Jesus tells his disciples to respect the authority of their leadership positions, he wants them to reject their example.
So if you shouldn’t try to practice what you preach, what should you do? The key to living a life of integrity and authenticity is to flip these two phrases around. Instead of trying to practice what you preach, you should only preach what you practice.
This means that before you preach something to others, you should ensure that you are practicing that thing yourself. Only share your ideals for others after you have implemented them in your own life. If you aren’t practicing something in your life, then wait until you do before you place those expectations onto other people.
Why is it so important to only preach what you are first practicing? Because it will cause two things. First, putting your ideals into practice first will make you humble and teachable. You’ll quickly see how hard it is to turn good intentions into meaningful results. It’s 1,000 times harder to do something than to talk about doing something. As Richard Rohr says: “Right words make all of us feel falsely important; right action keeps all of us forever beginners and not so important at all.”
Practicing before you preach will help to cut through your self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance (that often afflicts well-educated young people), and instead will help you become a humbled people who can admit that life is complicated, nobody has all of the answers, and that there’s no such thing as a quick fix.
When you admit these three things, something strange will happen: you’ll become much more effective, since you’re now willing to work with other people and learn from their wisdom. The practicing of your ideals will give you fresh insights and newfound wisdom so that when it is time to share them with others, you’ll have more helpful things to share. You’ll also approach other people with grace and show them mercy when they fall short since you know how hard it is to live up to your ideals.
Practicing before you preach also creates credible and trustworthy leaders that people want to follow. When other people see that your actions back up your words, they’ll recognize your integrity and will join you in the work. As the old saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.”
When other people see someone who is doing the difficult work rather than just telling other people what to do, that leader will have so much more of an influence than a “words only” person could ever have, no matter the size of their online audience. While words are important, what changes the hearts and minds of communities and cultures are not people who have all of the right opinions, but rather a person whose life exemplifies their beliefs.
What’s the takeaway from all of this? Be patient and avoid the temptation to preach something before you’re practicing it. Make sure that your life supports your ideals before you start expecting other people to listen to you. Otherwise, your words will ring hollow and you’ll just be another self-righteous hypocrite.
So before you preach to others, examine your life and make sure that you’re first doing what you want other people to do, so that as the Apostle Paul says, “After preaching to others, I might not be disqualified from the prize.” Paul knew how easy it is to never get around to practicing what you preach, so he made sure that he was living out his message.
That’s what made Jesus so unique. Jesus was the perfect embodiment of preaching what you are first practicing. He lived out God’s will perfectly all of his life, so when he started preaching to others after 30 years of ordinary life, they felt the authority and authenticity of a person who lived out what he expected of others.
I hope you will spend your life, especially your youth, putting your ideals into practice, gaining the hard-fought wisdom and insight that you can only get from real-world experience. While preaching your ideals before you practice them seems like it will speed up social change, like many “shortcuts” it will take you much longer to get where you want to go. Live out your ideals in practice, and I guarantee that you’ll have plenty of time and opportunities to preach to them when you are older.
