Scripture is clear that Jesus hates hypocrisy, legalism, and Phariseeism. Geoffrey Botkin explains how Christians can fall into those traps even while thinking they are pursuing true, Christian piety.

When Christians look back into history and they know that the Lord Jesus Christ really hates hypocrisy and he really hates Phariseeism and he really hates legalism in the way that we would take his law and we would take traditions and we would abuse it. It's happened again and again. But my biggest concern of all is in what ways are my own children and my own family picking up attitudes of what is called pietism. What they may think is pious conduct or a pious way of thinking or acting or dressing that is not biblical just because they've inherited something that they don't own and they don't understand. And so we can be guilty of following these same traditions of disobedience by becoming pharisaical.

And where we don't truly worship the Lord in spirit and in truth, we're teaching as doctrines the commandments of men, and we're worshiping in vain. And this is what concerns me about my own generation, and I think we're quite guilty all across the evangelical Protestant Bible Belt in the United States of having forms of pietism, where we think the sum total of our Christianity is the quality of the quiet times that we may be having, or how close we think we feel to our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. When if we would understand His assignment to us as His ambassadors and representatives, we would begin to see that we need to take His standards of holiness and there's nothing pietistic about it.