Religion taught you you should want to be good. Religion taught you you should naturally love God. Religion taught you to feel like everybody else finds this easy and made you feel that if you don’t there is something wrong with you. Religion threatened you with Hell in order to get you to follow the rules. Religion made you promises: like God wants you to be happy, and all you have to do is marry within your Faith so that everything will work out.
Religion let you down.
You were put down, belittled, unseen, and lied too. All that is good and beautiful in the world was considered evil. God’s gifts of laughter, food, and pleasure something to be denied? Money?? Lets not even go there…
And your “holiness” is supposed to manifest in your clothing???
Wtf?!
I feel your pain.
Whether religion was pushed on you by your parents, your pastor, or your schoolteacher, it doesn’t change the taste it left in your mouth.
Betrayal.
Betrayal of your childhood trust, your fragile hopes, your dreams of perfection.
We’ve been vaccinated against religion. Replaced the God of the Old Testament with one we can understand, one who makes us feel good about ourselves. After all, Jesus must have died so that I didn’t have to try so hard, since perfection is an impossible ideal – (When Strivings Cease, Ruth Chou Simons). Jesus loves me; therefore, as long as I lose myself in the romance of it all and try to be a nice person I’ve got it made. (Jesus >Religion: Why He is So Much Better than Trying Harder, Doing More, and Being Good Enough – Jefferson Bethke)
As long as I proclaim Jesus as my Lord and Savior nothing else matters.
Right?
Sundays are just another day for mowing the lawn. Church buildings are stuffy. Mary, idolatrous, and our efforts to “be perfect” irrelevant. Instead we’ve made fancy petitions for earthly longevity paramount, and forgotten what it means to spend actual time with God.
If God wants me to be happy, then what I really need is healing from all the lies, all the hypocrisy, all the pharisaicalism. What I need is more of God’s gifts, not less. Therefore, fasting is a rejection of God, and “mortification“, senseless masochism.
We need more “self-expression” not less.
Oh my darling, I’ve heard it all, lived it all. Been there, done that. Suffered. Watched my friends suffer, watched my family suffer, watched the most religious of families and lives fall apart. Surely, it is all a lie. Is not Faith is more of a death sentence than the hope it promises?
Maybe its all just a ploy for money… who knows? I don’t even want to think about it. Surely, it is much simpler to journal in a field or on a mountaintop and just leave behind all the crazy.
But somehow, some way, a few shards of Hope remain in the wake of failure and disappointment. Something inexplicable remains kindled in my soul despite watching despair quench the embers all around me.
What is it?
Why do I, of all people, still believe? for being painfully ordinary, why is my life and my outlook so different?
Maybe, I’ve always been here for a different reason.
The more I think about this, the more I watch the devastation rage around me, the more I question how religion, if it be of God, could fail so many well intentioned souls? I am forced to ask myself the question:
What if we’ve forgotten the purpose of religion?
We’ve been looking for religion to fill us, to quench our thirst, to make sense of all our dilemmas. We look for religion to take away our burdens, heal our wounds, and fix our mistakes. We want religion to provide a cushy, magic life where everything goes well for us because we love Jesus.
How’s that working out for us??
Isn’t that why we’ve decided we hate religion?
But, what if the real problem is actually a GIANT misunderstanding…
What if religion is under attack by the enemy to make people hate it so that they loose faith?
What if he has sold us the line that God wants us to be happy so that we look at this world of pain and call God the liar.
But, what if the enemy just conveniently left out the most important part: God wants us to be happy WITH HIM IN HEAVEN. That doesn’t necessarily mean a cushy life on earth. In fact, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all if we really get down to it. Look at the lives of all the saints and prophets of old. Their lives are marked with the greatest possible pains, persecutions, hardships, tribulations, obstacles, struggles… everyone from Abraham, Moses, and Job, to the Maccabes, to the early Christian martyrs, to His very mother… no friend or follower of God ever had a comfy life.
In fact, it is literally explicit how wrong this idea is…
Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. – Matthew 10:38
We only swallow the lie because it is more comfortable than the truth.
The truth is that this life is not paradise and that there is nothing wrong with you if you are unsatisfied here…. in fact, you shouldn’t be!!! We were not made for this world!!! Our very dissatisfaction is proof that we were made for God, not for this emptiness.
The enemy tells us that when we are dissatisfied, God has abandoned us, broken His promises or let us down, when really, our brokenness is meant to point us to the Healer, our weakness is meant to make us desire to seek our strength elsewhere, our loneliness to realize that no human company can satiate our need to love and be loved, to see, and be seen.
The world tells us to bury our pain and blame God (see Job 2:9), whereas God tells us to expose our pain, unearth it and present it to him, pleading for his touch to heal us. The enemy tells us that because religion exists, God has failed us,
but religion is not God. 🤯
What if religion is more like a toolbox?!
What did God tell us to do?
He gave us the law and the prophets, he told us to follow them. (Rich Young Man) Then he said, if you want more, then “Come, follow me”.
He said, “Seek first the kingdom of God… and everything else will be given” (Matthew 6:33).
Seek the Lord while He may be found, call to Him while He is still near. – Isaiah 55:6
He didn’t say, “seek all the things and read your Bible if you have time later”. He didn’t say, “seek your happiness/fulfillment and I will find you”. He didn’t say that we would find our calling in our happy-place.
He said seek Me, imitate Me, follow Me. Be perfect. Sell everything. Drink poison. Cast out demons. Heal the sick. Raise the dead…
But, you say, that’s impossible!
Boom.
Precisely!
NOW ENTER RELIGION
Christ gave us religion as a MEANS to live the impossible call He gave us (Matthew 19:24).
You see, He will not leave us orphans (John 14:18).
This is why we need religion. Not because religion and God are equals. In fact, if we pursue religion for the sake of religion, completing rituals just because we feel important being so “religious”, its just another more subtle form of idolatry.
Religion is not a replacement for God, it is the toolset we need to get to Him. It is the MEANS He Himself put into place to discover Him.
GOD WANTED US TO BE ABLE TO COME TO HIM…
THEREFORE, HE MADE A WAY.
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life – John 14:6
Before, everything was locked, there was no way to Him. Heaven was closed, shut off from us forever. The only difference is that now, after Calvary, the option to be close to God is open again, but we are still free, free to follow Him or to ignore Him. Either way, He is still the only way. The Cross is still the only means to achieve salvation, but religion is the source of the grace (divine life/strength) we need to live our Calvary, to follow the Master to our own deaths.
There is no cotton candy faith, no romanticized Jesus who awaits us at the pearly gates handing out prizes for participation… this is about a God who chose us, and waits with infinite patience for us to choose Him back.
It is not easy. Unfortunately, it is no longer a walk in the park, or, rather, an evening stroll in the Garden (Genesis 3:8). Those who doubt are not wrong about the challenges we face, they have just lost sight of precisely what makes them possible!
