What "religion" are you?

Several times in my life I've had to fill out forms - on paper or online - that ask me what "religion" I am.  I can't help but be tempted to write "Non-religious Christian" because I can't stand the concept of religion nor do I practice a religion.

Now how's that for a contradiction in terms!  How can one possibly claim to be a Christian yet also non-religious?  Isn't Christianity a "religion", and therefore to be a Christian means you're "religious?"  'How blasphemous', you might be thinking.  Or is it?

There's a reason why it's called the "Christian faith", because a religion and a faith are two entirely different things.  People who have not put their trust in Jesus Christ to save them wrongly call it a "religion" because they have a false understanding of who God is and how people are supposed to relate to Him.  However, people who have put their trust in Jesus Christ to save them - Christians - rightly call it a "faith".  They have realized that the salvation given to them through this faith is the "gift of God", that it can't be earned by anything you do (Ephesians 2:8-10).  Thus, they have been invited and accepted into a relationship - not a religion - with the one true God through Jesus Christ and Him alone.

I've come to realize that a religion is a man-made system designed to try to please their god (or gods).  It's full of rules and regulations and ordinances, most of which have no origin in the Bible.  It's also not a very fun system to try to follow, because failure to live up to its standards is constant and therefore it's a great cause of demoralization.  All too often, there is a push to get other people "converted" in a vain attempt to please or appease their god(s) and thus feel more important and better about themselves. 

Sadly, many denominations and movements claiming to be Christian are in fact religions far removed from what God intended Christianity to be.  They go by different names:  Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and so forth.  Then there are the cultic movements, like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons (Latter Day Saints).  God did not invent denominations or movements; rather, He intended Christianity to be a way to personally relate to Him through Jesus Christ and Him alone - no human intervention required.  However, people unwilling to accept His grace extended through Jesus Christ thought they knew better, and viola - the birth of modern religion.

Unfortunately, a lot of the atheism and agnosticism in this world today stem from those who have felt the pressure to convert to a particular religion.  These mindsets are compounded when these people witness the failure of religious followers to live up to religious standards, such as practicing what they preach.  And when these religious followers fail (not if, but when), they assume - or are told by their religious leaders - that their god(s) will fail to love them.

How the Bible paints a different picture!  If only these people would look past man-made religion and instead to the Bible where they can be told not only of the reality of the one true God, but also His amazing love for them, available without a single religious act on their part!

Here's what the Bible has to say about the Christian faith:

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope at your calling; one Lord [that is, Jesus], one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all."  (Ephesians 4:4-5)

What this passage implies is that the "one" Christian faith is therefore the only faith that exists.  It is one of those passages that is very exclusive, the kind that annoys and even greatly angers those outside the Christian faith.  In other words, it implies that there is no Muslim "faith", or Buddhist "faith", or Hindu "faith" and so on.  In reality, these are all religions:  the "one God" is revealed only in the Bible and in no other bodies of scripture, and therefore they are all worshipping false gods.  Also, they all have strict, man-made standards that have created a schizophrenic god or gods who can snap and go crazy on their followers at any moment and, worst of all, deny them passage to eternal paradise.

The appeal of Christianity is so much greater:

"Come to Me [Jesus], all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."  (Matthew 11:28, emphasis added)

"Everyone the Father [God] gives Me [Jesus] will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will never cast out." (John 6:37, emphasis added)

"... [God] is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9, emphasis added)

"For God loved the world in this way:  He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16, emphasis added)

"For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God's gift - not from works [religious effort] so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9, emphasis added)

I don't know about you, but I much prefer the "one" true faith that accepts everyone - people of all races and colors and, yes, all religious backgrounds - and doesn't require us to be cleaned up and perfect before approaching the "one" true God and humbly and sincerely asking for His mercy to forgive and cleanse and save us.  How about you?

The Great Facade

I was watching a video a couple of nights ago where some non-believing youth were being asked their opinions about various things related to God. One was, "What do you think about church?" The answers were not surprising to me, because I was also once a non-believing youth who felt precisely the same as they do. They referred to some stereotypes that are common in only a few churches, like the mention of "smelly old people", but other answers were sadly all too common, like "boring", "outdated", "irrelevant", and so on.

On arguably one of the greatest Christian music albums ever recorded, wonderfully named "Jesus Freak", the group dc Talk wrote a song called "What If I Stumble?" They open the song with a spoken audio clip of some guy who says

"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

What God has been showing me the past few months to a greater degree than at any point in my Christian walk is examples of people who call themselves Christians but who put on what I like to call The Great Facade. I have been anguished at times how their claim to be followers of Christ could not be more opposite in the reality of how they live their lives.

It is the existence of these people who are responsible for the opinions given by the non-believing youth in the video I mentioned. These people also give total validity to the above quote in that dc Talk song.

Now referring to them as "these people" doesn't imply that I'm looking down my nose at them or having hatred towards them. Sometimes I say and do little things that put me in the same category for a moment and leave me crying out to God and asking about why I was so stupid! But my anguish is for "these people" whose facade is continual, whose outward actions and appearance are put on to hide their actual lack of true understanding and relationship with God/Jesus. A facade that creates a Jeckyl-and-Hyde sort of approach to being a Christian that causes great damage to the reputation of God/Jesus as outsiders scratch their heads and wonder if their hypocrisy and inconsistency in life is what it means to be a "Christian".

Here's just one example of sadly many people I've personally known who've put on The Great Facade. An acquaintance of mine and his wife - both Christian by title - are almost at the point of separation. He wants to make things right again but she refuses, adamantly stating among other things that it won't work between them any more. She has seen her lawyer and is on the verge of leaving. At stake are their three young children who dearly love their mom and dad. She in particular is very proactive at school to make sure her children are doing well and being kept safe from bullies. However, among many measures she is taking, she no longer wants their dad to attend the same church as her and the kids once she leaves.

I cringe at how this woman claims to be a Christian but doesn't realize how leaving her husband will do infinitely more damage to their children than poor grades or a bully's actions could ever possibly do. And I almost gasped with disbelief when he told me that she doesn't want him to attend the same church any longer. Basically, she wants to put on The Great Facade at church to appear as though she's right with God, yet she won't humble herself before her husband to whom she once pledged her life - and Jesus who she claims to believe in and therefore follow - in order to make things work again.

Unfortunately, any non-believer who might learn of these things will only see the hypocrisy of a Christian couple divorcing despite the Christian belief in the sanctity of marriage. And they'll wonder why someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus would take so many actions that reflect the total opposite.

The host of the video followed up the answers of the non-believing youth by re-affirming much of what they said, but he then took things in a brilliant direction by commenting that perhaps the church has given God a bad rap. That for a non-believer to form an opinion of God based upon the mess that humans have made of the church that was created and is headed by Jesus is a crucial mistake to make.

When I was "unsaved", my opinion of God - as you will read about in other posts - was initially totally formulated by the particular "spiritual morgue" that I attended as a kid. It was reinforced by people who didn't have a real relationship with God - like people in the media and in academic circles - but still thought they had God and Christians and the Bible all figured out and discredited.

In other words, I was basing my opinion of God on bad sources of information. It was akin to asking an artist how to diagnose and fix a problem with my car, or asking a medical doctor to help me draft a plan to get out of financial trouble. I was using the mistakes and hypocrisy of believers and the lies and subjective opinions of non-believers to form my false understanding of God.

Now I have no idea how or why God began to unravel my totally false understanding of who He is, but He began to do so by exposing me to the Bible. He did this through books and preachers and teachers - including those on Christian radio broadcasts - who began to show me the truth of God and what a relationship with Him is really all about. In other words, I began to see God from His side, and I was so impressed by the non-religious reality of who God is that I was intrigued and eventually gave my life to Him through His only appointed Mediator, Jesus.

I began to realize how religion is not from God, but rather a means created by people to try to relate to God outside of what the Bible teaches. They have a beef with this-or-that, like the claim by Jesus that He is the only way to come to God and to know God, so they make up their own rules and think that God will somehow honor these man-made substitutes by forgiving them and letting them into heaven anyhow. Such religions include Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.

In the case of some sects that call themselves "Christian", they claim to relate to God according to what the Bible teaches, but they twist the Bible just enough to deceive people into thinking that their beliefs are still Bible-based when they actually are not. Such sects include Mormonism (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and such sects are typically and more appropriately called "cults".

Why have I shared this last bit about my realizations and about religion and cults? Because I want you, if you're a non-believer, to be careful about the sources of information you use to form your understanding of God. Quite simply, if these sources discredit or mock the Bible, or if their information doesn't line up with the Bible, then you should ignore them entirely until you have a better biblical understanding.

So how come so many Christians put on The Great Facade? I believe the #1 reason is because they don't make the effort to know and understand who God is. Because they don't know and understand Him, they don't trust Him and therefore don't allow Him to control their lives. So the root causes of a divorce or financial ruin never get dealt with because the Christian tries to fix these things himself/herself. And these disasters occur in the first place because these people never formed a daily relationship of dependence upon this God whom they've claimed to put their trust in. Doing so would have prevented many of these disasters from ever occurring. So these people claim to believe but they don't actually trust, and this makes their belief very shallow and superficial.

They don't read the Bible themselves and ask for God to help them understand it because they don't make the time and the effort to do so, and then come up with excuses. So they instead listen to a teacher's or preacher's opinion and claim that to be truth instead of consulting the source of truth itself. And when one is not familiar with the truth presented in the Bible, it's easy to fall for teachings that sound biblical but actually aren't. Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses live on today simply because Christians don't know their Bible (and don't understand what the cultic versions of the Bible are and how they differ from the real one) nor apply what the Bible teaches them.

They also don't really commune with God, which means spending time getting to know Him. They resort to prayer during an emergency or to present their wish list; they don't pray to ask God to show them what to do in life then ask for the patience to wait for His answer. They sing at church so they don't look unholy, but they don't mean what they sing nor give their reverence and praise to God because they fear being vulnerable plus looking wierd to their friends.

So on and on The Great Facade goes. The Christian puts on their "Sunday best" but then lives not much differently from the non-believer during the rest of the week. It doesn't help that they watch the same TV shows and movies and listen to the same music, either. And all the while the mighty power of Jesus that is available to work in peoples' lives gets overshadowed by the hypocrisy and mistakes of multitude Christians who've put on this facade and don't allow this power into their lives.

These are the main reasons why so many churches become "boring", "outdated", and "irrelevant". The people are there pretending to know God when they actually don't, so they tolerate and never question all the irrelevant (i.e. non-biblical) religious ritual. The religion becomes a safe alternative to actually becoming vulnerable to a relationship with God that will bring about change and growth. They want change and growth on their own terms even if they realize that God's plan is a much better one.

And the net result of all these factors is Christians that are far too often ineffective and hypocritical to the outside world.

Why don't people believe? Part II

Part I of this topic explained how some people don't believe in God because they like to do things their way, regardless of how immoral some of these things are. And people will do the immoral things ("evil", according to God's definition) because they "love" living in "darkness" apart from God instead of in the "light" of God's forgiveness and presence in their lives.

With this recap, I will suggest another reason why some people don't believe in God (or more accurately, choose not to believe in God). Some people simply get upset by how Jesus claims to be the only way to know and come to God. Jesus explained it this way:

"I am THE way, THE truth, and THE life. NO ONE comes to the Father except through Me." (Capitalization added for emphasis.) -- John 14:6

The hornets' nest is stirred up even more when they read claims like:

"The one who has seen Me [Jesus] has seen the Father [God]." -- John 14:9

Jesus equates Himself with God even more blatantly in the following passage:

"The Father [God] and I are one." -- John 10:30

As you can imagine, most Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and followers of other religions and cults who don't use the Bible as the scriptural basis for their beliefs are upset - and some even completely outraged - by such statements. They accuse the Christian of being "exclusive" and "narrow-minded", among other things. They accuse Jesus of being a fraud and of being delusional. Such statements also fly in the face of modern spiritual thinking that there are "many ways" to God instead of "the way" that Jesus Christ claims to be.

So who's right: Is Jesus the only way to God, or is He not?

There are so many ways that this question can be explored. One can look at the mountains of archaeological evidence that give credibility to biblical names and places and use this to conclude that the Bible and whatever is written therein must be true. One can look at the extra-biblical accounts of Roman concern over the unrest caused by the ministry and teachings of Jesus and use this for evidence in His existence and in biblical credibility and teachings. One can look at the number of biblical prophecies fulfilled by Jesus and the infinitesimally small possibility of them being fulfilled by one man alone and use this to form the basis of their faith in Jesus. (Here's a great article about the odds of Jesus being this man.)

But rather than going on a search for evidence at this point - something that you can embark on if you wish - let me instead suggest that you first consider the following:

What if Jesus was right?

What if He was actually for real and was actually in the presence of His Father God in heaven, since before the dawn of time, before being placed into the womb of a Jewish teenager and living on earth as simultaneously the Son of God and the Son of Man for 33 years before being crucified on a Roman cross (according to God's plan and purpose) then bodily rising from death from a guarded tomb and appearing to 500 of His disciples at one time - and also His apostles, including one who actually touched one of Jesus' crucifixion wounds - and others over a 40-day period, then taken up into a cloud into heaven in the presence of several people and even two angels? (Whew!!)

Is it possible that all other religions of the world and the cults have gotten it all wrong? Is it possible that all of their attempts to worship and please their gods are totally in vain because their gods do not even exist? Well, according to the Bible and the words of Jesus, these things are the case!

The saying "Pride comes before a fall" is taken from the book of Proverbs, chapter 16 verse 18 (Proverbs 16:18). Humans love to acquire wealth and power and prestige and self-achievement and so on, and the root and result of these things is none other than pride. Pride likes to thumb its nose at others - and God - and say, "Look at what I have done. Look who I am. Look at what I have accomplished." Pride makes dependence upon anyone else - especially God - impossible. Pride also never wants us to admit that we might actually be wrong.

The reason why so many people throughout history have been insulted, angry, and even enraged to the point of murder about the claims of Jesus is not so much because they fear Him being right, but more so because they fear being wrong. They simply don't want their pride to be dragged through the mud of truth. In the case of people who have risen to religious prominence apart from the teachings that Jesus is God and the only way to come to God and that the Bible is infallible, they also risk the loss of wealth and power and prestige if Jesus is proven correct. The hyper-religious Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus' time are prime examples, and they stopped at nothing to kill Jesus (or so they thought) and his followers. Modern-day Pharisees live on in the form of the non-Christian religions and cults of this day.

Before you decide to protest or complain about what you have just read, just remember that it's no use shooting the messenger, me in this case. I'm only re-stating what Jesus said and what the Bible records. Your real issue is not actually with me or with this blog, it's with God. Your anger is actually anger towards God, whether you believe in Him or another god or not.

And you need to ask yourself why, exactly, you are mad at God: Are you mad at a Christian or someone else who claims to know God who wronged you at some time in the past? Are you mad at the suggestion that you might actually be wrong, whether you're an atheist or a member of another religious group? Or are you mad at the possibility that God actually did make Jesus the only means by which we can come to Him and know Him?

If you disagree with the claims of Jesus, what I suggest you do from here is really start to ask some serious questions about your current beliefs. If you decide to close your mind and live and die on your current assumptions that you're right and God/Jesus/the Bible is wrong, then the consequences for you as outlined in the Bible will be eternal, and I wouldn't wish these on anyone.

Please don't assume these claims aren't for real without giving them a serious look. Please don't let your pride lead to a fall that will last for an eternity.