You know what is worse than religion?  People who are always bashing religion.  The fact is that we are religious creatures, we are designed to worship.  If you have a problem with that take it up with the creator.  Lack of worship is not possible, the only options are good and bad worship.  You don’t ever hear about God telling his people “If you are going to stop worshiping the one true God, make sure you throw out all religion rather than following one of those false ones.”  No, there are two options, the one true God, and all the others.

Religion is one of the many terms that we allow to be defined by the world rather than the Word.  Religion isn’t some category of private spiritual awareness or interaction.  Religion is the outworking of what we believe.  If you show bad fruit it is because you are bad at heart, if you show good fruit it is because you are controlled by the Spirit.  These are the only two options according to scripture.  But in our modern Evangelical silliness we have tried to create a third category, the bound Christian.  This is a Christian who has been fooled into believing that the outworking of the faith in every area of culture are not necessary and might even be damaging to the message of the ‘gospel’.  I put gospel in quotes because they a have so limited it’s scope that it means something entirely different than the Word does.  These are the Christians who are always lamenting Christians who actually try to live like the Bible commands.  They label them as ‘fake’ or ‘phony’ or accuse them of ’empty religion’ or being ‘holier than thou’.  They pride themselves on only sticking to the gospel and not getting involved in politics or cultural areas.  ( I was blown away at our missions conference a few months back at people fearful that missionaries were teaching English to unreached people groups.  Instead of realizing the innumerable Biblical resources that could be opened up to these people by the English language, to say nothing of the economic opportunities, they lamented that we were forcing our ‘culture’ on these people.  They cling to this notion of the noble savage, reeling like the modern post-Hitler multi-culturalist, at the notion that one culture could be better than another.  Well our culture is better because it was born from Christendom.  The noble savage recognizes this, he wants to learn English.  And we stupidly hold him back, misunderstanding our history, and the way that God works on this earth.  Can you imagine Paul wasting time translating his letters into all the indigenous languages of the peoples in the Roman Empire from before they were conquered?  No, he took advantage of a world united by Greek.  This is the old notion of pillaging Egypt that I wrote about last time.  Take the aspects of culture you can appropriate for the gospel and replace those that you can not.  Don’t lament Christian cultural involvement, that will only create an empty house for the Devil to come and fill, Matthew 12:43-45.)

We are the salt of the earth, where does the Church go to get salty if it is gone?  If the world becomes rotten because it lacks the preservative characteristics of salt, it can go to the church, but when the Church has no sense of right and wrong, when the Church does not judge correctly, everyone is lost. Where does the salt then come from?  The blind are leading the blind.  But don’t worry the blind Christians have an inner relationship with Jesus–it’s there–honest.  Or is it. James didn’t seem to think so, James 2:14.  John didn’t seem to think so.  I was blown away by a sermon I heard last week on 1 John suggesting that the gospel is not about a club or a culture it was about a relationship with Jesus.  Well it is about a relationship, but John’s point is the exact opposite. “If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.”  What good does it do to talk about your personal faith with lovey-dovey Jesus if it does not manifest itself in and outward way, in a religion, in a culture?  “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.”  Not sinning is the point.  What do you call someone devoted to the practice of not sinning?  I would call them religious, yet today we are wont to call them legalists.

And of course we are part of a club, it’s called the Church.  We are supposed to look good to the world and show them by our real interaction what love is, John 13:35.  How are a bunch of individuals with private Jesus-relationships supposed to display this to the world without a physical group interacting together regularly?  Which, I believe, be careful here, is the definition of a club.

Of course it is true that there are many bad religions.  But I think it is silly to suggest that these religions are damning people.  If these people are following good religious practices without real heart commitment, they still benefit as the Jews did for thousands of years, and still do to this day.  Living a good clean moral life, even without true faith is a good thing.  It’s sad that they put in all this effort only to be lost in the end, but every murder stopped and every marriage vow kept is a good.  Creation acting as it is supposed to, glorifies God.

But today we suffer from the opposite sin. We think our faith is something private and individual, that has very limited outworking.  We think we have faith without works.  We allow the world around to set the parameters of every area of our life except for a few ‘religious’ compartments that we turn over to the word of God.  People who take the word of God seriously, who have both true inner faith and outer works, are labeled religious, legalists.  But this is what God requires, our faith should work it’s way out into every area of our lives.  This is what culture is.  And of course it will be in conflict with the world.  It was from the very beginning, as Paul and the other disciples began to crash the idol manufacturing economy of Ephesus, Acts 19:21-41.  Kings will tremble, Matthew 2:3. This is not a distraction from the gospel, this is what the gospel does. It divides.  If you want to stifle this so you can get along with the world, this is sin.  It is the sin we are most likely to commit.

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”  This is what God requires of us.  It takes hard work. It takes generational work, building these good habits into our children, that they may be free to obey more of God’s word every generation.  But this is the true religion.