Religion Vs. Relationship

James 4:6-10 
But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.



True Christianity is not a religion based on rules and rituals, but a living relationship with Jesus Christ. Many people reduce Christianity down to attending church meetings and trying not to commit a list of certain sins. But being a Christian is being united with Jesus, a member of His body, with His life in your heart. Jesus should be your focus -- not religious activity -- but the person of Jesus, the Lord and Christ.


1 CORINTHIANS 1:9  God, who has called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful.

 Church meetings, Bible reading, etc. can be good, but should not be allowed to become an end in themselves. They are tools to help us know Jesus and walk more closely with Him. But what about laying in the grass, gazing at the sky or walking a nature trail while contemplating the beauty of His creation? Singing worship songs in the shower? What about reading a devotional in the bathroom? Is that sacrilegious?

Jesus isn't looking for your polished, Sunday best appearance or your eloquent prayers. He doesn't care how many times you've gone to church services or mass. He doesn't care if you memorized the Bible or even if you donated millions to charity if you don't know Him personally.

What He does care about is our level of dependence and need for His mercy and grace. He wants us to respond to Him like a child to a father. We cry out with grief or thankfulness from our heart...not a well crafted prayer from a book or one we heard somewhere! And we OBEY Him because of love not religious obligation!

 
Does Jesus need to be needed? C. S. Lewis points out:

If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being. From "The Problem of Pain"


The Bible says we are to be faithful; but faithful to what: a religious system, an organization -- or, a Person? Are you serving Jesus -- or serving something else as His substitute? The focus of your life should be to please Jesus like the FATHER He is. And not to place ANYONE OR ANYTHING above Him.

Exodus 20: 4- “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,

 COLOSSIANS 1:18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 

Does Jesus have first place in your life? In your schedule? If not, why not? In everything, Jesus should be central. Today, I will keep my focus on my constant Companion and Savior Jesus Christ.