Jesus & religion

This post comes from the Wednesday night session at Camp Victory.

When I talk about religion, I'm not talking about it in a good way. This is my meaning of "religion." Religion says I am a good person. Religion says I can be my own salvation. Religion says if I'm good enough I can get to heaven. However, Jesus believed quite differently. Jesus said religious people were like evil snakes. Jesus said religious people were hypocrites. Jesus even said religious people have a hotter section in Hell. And, for some odd reason, religious people didn't like Jesus either. They actually are the ones who murdered him.

Many times we take two approaches to get to God. 1) We try to be a good person and come to God with our hands full of "religious deeds" hoping that God will see how good we are. 2) We realize we are messed up, evil people who have no possibility to stand before a holy God, so our only means to God is Jesus. Because he suffered the penalty for our sins, we don't have to bring "religious stuff" to God, we just have to bring faith in Jesus.

In Philippians 3, Paul said the same thing. He gave his own personal story of trying to be a religious person. He even says he was more religious than anyone alive! He then lists out all his religious credentials that he thought made him a good person, but then he said after he met Jesus, he dropped all his religious deeds and counted them as "rubbish" or "dung" or manure. Frankly, this is the same way God looks at our religious stuff..."manure."

Paul used to believe a False Gospel:
"If I obey God, than He will love and accept me."

Then Paul learned the True Gospel from Jesus:
"Because God loves and accepts me, I will obey and follow Him."

Every religion in the world, other than Christianity, believes the False Gospel. They believe that if we are good enough people, then our god will accept us. However, this is drastically different in Christianity. Even when we were terrible evil sinners that hated God, Jesus showed us how much he loved us by giving his life for us.

My pastor, J. D. Greear says this often,
"Nothing I do today will make God love me more or love me less than He already does right now."

God's love for us isn't dependent on our actions or deeds. Rather, God's love is unchanging. On the cross, Jesus demonstrated that God loves us more than we could ever think or imagine.

The only righteousness we have is Jesus. Are you coming to God with hands full of religious stuff, or are you coming to God with faith in Jesus?

(closing disclaimer: this doesn't mean that we don't live holy lives. One of our goals as a believer is to be holy as Jesus was holy. This post today is focused on how we view the love of God and the gospel. Our holy living doesn't get us closer to God, but after salvation, we have a motive and a new desire to be holy.)