The Religion of the World vs. Freedom from Religion

I wrote about how religion is what I had all during the time when I thought I was resisting religion. The world calls us to religion, while God calls us to be free.

What I mean by “religion” is a heavy yoke. The world requires us to embrace false and irrational ideas, and live as if they are true. The weight of all the falsehood, day by day, grinds us down and makes us lifeless and grim.

Jesus was a radical for truth. His teachings were “light” in each sense of the word. The way of Jesus lightens our load by lifting away the weight of lies, and illuminates our view by shining shafts of light through the worldview we are conditioned to accept.

The world looks different when we can get free of religion. Below are some of the teachings of the religion of the world. See if you recognize any of them. In addition, here is what freedom from religion allows us to see instead:

The religion of the world
God is irrelevant. God might exist, but he is aloof from normal life. Things happen at random.
Freedom from religion
God is in control. A wind of purpose blows through everything that occurs. We can tack to that wind and we can sail on it.

RW
We are alone. Don’t look for God.
FR
We are accompanied. God speaks all through the context of what moves in our life and how we are affected. There is much to learn if we will make ourselves students.

RW
We are practically powerless. You have no power except what you can lift with your hands, communicated with your voice, buy with your money, etc.
FR
You are not just a material being but also a spiritual being. You affect the world with the power of what you believe.

RW
Your value is determined materially, according to your wealth, income, status, or fame.
FR
The true value of any person is revealed in surprising ways, according to the life-giving effect that person has on another person, who goes on to affect another person in turn. This value has almost nothing to do with wealth, income, status, or fame.

RW
The world we see and touch with our hands is all there is.
FR
This sense we all have that there is something bigger and more meaningful going on is actually true. There is a real spiritual realm that is bigger than the world, and we begin to perceive this realm once we stop rigorously disbelieving in it.

RW
Your mind is where your self is located. To be called “intelligent” is particularly flattering, because it means your self-house is constructed particularly well.
FR
A person has a heart—a spiritual center that lies deeper than the mind. This can be proven from experience. When your mind is logically persuaded of something, often your heart keeps you from acting according to your own logic. But surrender your heart to being changed, and your mind will flood open with new awareness that it never had before.

RW
You are going to die. If there is life after death, you will find out then. Life on earth and life after death are two entirely different things.
FR
Eternity is congruent with the material world. It is as “here” as here is. Death is not the requirement for eternity. Begin to experience eternity by accepting the eternal into your heart. Your material life will end or fade away, but you will not die.

RW
Pursue happiness.
FR

Have joy.

Photo courtesy freestockphotos.com

Losing My Religion (I Never Knew Jesus Was God)

I never knew that Jesus was God. That might seem like a strange thing not to know, living as I do in a culture surrounded by churches, and having grown up attending a church every week. But my initial, foundational assumption—the premise that reached me and taught me first—was that Jesus was certainly just a man like any other, and nothing more. To believe anything else was to cling to a fantasy.

This was the lens through which I viewed all of the claims related to Christ. His miracles had to be dismissed as hokey tall tales invented by his followers. His teachings had to be dismissed as inventions in much the same way, wherever they conflicted with our own modern ideas of what is practical, permissible, or expedient. Intellectual sophistication demanded these dismissals—and I demanded of myself that I had to be sophisticated.

Against all of this, it was not even possible to hear or understand something significant, let alone get caught up in the wonder of it. Completely lost on me was any sense of the idea that God is so crazy in love with us, he came to earth as a human being so he could teach us the way an authentic and joyful human life is actually supposed to be lived.

I thought I was resisting religion. I wasn’t. I was actually clinging to religion, because God doesn’t call us to be religious—the world does.

“Religion” is self-imposed obedience to irrational precepts. My adherence to a notion of so-called sophistication was an example of this obedience. It made no sense, but I forced myself to cling to it anyway. Other commonly embraced premises make no sense either. For example, the religion of the world tells us (or strongly implies) that the pleasures of this world offer a way to joy, and that the acquisitions of this world have lasting meaning. The religion of the world also says that the approval of the world is what matters. All of these ideas are logically and demonstrably false, yet we give our service to them anyway.

To follow the way of God is to abandon religion. It consists of becoming freely unsophisticated enough to turn away from the ways of the world, and favor the world that is oriented around God instead.

They are overlapping worlds. They include the same time and space. The vital difference is a matter of heart. That difference can be found in the new foundational assumption. Namely: When I become unsophisticated enough to lose my religion, I become so much a part of God’s plan and God’s creation that the most significant event in the world becomes the most significant event in my life. God dying as a man and rising from the dead was the turning point of all of history, and it was the turning point of my life, too.

Think Again! The First Sentence of Jesus Christ

When Jesus formally began his public teaching, he spoke one sentence that summarized his good news about the new way to experience life on earth.

Matthew 4:17 records it:

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

We are conditioned to think we know what this sentence means. In church and out of church, we lay a well-worn interpretation onto it. Namely, “Repent” means “Shape up!” and “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” means “or else you won’t go to heaven when you die!”

Is it any wonder that people are wary of Jesus when they believe that he began his ministry with a threat?

He began his ministry with an invitation instead. He began with a disclosure about how rich and pan-dimensional God’s creation actually is.

Look at the sentence again. Jesus doesn’t say anything about death with these words. He says the kingdom of heaven is “at hand”—that is, right here. Many of the listeners hearing this were nowhere close to the end of their years. The kingdom of heaven is much nearer than physical death.

Jesus also doesn’t say at this point to “shape up,” or to start obeying some heavy set of obligations. “Repent” is the English word that was chosen by a translator. The original writer wrote metanoeo, the literal sense of which includes “think differently,” or “think a new way afterward.”

In other words, the good news of Jesus Christ, the first and most fundamental sentence he chose to teach, could be summarized this way:

The realm that is bigger and better than this one is present right here and right now, and your own life can take hold of this kingdom if only you will think a different way.

I never wanted religion. I thought it was a pointless waste of time, or a scheme to manipulate credulous people. At the sound of “Jesus,” I would try to change the subject.

Then the day came when I discovered that religion is what I had all along. The world that we are trained to accept places heavy obligations upon us. It manipulates credulous people.

Jesus does talk about “shaping up” in the gospels, but not always in the way you might expect. Hearts will be set free, and transformation will come from within.

He also talks about death in the gospels, but not always in the way you might expect. Some people are dead now, even though they are still breathing and still showing up for work. When he says to “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22), he reveals that there is a living death from which we can awaken. In fact, when Jesus explains in John 3:16 that God gave his son so that “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” there is no suggestion that we must wait for physical death in order to find out what he means.

Eternal life can start right now.

The kingdom of heaven is at work all around. God wants each of us to choose him with a willing heart. Somehow, that is part of the plan. But when we do, we begin to see what we never saw, because we never would have accepted it before.

Something bigger than the world is going on. It is a mystery, but it does not have to be invisible. All through our human world, there is this movement afoot—an insurgency of love. Sometimes it is aided by the church and sometimes it is confounded by it, but nevertheless it keeps on succeeding at rescuing the lost, receiving the broken, lifting up the afflicted, and teaching folks of all nations and circumstances that there is a better, freer, more joyful way to experience earthly life.

Related post:
Now What? The Second Sentence of Jesus Christ