Dear readers,
It is amazing how quickly we can go from being dry all winter to the place where people are complaining about the rain. Let us remember, it can get from wet to dry in a very short time.
Our devotional thought this week concerns the difference between religion and faith. There is a marked difference between the two. Religion is the number one substitute for genuine faith. Religion convinces you are worthy and then gives you a list of things to make yourself more worthy.
Religious people would rather have a religion that just teaches you to live a good life, to be a social activist, to be generous, to be a better you, to be better a dad and husband and partner, to live strong. As Christianity has gone mainstream, people have corrupted it to say just that.
That is not the gospel. The gospel is that you have no worthiness. All your righteousness is like a filthy rag. Isaiah says it best, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”
We have no righteousness of our own. God created us, and we have precious worth in his sight. But sin caused us to be separated from God. We need to be saved, rescued, born again. Those words may sound backward and uneducated and even old fashioned to the world, but they are the words of eternal life.
The religious almost always reject those truths because they like to see themselves as respectable. Jesus points out that religious people will miss the party, that is, heaven, because they refuse to acknowledge that they are unworthy. That’s why they don’t take Jesus seriously.
Jesus says in Matthew 5 that only the poor in spirit will inherit heaven. The poor in spirit say, “Maybe I’ve done some good things, but even my good things were done for bad motives. My kindness was mixed with self-righteousness and selfishness. Oh, wretched man that I am! Every part of me is stained with sin.”
The poor in spirit see Jesus’ invitation for what it is; something they are desperate without.
The bottom line is this: It is not about our “religion”, it is a relationship with the Lord Jesus that saves us.
For Him,
Pastor Jerry
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