I realize that many use the term ‘religion’ in a positive way, but the term actually means ‘to repetitively do a method ritualistically’. In other words-anything we do over and over. Whether it be watching the same TV show every night, getting up at the same time each morning, praying before we eat, routinely disciplining our children the way our parents did us, or any other such habits that years have embedded, we can call religious.
Religion is not necessarily a bad thing, and it sometimes helps us with our daily repetitive customs of organization, but when it replaces our relationships and minimizes our interactions with those that supposed to be close to us, then each has counterfeited intimacy with routine.
When men, (especially those of the so-called cloth), get off their high-horse and turn their backs to this non-sense on these many methods and rites that go on without meaning in their congregations, then, and only then, will there be space provided to let God come in with His Way, Truth, and Life. Each act that is done in these theaters called ‘church’ is of its own not to be diminished, nor can any trivialize several of them, but when these rituals and methods replace Gods’ plan for that day, then they truly do become non-sense.
When man placed himself as chief honcho in these assemblies and call it ‘church’, we at that moment ceased to be a congregation of students of God and become a showpiece of the inventions of the idols of man’s mind. Routines and methods of religion don’t work here. But carnal man and his desire to imagine and invent another program, system, committee, sermon, and when we should pray together has overstepped, many times, the flow of what the Holy Spirit had for us. When the status and the piety of some preacher, and what he can strut before his congregation, thus becoming more important than He that he is to represent, then we have a problem- and folks we truly do have a problem.
Who cares about who started a new program, another committee, or what group they want to please, or even the skill that they use to deliver another empty sermon- I want to know who has the Heart of God? What man will stand up and tell the parishioners that God didn’t give him a message for that week? None of them will. It’s a status thing, a pride thing, and their egos won’t let that small bit of truth come out. So they continue with their meaningless rituals of religion until the whole congregation is dying of hunger and thirst Are these fleshly preachers and those that sit with them at there round table, innocently naïve enough to really think that these structures that are invented in the carnal mind of man is representing God, or do they truly know better deep down that they too are guilty.
Isn’t this too a form of death?
