The ultimate battle over mankind started in the garden of eden and still rages on today. It is the battle of good vs evil in the form of religion vs faith. Religion and faith are not synonyms, they are bitter enemies.
Religion can best be described as man seeking to please God. It is a system of rules, teachings, life styles, ceremonies, etc that promise to make man acceptable to God. To make man good enough. To allow man to improve himself.
Faith is the opposite. It is the realization that many can never make himself "good" but rather man mustered totally on God to do this. It is God seeking man. It is man stopping his labor to be good and having faith that God will perfect him.
In the garden there was 2 choices..... Rely on God for the basic understanding of good and evil, rely on God through faith to accept us, to perfect us, to love us just as we are, day by day. Or... Choice 2 was to take on the responsibility of knowing good and evil, to do the work of choosing ourselves, being good, day by day, of our own effort. That is the classic battle of religion (become like god) and faith (trust in him to accept and love us as is).
This is the same choice and battle we face today. All religion presents a set of rules (good and evil) that we must understand and follow... Day by day. All in an effort to improve ourself, make us acceptable to God, worthy, make us like God. It is man taking that apple once again to make himself as God, by rejecting God. Demanding the right to fix ourself, we are enough, we don't need God.
The Christian faith is opposite. It is an acceptance that man is horrible broken and evil at heart. We can never make ourselves clean, acceptable. No rules, no ceremony, no revelation will ever cleanse our evil hearts. And that's OK because as God instructed Adam in the garden, "trust in me"... Have faith. God himself wants to be our guide post, our leader, our measuring stick for good and evil. In the garden Adam didn't have to choose good and evil, he trusted God to guide him. Jess said he would write God's laws in our hearts, fill us with the wisdom of the comforter, to speak to us from within, to be our guide through all things, and most importantly, he would personally cleanse us. We do not need religion... Because through faith in jess we have been made perfect. There are no rules, no ceremonies, no revelations required to make us perfect. He does it for us.
It was religion that crucified jesus, it was the rules and laws of religion that put him on the cross. And religion today, of any flavor (Christian, Islam, atheistic, deistic, humanistic) will kill us. Religion fails because man can not be changed from the outside in. To ge truly clean, and at peace with our creator, requires a new, changed, purified heart.
Faith works inside out, change the heart and the rest of man will follow. Religion works outside in, act certain ways and ignore what is deep inside. Religion doesn't work. Man can not redeem himself through his actions. Man can not repay his debt on his own. Faith forgives that debt and sets us free.
We have the same choice today, each of us, to live by faith and let God himself redeem us through jesus or eat the Apple of religion and be responsible to be like God on our own. Only faith can succeed. Only the humility of admitting "I can never be perfect inside" and turning all trust to God.
Through faith we return to the garden, where man started. We live day by day through the wisdom and comfort of the Holy Ghost. Rules, laws, ceremonies, are all gone. All that remains is truth, rest, peace, clean. Faith, in jesus as our savior, in the Holy Ghost as our daily guide. In our creator who loves us dearly and is patiently waiting for us to stop... And let him love us.
Faith, not religion.
Posted via Blogaway
