Sadly, we're often guilty of allowing "religion" to replace the gospel. Religion...with all it's rituals, rules and never-ending to-do lists keeps us forever coming up short. It was a problem in the early church in the Bible and it's a problem now. We obey God out of thankfulness for what He did on the cross. Not to win His favor.
Do any of these "isms" sound familiar?
- Formalism: the gospel is reduced to church activities and service disconnected from the heart and how life is lived
- Mysticism: the gospel is reduced to dynamic emotional and spiritual experiences
- Activism: the gospel is reduced to participation in Christian causes
- Biblicism: the gospel is reduced to mastery of the biblical content and theology
- Psychology-ism: the gospel is reduced to the healing of emotional needs
- Social-ism: the gospel is reduced to a network of fulfilling Christian relationships
- Legal-ism: reducing the gospel to "good works" that can be earned for salvation.
When the church of the Galatians started perverting the gospel of Jesus with the law, Paul came to meet with them and he was furious! I love what he told them (it's meant for us today, too). Paul said, "I can't believe your fickleness- how easily you have turned traitor to Him who called you by the grace of Christ by embracing a variant message! It is not a minor variation, you know; it is completely other, an alien message, a no -message, a lie about God. Let me be blunt; If one of us-even an angel from heaven-were to preach something other than what we preached originally, let him be cursed!" He goes on to say, "is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily. You crazy Galatians! Did someone put a hex on you?"
Let us remember Paul's admonishment when we begin to add things to the gospel. Paul ends his message by telling the Galatians, "as for me, I am going to boast about nothing but the Cross of our Master, Jesus Christ."
my husband said I should add a disclaimer about the versions of the Bible I use. I read the King James Version, NIV, The Amplified Bible and the Message. I acknowledge that many people have problems with versions other than the KJV but I personally believe they are all for us to use today. The Message is a "paraphrased" version of the Bible and I use it often in my blogs because the words are how we speak today. But it is a "reading Bible" and not a "study Bible". From now on, I will try to remember to note the Bible version I am using in a blog.
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