My World of Wasted Worship

It was easy for me to be a Christian when I was a kid. My dad and mom, grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers and cousins were Christians. I grew up in a big church with exciting Sunday schools. I had a pretty happy childhood. My parents were financially responsible and emotionally attentive. I got it pretty good. Life wasn't perfect, but really it was a ton better than what a lot of people even wish for. Partway through college, though, I grew sick with my religion. A series of shut doors drove me to bitterness and despair. The futility of purity became apparent and my sacrifices were not buying me the lifestyle I believed I deserved.

When I left religion

There were things I wanted in life and my idea was that God would not let me down if I had faith that He would do the things I wanted and asked. I quoted Matthew 7:7-12 in my prayers, sure that if I reminded God of those red words in my Bible, He'd understand that He had to give me what I was asking for. If those things did not happen like I demanded, then God's love would be exposed as a scam.

At that crossroads, God showed me the door out. I was afraid to leave the safety I'd known in my religion, but I could not take any more broken promises. I was fully convinced that I had earned better treatment than I was getting. Based on my pursuit of a lifestyle of sacrifice and self-denial, it seemed fitting that God would line me up with some choice benefits and open the floodgates of opportunity.

But I had jumped through these hoops for all the wrong reasons, subjecting myself to a school of thought that was better at teaching Christian soldiers self-denial than surrender to the Spirit. I was a slave set free who would not abandon his shackles. For the first time in my life, being a Christian became extremely inconvenient and uncomfortable. I almost left. God didn't beg me to stay or bargain for my devotion - not like I really hoped He would. He'd already earned my love and He knew I needed to realize that.

Back to the basics ONE MORE TIME!

Like many, I'm prone to join gatherings in the name of Jesus, sing about Jesus, and talk about what Jesus said; but somehow entirely miss the point of it all. It's an attempt to follow the law in accordance with the stipulations outlined by the 'contract of salvation.' We're taught that Heaven's real estate is only granted to those who agree to give up smoking, swearing, and general debauchery, thereby preventing their names from fading from the Lamb's book of life.

Jesus died so that we can no longer be slaves to the eternal consequences of sin. Yet we still live as slaves to our commitment to rid ourselves of sin, denying the far-reaching cleansing power of Christ's blood to declare us justified and innocent. This obsession distracts us from the higher calling to be salt and light. I'm not saying that we should sin all the more because of grace, but is avoiding evil causing us to forget the good to be done? There is literally nothing to be earned in order to enter God's kingdom. There's no price left to be paid. When Jesus paid the price for our sins, He paid it all. There's no remaining balance, there's no convenience fee, no processing charge, no nothing. 

How different would the church be if more people stopped living like they still needed to earn the crown of life and started living out of gratitude and thanksgiving that it's already been granted? A non-refundable, irrevocable, unconditional, expiration-free pass to Heaven has been bestowed upon those who merely acknowledge Jesus as God and His death as our rescue from eternal damnation. We would give so much more of ourselves and with such joy! But we continue to carry our own burdens and that's why I no longer wonder why so few Christians are genuinely excited about their religion.

On graphite and wax

If you keep using a pencil or a crayon without sharpening it regularly, you lose the point. Jesus was questioned as to the greatest commandment in Matthew 22:34-40 and He responded, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,'" and then followed it up with, "'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" The point is that our lives should be centered around the goals to love God and to love people. Apart from these fundamentals, even the great commission is nonsense!

In other words, God is saying, "Stop worrying so much about your guilt! I paid the price for your sin so you can, instead, spend your energy simply worshiping me and loving the people I created." As we align our hearts with the mission to express love to our Creator and His creation, the grip that sin has on our lives will be weakened as our minds are enveloped with the character of God's presence. Instead of trying to empty our lives of sin, we could be filling our minds with love until there's no more room for sin to abide within us.

Purification, after all, is a process only Jesus can do and only when we surrender ourselves to Him. And many times, surrender means accepting that some thorns of sin and addiction may never be removed from our lives, but resolving to praise the Lord regardless because we've been saved.

Light and darkness

If we identify sin as an absence of love, you can see why it might be silly that we work so hard to avoid an absence rather than embracing a presence. I have sin in my life. I have a lot of it. Knowing what I know about myself, I consider my ministry an abomination. But I've witnessed a re-focus in my life. The beauty of grace is that it offers those who worship God to direct their attention away from the letter of the law and towards the spirit of the law. Our freedom from sin does not necessarily mean that we will be delivered a life free of sin. It means that we can invest and focus our energies on loving people: not trying to avoid sin. As we know God better, sin will have no room to continue to abide in our lives. Until the day I die, despite my greatest efforts, I will be corrupt and twisted. But my focus today is that I will try, as often as possible, to act in love and gratitude toward God, others, and myself.