We all hate religion! Amen? AAAAAAAMMMMEEEENNNNNN! Good and hearty!
Most of us define religion as what some other guy thinks we need to do to please God and we don't agree and we don't want to. We are right about the other guy's religion but we are often blind to the religion we ourselves build around God. We all are guilty of building towers of religious thought around our relationship with Christ. We each dwell in our own ivory towers of Babel as we seek out those who agree with us or those we can sway over to our way of thinking. Some are successful in aquiring workers to help build and maintain the tower they have created, while others work and maintain alone. As the towers rise higher, those within rise higher and higher above all of those of whom we are commanded to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We who are to be light and salt in the world are removed from that which we are to preserve and those whom we are sent to enlighten by our attempt to reach God. Trapped in our towers of religious thought, we become worthless and fit for nothing but to be cast out and trampled underfoot.
In the first moment when Jesus is revealed to us, (or the moment of our salvation, or when we are quickened, or converted, however the language of your's and my personal religious thought names it,) we are so immersed in Jesus and in the fact that He loves us and our sins are forgiven, that the Love that has filled us can't help but to spill over onto others. Then we begin to think of ourselves as having become more wise and mature and the tentacles of legalism begin to wind themselves around our heart and mind and we begin to imagine ourselves to be much more than what we are as we either create or adopt some religious code. We can't help it for as bees build hives, people build towers to heaven in an effort to be like God. We turn from Grace and turn again to keeping the Law.
Thankfully, our towers always eventually crumble and pass away. All that is of man and not God crumbles and passes away.
I am not a keeper of the Law. Sadly, I am a Law breaker. The harder I try to keep the Law, the more likely I am to break it. I agree with God that the Law is good but it is beyond me and He has designed it that way. God will not allow us to build towers that reach all the way to heaven for He does not desire that we reach Him. His desire is to reach down to us and for us to allow Him to envelope us in His Son Jesus Christ. That we should become like His Son by the power of the Love of God that is available in Christ alone.
Jesus is my Ten Commandments. He is my daily sacrifice for sin. Jesus is my ordinances and high holy days. I am His temple and His Holy Spirit lives in me. Though I am but a Law breaker, my life is completely hid in Him. Because I love Him, I desire to keep all that He commands and His command is Love. To first love God with my heart, my soul, and my mind, with all of my might and others as myself. I am to allow the Love that fills me through Him to flow to others and for that to have a chance of happening, my ivory tower of Babel must come down.
Father, keep me from religious legalism of my own making and also of others. Keep me in your Love and keep the simplicity of your command at the forefront of my mind. Keep me from sin and protect me from evil. Place me among those who need your Love and continually empower me to love them. Keep me in the moment, for I am not given to know times and seasons, and I don't know the exact hour of your coming but Your Kingdom is here in me now and I desire that through me, Your Will to be done on earth as it is in Heaven. In Jesus' Name.
For He has sent me "as" John to make a strait path for the Lord to follow and to be the watchman on the wall blowing the Trumpet, which I have done and will continue to do, not by my own authority, or knowledge, or strength, but by His strength, and knowledge, and authority...for without Him I can do NOTHING.
"Do we then make void the Law through faith? God forbid: yea we establish the Law." (Romans 3:31)
"And hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His Commandments, is a liar, and the Truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth His Word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in Him. He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself to walk as He walked." (1 John 2:3-6)
"Do we then make void the Law through faith? God forbid: yea we establish the Law." (Romans 3:31)
"And hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His Commandments, is a liar, and the Truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth His Word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in Him. He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself to walk as He walked." (1 John 2:3-6)
It is the strong man that chooses love and forgiveness through sacrifice of himself and his own desires, not following after the ungodly men of this world. His justification is in the Lord and he chooses to follow Me...in My very footsteps. ~ Jesus [Letters from God and His Christ - Volume 6 - Keep Not the Company of the Wicked, This is Where All Seeds of Dissension Grow]