Can’t we all just get along?

Posted on Feb 24, 2016 in BLOG, pastors pen |

 

The USA is partly founded on religious freedom of expression, and we sure have it these days with a multiplicity of religions seemingly gaining momentum in many areas. On the eastside – my neck of the woods – there are a variety of temples and ‘alternative’ worship centers popping up all over.
 
Middle American Judeo-Christian values are being challenged on a broad scale from all sides: both religious and non-religious or ‘secular’. Is Christianity seems to be losing its relevance. Are we in some sort of evolving societal dynamic, and do we need to wake up, smell the coffee (ah yes, the Northwest is famous for that) and change. Can’t we all just get along and agree that as long as you believe in something for the betterment of mankind, that’s OK – a sort of ‘live and let live’ approach?

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it. After all we can then avoid the bigotry and hatred that seems to emanate from taking a fundamentalist view of religion – whatever it may be.

My two cents follows.

I believe that when any person encounters the risen Christ, Jesus and ‘tastes and sees’ that the Lord is truly good, they will spend their life’s energies wanting to spread the fragrance of Christ’s love for all and be recognized by what they are for, and not so much by what they are against. To me Jesus is attractive, He was surrounded by His friends – the sinners. Only religious folk whose ego, pride and position was tied up with their legalism, shunned Him and would not draw near. Eventually these types engineered His crucifixion. Fortunately, a unique thing happened (Easter is coming by the way), He rose again from the dead, a fact that when properly and honestly researched is without contradiction.

The Christian faith is meaningless when you take the resurrection out of the picture. But you can’t: it’s unique to the Christian faith. All the other  roads up the so-called ‘mountain of religious salvation’ stop somewhere short of this. Yes, they all have some set of ritual, beliefs, temples, priest etc, but only Jesus as revealed in the Bible is risen from the dead.

Besides, the following pointers set Him apart from the rest and make a relationship with Him eternally life changing:

  1. No other religion gives you an eternally satisfying and meaningful relationship with your creator. Jesus Himself spoke of this with the Samaritan woman at the well:
 

John 4:13-14 13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Her life was trapped in a seeming endless cycle of unfulfilling relationships with less than perfect men. Only when she met Jesus- man number seven, did she get set free from looking for love in all the wrong places. She was radically changed by her spiritual encounter with her maker.
 

2. No other religion teaches that God almighty comes to make His home in us! Jesus Himself said that it was God’s heart to be with His people in the most intimate way possible: to live within them. Quite unique and revolutionary for the religionist who always had God off at a distance somewhere.

John 14:23b “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him”
 
3. In no other religion can a person actually partake of God’s divine nature. Yep, that’s right: only through Christ’s promises can anyone who calls upon Him receive the very nature of God on the inside. Think on Verse four especially.
 
2 Peter 1:2-4 Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, 3 as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, 4 by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
 
4. No other religion frees you from running the never-ending ‘works’ treadmill. What I mean by ‘works’ is that salvation is a product of our own efforts to keep a set of rules and regulations. God’s reward is seen not as a gift, but as a reward for our discipline, supposed pure heart motives etc. Surely a recipe for failure.
 

Take Saul, later to be renamed Paul (the great apostle of the New Testament) for example: he was tops in his religious circle, a prime example of the type of person who was just ‘perfect’. Yet this religious perfection produced only tremendous persecution of true Christ followers. He was even accomplice to Stephen’s murder in Acts 8.

 

Acts 22:3-5“I am indeed a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, taught according to the strictness of our fathers’ law, and was zealous toward God as you all are today. 4 I persecuted this Way to the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women, 5 

Paul falls off his high religious horse on the Road to Damascus (modern day Syria) and his own agenda firmly rooted in legalistic Judaism comes crashing down with his realization of the love of the risen savior Jesus. He is completely turned around and follows the way of love from that point on.

Finally (for this blog),
 
5. No other ‘religion’ lays an axe at the root of the sin problem…. takes it completely away!!
 
John 1:29The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

 

John the Baptist, a prophet in his day, recognized Jesus for the radical fundamentalist He was: He had come not to put a band aid over sin, but to take it away! Remove it as far as the east is from the West.

Either Jesus did or didn’t take away the sins of the world. I believe He did. That is what I am for, what we are for.

His unique love for all mankind and His offer of deliverance from anything that falls short of His marvelous grace is what sets Him apart from the pack.
 
Let’s get along with this.