Christianity vs Religion
Feb 13, 2009
Most people in our country think that Christianity is religion. In other words, they see Christians as those seeing the world in terms of good people and bad people with Christians being the good ones of course. They supposedly believe they are good because they avoid sin and try to do the right thing as followers of God. Though this may be the way many have lived and called it Christianity, it is not the Christian message at all. For example, Flannery O’Connor writes in Wise Blood of one of her characters, “There was a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”
I struggled to make sense of that quote for quite some time but now I have begun to wrap my mind around it. A religious person believes that if he/she avoids sin enough then God owes them or He will have to bless them or something to that effect. In other words, if I’m a good enough person, then I don’t really need Jesus at all; I don’t really have to encounter Him or do any business with Him—why would I, I’m good enough already. Moral or religious people have a habit of giving lip service to Jesus while actually believing that they never really need Him.
In contrast, true Christians know that our world isn’t filled with good and bad people of whom we are the “good.” Instead the world is filled with bad people and we are numbered with them. This is why I can’t “avoid” Jesus. I need Him. I need His life, His death, and His resurrection to be mine so that my evil can be paid for. I don’t want to avoid Jesus by pretending to be good; I want to encounter Him by admitting to be evil.
Of course, it is a scary thing to admit such sin before a holy God because our likely fear is that if we admit the truth then that holy God will strike us down. For religion, this would be true but nothing could be farther from the truth in Christianity. Jesus rejects the religious and welcomes the wayward. That’s why he tells the religious people of His day that “The prostitutes and tax collectors go into the
Jesus demonstrates this dramatically in Luke 18.9-14 where He pictures two men praying, one a religious Pharisee who looks down his nose at all the “bad” people who aren’t as good as him and one a tax collector (read: traitor against God and man) who beats his chest, refuses to even lift his eyes up to heaven and proclaims, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner!” Jesus concludes His comments thus, “I tell you the truth, this man [the tax collector] went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Don’t get caught confusing Christianity with religion and thus rejecting something out of hand before you understand it and don’t get caught being a religious person while thinking you are being a Christian. Only one man will “go down to his house justified” before God.
