Grace / Jesus and bad religion
When Someone Adds Rules to Your Faith
A practice that helps somebody follow Jesus doesn't automatically become a requirement for everybody else.
I once told people that if they weren't spending half an hour to an hour every day in the Bible and in prayer, what were they even bothering for?
That was a long time ago, when I was very excitable. I didn't realize how it sounded until I heard myself say it out loud. I'd found something that worked for me, and I made it the measure of everybody else's faith.
That's an easy thing to do. You find something good, it helps you, and before long you're wondering what's wrong with everybody who doesn't do it your way.
Maybe you pray at a certain time. Maybe a particular style of worship means a lot to you. Maybe your church does something in a way you've always loved. There's nothing wrong with being grateful for those things.
The trouble starts when your way becomes the way everybody has to follow to be right with God.
I've been on both sides of that. I don't want to be bullied, and I don't want to be the bully either. Colossians has something to say to both.
Paul tells Christians to resist this pressure
begins with a "therefore." My old exegesis teacher used to say that when you see a therefore, you have to ask what it's there for. Here, it points back to what Paul has just said: God has made us alive in Christ, forgiven our sins, canceled our debt, and defeated the powers that stood against us.
Therefore, don't let anyone judge you over food, drink, festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths. And don't let anyone disqualify you over the supposedly superior religious experiences they're promoting ().
Those things sounded impressive to somebody. The people promoting them thought they knew what a really spiritual person looked like. Paul tells the Christians not to accept their verdict. He's writing Scripture, and he tells believers there are religious judgments they ought to refuse.
Disqualify is a sports word. In the long jump, if you step over the line before you jump, you're disqualified. Jesus is the one who made your faith qualified. Not you, and not them.
We sometimes think humility means accepting whatever a confident religious person says about us. But a person can be confident, insistent, and wrong. Somebody else's list doesn't overrule Jesus.
The practice and the demand are two different things
Should you be in the Word and in prayer? Of course. I've spent a whole lot of my life encouraging people to do both.
But maybe you've got a podcast you listen to on the way to work that fires you up about the Lord. Praise God. You found something that's good for you. Just don't come tell me I have to listen to that podcast to be holy.
I can help someone learn to pray without insisting they copy my schedule. I can recommend something that helped me without making their acceptance of my recommendation a test of their love for God.
The same thing happens with worship. I grew up singing a cappella, and I loved it. I can't hold my part. If I'm trying to sing tenor, I'm all over the place. But when a song has a great tenor line and I can find it, I just love it. I can be thankful for that and also not be a slave to it.
Some of the sweet folks I grew up with believe I'm going to hell for worshiping with instruments now. I don't have to condemn them back to be grateful for what they gave me.
A tradition can be a blessing. You can receive that blessing, thank God for it, and let another Christian do something different.
What is God actually asking of us?
Jesus said the whole law hangs on loving God and loving your neighbor. If that's God's command, then sin is failing to love God and people. All sin is relational. I can't sin against a chair. If my grandpa made it, I might have all kinds of feelings about it, but those feelings are about my grandpa.
That's why Paul can dismiss one argument about food and take another very seriously. I can't sin against a hot dog, whatever the mustard people think of us ketchup people. But in Corinth, the rich folks who didn't have to work showed up early and ate everything, and the poor folks who'd worked all day got there to find nothing left (). That's sinning with food, because it's about how you treat people.
Religious people can put tremendous effort into things that never get around to that question. We can be very strict about the schedule, the dress, the music, or the accepted words while treating actual people like dirt.
The love Paul calls for gives us plenty to do. It also gives us a way to ask whether all our religious activity is accomplishing anything good.
Is this helping us love God and each other? Is it nourishing people in Christ? Or have we become so attached to our method that we're willing to hurt people to preserve it?
Strict doesn't automatically mean holy
The people Paul describes had rules about what you could touch, taste, and handle. Their practices had a reputation for wisdom. They involved severity and self-denial, so they looked serious ().
But looking serious isn't the same as growing in Christ.
A person can be extremely disciplined and still be proud, cruel, and impossible to live with. A group can make its members miserable and call that misery spiritual progress. The difficulty of a practice doesn't tell us whether it has any value.
I asked the veterans at church once when chow was in basic. Six, twelve, and four-thirty, they said. Do you still have to eat at those times? No, because you got out. You might still like eating then, but nobody's yelling at you to get to the mess hall. Paul says we died with Christ to all those rules (). So why would we let them regulate us?
Paul points us back to Christ, the head who nourishes His body and holds it together. That's where the growth comes from ().
Good practices serve that relationship. When we make the practice itself the thing that secures our place with God, we've given it a job that belongs to Jesus.
I've been with people who loved Jesus and couldn't be at peace as they were dying, because they weren't sure they'd been right about enough. It's always grieved me. Because of what Christ did, the only thing we have to be right about is Jesus.
Be free and be grateful
Some things from your church background may still be precious to you. You may love the songs, the prayers, the meals, or the way certain people took care of you. You don't have to throw those good things away to acknowledge what was wrong.
And if a particular practice has become impossible for you to enjoy because of what people attached to it, you don't have to pretend otherwise.
We need ways of doing things. A church has to pick a time to meet and decide what to sing. Ed Hoskins, one of the elders at the first church I served full-time, was a big shot at NASA, and he used to tell the other elders, "Gentlemen, even God can't steer a train that's standing still." He was up for trying anything that wasn't overtly unscriptural or sinful to see what worked. Freedom in Christ lets us make those decisions and change them when there's a better way.
What we don't get to do is turn each decision into another condition of salvation.
I needed to learn that back when I was telling people how long their prayer time had to be. God is good, and He works with us right where we are. He didn't wait for us to reach some level before He grabbed a hold of us.
— tobe