The Heart of True Religion

I am not at home this weekend, so worshiped this morning with another congregation. The pastor, David Reese, gave a very powerful sermon on the heart of true religion from Colossians 2:18-19.

He said the heart of false religion is any form of religious devotion or thinking that in any way diminishes the glorious sufficiency of Jesus Christ. In this passage Paul mentions three things that were involved in the false religion that he is combatting.

First is asceticism which can include self-abasement, humility, fasting or harsh treatment of the physical body. These can be positive and beneficial things in our sanctification process, but because of our natural tendency to self-righteousness we turn even our asceticism into a form of pride and as a platform from which to judge others. Pastor Reese pointed out that the sanctification process is just that, a process. It is also very personal as God deals with each one of us in various ways and at various times. Every Christian should be growing and none of us should judge others, nor allow others to judge us, by spiritual milestones attained.

Secondly, Paul mentions the worship of angels. Pastor Reese said there is much debate about what this means, but the bottom line is that they were overemphasizing something other than Christ crucified. Even good things, true things, biblical things that we hold dear can be overemphasized to the detriment of our focus on the Lord Jesus--sound doctrine, pure worship,etc. can easilly become idols.

The third aspect of false religion is arrogance. If we are puffed up about our spiritual maturity it is simply spiritual arrogance and Paul says if this is true about us, we are not spiritually minded at all, but fleshly minded.

Pastor Reese said that really these three things are only symptoms of false religion. The heart of false religion is that those promoting these things are apart from Christ. They are not holding fast to the Head. If we latch onto anything other than Christ as the focus of our religion we are, in fact, cut off from God.

The heart of true religion on the other hand is very simple. If you have Christ, you have everything you need for a relationship with God. He is the fullness of the Godhead, in Him we are complete. We are not comfortable with this simplicity because of our legalistic bent. We like to have a checklist that shows we are being faithful and that we are more spiritual than others--oops, I guess we just regressed back to point #3 - arrogance.

The bottom line is that we are not to get our religion from other Christians--nor are they to get theirs from us--we are to get our religion simply and solely from Jesus Christ.