God in a Box (Concept)

The following quotes are from Wayne Jacobson from his latest issue of Body Life, you can read it here.


“You would think that if one of us was serving the Living God, it would look differently.”

“Religion is the same all over the world. It is a prescribed set of doctrine, rules, rituals, and ethics. It celebrates sacred space, exalts holy-men as gurus and tries to muscle its way into the culture. For 2000 years many have practiced Christianity as a religion, essentially no different than the others, except in who it claims to follow. But if one of us was serving a Living God, wouldn’t it look very different?”

“When we cram the life of God into a box, we rob it of its life and power and only distinguish it from other religions by claiming a more truthful doctrine. Could that be why Jesus didn’t teach his disciples how to gain a following or build institutions. He didn’t teach them how to meet on Sunday mornings at 10:00 with a worship band and a leader to lecture the others. He didn’t give them a prescribed set of behaviors that people were suppose to follow as the means to serve God.”
“No, he invited them into his Father’s house, and a reality of relationship with his Father that would transform them and opened the way for them to share that love with others. That you can’t put into a religion and trying to only chokes out any hope of relationship. Putting creed and doctrine above a growing friendship with him supplants the reality he offered us, no matter how correct our doctrine or moral our ethics.”

We’re either coming to Christ as a blank sheet ready for Him to write into our being Life, or we’re coming to him with our already established religious mind set (conceptual thinking) and trying to make what He says fit into what I have determined to be the truth.
Isn’t that what Nicodemus tried to do, meaning, it was a ignorant Palestinian ‘ditch digger’ Jesus came to in John chapter 3, it was a religious, pious, educated man of learning.
It would be surmised that his morality was well in check, having a good hold on what is good vs bad etc. When he hears Jesus saying to him he needs to be “born-again” he automatically tried to fit a heavenly truth (reality) into his established conceptual reasoning, look out Nick, you’re about to have a brain fart!

Is it any wonder there is such consternation within this demographic called “Christianity?”
I hear so many looking at what God is saying which is “spirit and truth” as merely viewed as a “concept” and trying through the energy of their flesh to make it fit into their living!
What ever happened to putting (that which is heavenly-spiritual) new wine into a new wine skin anyway?

Rich