Bad Religion and the Resurrection of Jesus, by F. Remy Diederich

Bad Religion

…and the resurrection of Jesus.

Did you know that Easter is a victory over bad religion?

Bad Religion

Bad Religion is when religion pushes people away from God rather than helping people connect with him. It's when the people in the religion are oppressed with manipulations and control. Bad religion is when a few are preferred over the majority. And when people are prevented from experiencing God in his fullness.

Thankfully, Jesus confronted bad religion, was crushed by bad religion, and then conquered bad religion by his resurrection. Let me explain…

The Resurrection Overcame Bad Religion

When Jesus came back to life, it validated his indictment against the chief priests and the bad religion of their Temple worship. The resurrection gave Jesus the last word. He lived, yet the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D.  If we miss that, we miss one of the key themes that Jesus was trying to communicate in his ministry. 

Jesus needed a "new wine skin" for the ministry of his church. Sadly, many churches today offer nothing different from Temple worship. People go to a building out of a sense of obligation, following rules and traditions made by men, thinking that it pleases God. But what I want us to see is that the resurrection offers more than the hope of victory over sin and death. The resurrection opened the door to worship God in a new way.

Good Religion

 Jesus told a woman about a new kind of worship:

...a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” John 4:23,24

If you want to know what worshipping in "the Spirit and Truth" looks like, all you have to do is open the book of Acts in the New Testament. You won’t find people mindlessly filing into a Temple to put in their time. You see people whose lives have been changed by Jesus and who live lives of purpose and passion out of a sense of gratefulness.

It’s not a dead religion but a community of people all sharing their gifts and talents to help others. They’ve become the salt, light, and city on a hill that Jesus talked about. They are an expression of God's kingdom having come to earth as it is in heaven.

An Alternative to Bad Religion

I want to issue an invitation.  I’d like to invite you to engage in what God is doing in our world today. Maybe you have left the church, and I get that because I dropped out of church for many years. But Jesus didn’t die and rise from the dead only for us to quit on him. No one wins in that scenario. Judas did that and it didn’t help anyone. It didn't solve anything.

We can point our finger at bad religion and use it as our excuse to opt out...sitting back and criticizing “those hypocrites.” Or we can point to Jesus - his life, death and resurrection - as our reason for opting in. We can fulfill his vision for what it means to be God's people, becoming a part of the solution to bad religion.

I hope you’ll see the resurrection of Jesus as an invitation to join Jesus in creating a new community of worship…one that he and we can be proud of sharing in.

Prayer:Jesus, I’m convinced that your heart still breaks today as you see how bad religion robs people from a true relationship with you. Thank you for confronting it, allowing yourself to be crushed by it, and then conquering it. God, please save us from falling into the trap of bad religion. We are as capable of that as anyone. Might we not waste what you fought so hard to achieve. Might we be the people you called us to be...salt, light, and a city on a hill.

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