I get it. The mockery of people who claim to believe in God is surely quite socially acceptable. Such a bandwagon is loaded. The smirks, the rolling of the eyes, the accusations of ignorance and inconsistency? I've heard a life full of insults directed toward me/any who claim to follow God.
I get it. And how often I know that such darts of complaint are justified. Guys like me seem to leave a trail of missteps; if not blatant contradiction to the very thing we espouse. For me? I admit failure.
Yet, I will not bow in hesitancy to such strong claims against the concept God has in place of rescuing mankind from the swarming pit of which we often find ourselves. He is more than religion. He is Life.
What has happened is society, in turn, has developed a religion of being anti-religious. I don't speak with blame. I get it. I get their frustration with us. I understand their injury when living among us. We should do better. And how we try. And, how sometimes we don't try and it appears we don't care.
But what the anti-religious religion doesn't get is that we are developing a faith in Jesus because we ran out of a self-improvement agenda. Our efforts to get it right on our own turned out to be futile.
We tried to save ourselves. Oh, how we tried. And those who choose to take cheap shots at us? Well, they were justified. Our high-minded looking down our noses did not come from the Spirit of God. Our bad.
We religiousers fail because we have bailed on humility and felt the need to parade our (self)righteousness. The anti-religiousers fall into the exact same trap; parading an attitude of smugness toward...the other smugness ones.
The Good News, the full-of-hope news, is that Jesus doesn't represent religion. He represents Life. Religion, don't you recall, is what executed him upon the Cross. Faith in God is so much different than faith in churchiosity.
Faith in God has an assurance of victory in the center of our demise. We need this. We all need this.
So just as those of us who admittedly need to park our high-horses and quickly dismount, so do those of the anti-religion religion. We cannot save ourselves; neither group can. Our mission is to find the one who can save us from this mess of being us...and Jesus can, does, and will.
Should you be one disgusted with the pride of people who are a deep part of church, your disgust most likely carries an equaled pride that you are not like us. Both fall into the ditch. So might it be possible that if we were to meet at the Cross we would find that both religions (the pro and the anti) would find saving grace that came straight out of Heaven?
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