Religion killed my friend

Steve McVey writes:

 Such shocking news. And sad beyond words. I was told that a pastor friend I knew years ago walked into the woods, pulled out a gun and killed himself. The man was known in his community as a busy, sincere and hard working pastor, but behind the scenes he had struggled with self-doubts, emotional and mental fatigue. They said that a big part of the reason for that was the demands he felt on himself by the people around him.

Sometimes it's just a short step between spiritual commitment and a religious prison and that short step makes all the difference. Love motivates actions coming from desire while religious rules become the bars in a religious cell. Desire leads to one and dead duty leads to the other. It’s the difference between a tiring sense of “ought-to” and thrilling sense of “want-to.”

Which one describes where you are? If you're trapped in dead religion, get out. You don't have to stay there. God certainly doesn't expect it of you. You may have done it for so long that to leave it seems like you're leaving God but that's not true at all. Driven religious duty is the furtherest thing from what God wants for you. In fact, He knows it can kill you.

Christ offers you much more than that. He wants you to experience Life as a soothing rhythm of grace. To know that kind of lifestyle, you may have to leave the lifestyle where you are and start again. God doesn’t need you to break the three-minute mile for Him. He just wants you to enjoy Him, knowing that everything else in your life will flow out of that

Religious prisons are filled with ticks that slowly sucks the lifeblood out of intimacy with God. He didn’t ask you to be His maid, but His bride. Of course you will be involved in spiritual activity, but it is to be the natural expression of your love for Him. Otherwise, it becomes a nothing more than a prison of performance.

Sincere people often find themselves in a place that can be compared to the man lost at sea in a life raft. Because he is dying of thirst, he begins to drink the seawater around him. The salt water causes him to become increasingly thirsty and his thirst causes him to drink more seawater. This vicious cycle will ultimately kill him.

This will be the fate of anybody who believes that doing more is the remedy for spiritual thirst. Sometimes the answer to our deepest need is met when we understand that the best way to move ahead may be to retreat.

Don’t let yourself to be pressured by the religious system that often dominates in modern Christian culture. It’s not that you are to become spiritually passive. Christ within you will see to it that doesn't happen. On the other hand, you are free to step away from any demand to do more than you feel in your heart you are intended to do.

Don’t let other people manipulate you into doing what they think you need to do. That’s not their call but yours. To stand on this fact sometimes requires be willing to accept the disapproval of others who try to pressure you into doing what they think is right for you.

Jesus didn’t come to help us be religious. Humanity already had that down pat. Far from it, He came to deliver us from empty religion, even orthodox, time honored religion. Jesus came to bring us into intimacy with God through Himself. In His earthly days, as in our day, those most offended by Him have been the religionists who have built their reputation around keeping their golden idols polished to a brighter shine than anybody else in town.

The idols are their own particular rules of the religious prison that must be observed. Those rules are the ones that most easily fit their own personality and temperament. They judge everybody else by whether or not they live up to their own personal standards. People are incidental. What matters is how you are behaving.

The fact is that even Jesus wasn’t a good churchman by the standards of the religionists of His day. He didn’t live up to what they thought He ought to be. To them, He had no convictions. He appeared to compromise the purity and integrity of their values by doing things like healing people on the Sabbath, by eating with the crooks (Publicans) and party-animals (sinners) of His day. He was a friend of the hookers and homeless. He didn’t separate Himself far enough from the riffraff, as every good churchman knew one should do. Consequently, He lost His reputation with the Pharisees, an incidental matter which didn’t seem to bother him at all. Jesus cared more about relationships than reputation. He still does.

A legitimate grace walk gently flows like water along a riverbank, refreshing everybody who happens to stumble upon our banks. It isn’t a flash flood of activity that honors God. He doesn’t lead us that way, but instead He has chosen to make “[us] lie down in green pastures. He leads [us] beside the still waters [where] He restores [our] soul” (Psalm 23).

Don't stay in a religious prison. Walk out. Otherwise, it can kill you. I know one man who proved it.