Somewhere along the way, the performance-based ideology of our society intersected with our spirituality and it created a religion or a dutiful exercise in our efforts to know God. In life, when we perform, we know we must meet certain standards to meet a certain goal or expectation. If the stakes are high, we push ourselves to achieve what we want to achieve and our minds and behavior become focused on the goal. As a result, we often have to disconnect from everything else so that we can maintain our compliance to these rigid expectations and the drive to achieve propels us forward.
In the United States, we live in a capitalistic society, and although it provides wonderful opportunities for people, it creates an underlying mindset that our value and worth equates to high performance and production quotas. If we perform and achieve, our value will grow and we will earn our rewards. It makes good sense in the secular world and it often pays off in the business world.
But, as in every other comparison to man-made, worldly systems, this performance-based theory runs counter to God’s message and His view of Christianity. The Lord is seeking those who will submit to His ways, follow Him, and seek His guidance. He wants us to desire to walk with Him and to surrender our lives to His purpose and for His glory. When we get caught up in religion, we are generally focused on our own outcomes and image. Frequently, the desires of our heart reveal that our efforts to have relationship with God are based solely out of our human awareness of Him and our ideas of what we believe He wants from us. Sadly, these theories are a result of not knowing Him properly and are also a result of the performance-based ideals that we naturally project onto Him. This repetitive cycle of our minds and behaviors expose that we are perhaps more religious than we are Christian.
When we truly do not know the Lord, we make up ways to get to know Him from our own human experience. These efforts are futile and will eventually collapse because we do not have the strength, wisdom, capacity, or persistence to maintain such high-level pursuits. We become tired, weary, and accomplish nothing spiritually, and our “religion” crashes and burns from the weight of our own ignorance.
Many of us have learned this the hard way, but God wants to have relationship with us. He does not expect us to perform for His love, grace, and mercy. He wants us to know Him through His Word, and when we do, we will experience an internal transformation that shapes our hearts in ways that naturally desires to seek Him. When our hearts genuinely desire Him, we will find that obedience is no longer a task or a duty, but instead a heartfelt longing to please Him. This lifestyle draws upon His strength, wisdom, and persistence and has the capacity to sustain us through anything.
Being religious is a function of the mind and a behavioral display of our lack of understanding. Being a Christian who truly walks with the Lord, reveals an intimate relationship of the heart and a willing surrender of our lives to the One we so passionately desire to please. Religion collapses. Christianity endures.
http://www.helium.com/items/1189258-christianity-religion-knowing-god-being-a-christian-being-religious-pleasing-god
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