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It's not a religion, it's a relationship. This week on the Why do Christians podcast, Hey,

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welcome to the show. My name is Mark dickey. I host the afternoon show on the bridge radio station. My co hosts are two of my favorite pastors, Pastor Burton, Pastor Josh. Guys. Do you have a relationship with Jesus? Yeah, yeah, I think so I would hope. And would you consider yourselves religious? Yes, absolutely, yeah. Episodes over, all right, wow.

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So, I mean, you guys have to have heard that phrase before, right? Yeah, sure, yeah, so I definitely, as a high schooler, I was taught that. I mean, I did grow up in a religious household, and it didn't look the way that my relationship with Christ began that phrase relationship, and I started denying, like, Oh no, I'm not religious. Religious is this thing? I'm connected with God, like, and everybody else got it wrong. You're the real one. Yeah, 2000 years of history, yeah, wrong

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this. I feel like this episode is already sounding way too one sided, maybe. Okay, well, hold on, hold on, hold on all right, because you're not alone. I've used that language in the past before. Sure, me too, sure, yeah, maybe. And if you're watching, you too, you know you're a good company, man, we're not, we're not judging you. We're not mocking like, come on, same fan. And you know what we should say? What is not that we're mocking people, but is it a trendy phrase that got picked up and we've kind of lost the meaning behind it? I think so that's probably really what we're trying to say. Yeah, because the thought goes, Hey, listen, you don't want to be stagnant. You don't want to be just dedicated to an empty dogma. Instead, you can have a real relationship with God, right? That's Biblical. I mean, that's clearly like, there's all kinds of verses that talk about this idea of being God's family, or the knowledge of Christ, like knowing him surpassing

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human understanding. So yeah, that's absolutely real.

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And so I think the intention is good. I just think the phrase isn't accurate, yeah, I at least the way it made sense to me. Growing up, I would hear the stories of Jesus and how his constant enemy was the Pharisees, religious jerks, the religious people. And I think that's kind of where this narrative comes from, right? Right? Is that Jesus was anti religion. So when we put Jesus in the box of religion, then we're kind of undoing what he came to, you know, tearing the temple down. Yeah, yeah. You know, now that you said, Now you put it like that, it makes me think that a big part of it is us comparing righteousness like not with the standard God has given, but with each other. That right, that when I when I used to say, Oh, I'm not religious, already had pictures in my head of certain people that I was better than, wow, right? That I had, I had a relationship that was more in line with Jesus versus them, and those stale and dead people and so and so that wash tombs, right? Yeah. And so it was. It was that idea that, Oh, I don't want to be like them. I want to be more like this picture that's in my head, vibrant and connected to God, yeah, yeah. And it was always my picture. And I think that's, you know, it wasn't like the religion or the faith that the scripture was talking about. It was just what was in my head. I don't want to be like them. I want to be like, Yeah, this vibrant. And that's a big part of it, right? When we use that terms that it brings us very much internal to self and not looking towards God. Well, that kind of, I mean, look, maybe, maybe this is me being selfish or partial because I'm clergy.

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Could totally be okay. I do think when it comes to the

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comparison to Pharisee of like, hey, we want to be like those Pharisees. I agree, but let's be really careful to not label a fellow believer as a Pharisee.

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And the reason I say that is like, hey, somebody that might practice the Christian faith in a way that's different than you do in terms of different liturgy, Sunday service, styles, music, whatever. Oh, yeah, that's very different from someone who sees Christ in front of them bodily, doing miracles and says, I'm not going to believe. That's like, not just that, but like, actively working to get people to not believe in Jesus.

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Like, that's a Pharisee. That's what he's rebuking that. And like, when they when they put human tradition on par with scripture, he has a problem with that. But let's just be clear here that I think usually that kind of comparison is not apt. Okay, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's when the crazy part is we do all the

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time, and in worship, you know, if I'm more expressive, then I'm more alive, right? I'm more faithful, versus the person like you were saying, who's more contemplative and more just quieter? I look at that and like, oh, that's fair say, like, Oh, they're not really. They got far brother. Why? They got fire brother? Yeah, they don't have that deep relationships I have. Yeah, that's right. I just watched the Hulk Hogan documentary, so I got the word brother in my vocabulary a lot more. Yeah, so the concept of relationship over religion, where did that come from? Like, does it have an origin point? Yeah, not, not definitively, in any place I could pin down in terms of like, this is the published work that says, you know,

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it's not a religion, it's a relationship. William Wallace, and I couldn't find anything like that, right? What I could find was a progression of thought. And there's some, there's some key moments, they could take our religion, that's right, but they'll never take our relationship, that's right. I was hoping somebody was gonna break. That's great. What I could find was you can start to see this kind of language being used in revivalist movements. So whether that be guys like Billy Sunday or you think like old tent revivals, or even like Second Great Awakening, where there shifts in emphasis to this idea of it not being based upon religious practice, but like, Hey, have you personally connected with God, right? Rather than it being, hey, this is the religion of my parents, and I've inherited it. Do you have a relationship with Christ where you're going to him and you've believed on Him to save you that kind of thing. So you see a little bit of it there, but then I'll tell you a place where it really picked up steam was, there's a there's a great, and I'm gonna say great. There's a great parachurch organization still in existence called Campus Crusade for Christ. Oh, yeah. Crew, yeah. Crew, exactly. They're on college campuses

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now. They really popularized it in their means of evangelism. And they would put out this thing called the like, it's called the four spiritual laws and stuff like that, which about when. How long ago did they do this? I want to say the 70s. It was Bill Bright. And if I'm getting the decade wrong,

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I'm sorry about that. So I think it'd be the 60s or the 70s, okay? But what they would do, the emphasis was all on personal decision to receive Christ. And so you can start to see this shift of like but they're also they're reacting against what we might call like a dead formalism

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of mainline churches of the day, where, again, it's about doing something for the again, I'm not trying to speak of anyone's heart, but just it's about, you know, like religious attendance is not just

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condoned, it's expected. And you have people leaving

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church in droves because they're, they're they're perceiving spirituality as restrictive or oppressive, and as a number of reasons why? Well, well if, let's say 70s, that would mean they were probably born in the if it's college students in the 70s, they were probably born in the 50s, right? And when you think of the 50s and just the formal the post World War Two,

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yeah, I can see religion being very structured. And when we know that in history, sure, it was just very there.

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There was no electric guitar on stage. Well, yeah, and, but you've also got a cultural version of Christianity. Again, it's commonplace to being an American.

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And so you could have people in church where, hey, they go to church, because that's the social club of the area. It's so you're not seen as weird, right? Like, that's weird first to think about, because, like, church, Inc, is now in the minority, but back then, no, like, you would have people, they're, they're going to church. That's, that's what you do on a Sunday. I'm old enough to remember stuff being closed on Sundays because of church, you know?

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And so you got a movement of people, and it's not just them, but, but they're probably the most famous group where they're saying things like, Listen, don't just go through the motions. You need to actually know Jesus. And so you start to see this shift of like, hey, it's not about a religion, it's about a relationship. And unfortunately, I think you couple that with also

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a history of perhaps human fallenness and corruption in churches, church leadership scandals over the years. It creates a distrust towards organized religion and perhaps power. And so this emphasis from it's not religion, it's a relationship. Can sometimes be.

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Taken to this other extreme of, hey, religion is bad, and I think that's something that we're seeing now, culturally

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guilty, okay, yeah, yeah. I don't want to say I was brainwashed to think that, but I can clearly like what you're saying resonates so specifically with growing up as a Christian, like, no, the way, you know, traditional church bad, free, flowy. Jesus loves us good, right? And I get the heart behind it,

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because, yeah, who wants to be part of something that's corrupt, for sure. The problem is, when the Bible talks about religion, it doesn't always talk about it in the negative. So in other words, like, in fact, there's many says what we would associate as something being a religion the Bible affirms.

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And so I think when we, when we adopt this posture of, hey, it's not a religion, it's relationship. And specifically, it's all about me and my relationship with God, we actually gut the heritage of what it means to be a Christian, because you think about like Acts two, the first church ever, first gathering of believers, first people converting, one of the markers of being Christians that says they devoted themselves acts 242, through 47 they devoted themselves to The apostles, teaching, to the breaking of bread, to fellowship. And word that we translate there as fellowship with Greek Koinonia. It means, like intentional gathering with they devote themselves to the apostles teaching. Okay, so they're recognizing spiritual authority the breaking of bread. This is almost uniformly believed to be talking about communion, like religious ordinances, like, and this is like, where people who enter in through baptism, which is also an ordinance or sacrament, depending on your tradition. So the idea of, hey, there's rites, there's rituals, there's authority structures, there's a charity is another one like, they sell their stuff and give away the money to help the poor, right? Like this idea of, hey, there's intentional structure that's bad because it's just me and Jesus. I don't think the scriptures support at all. And so I like to just say like this, Hey, that like the solution to Bad Religion is not no religion. Solution to Bad Religion is good religion. Same way, the solution to bad theology is not no theology. The solution to bad theology is good theology.

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That's That's good. I mean, you've even got me thinking about the

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because we've been so anti religion

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that we've seen deconstruction happening. And a whole, whole generation of people who were raised in, I'll say the church relationship and not religion, are saying, No, this isn't for me, and they're choosing no religion or no theology instead of bad theology.

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Yeah, correct. I think I mean just off the

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I think about how it hurts, just in sense of we're putting aside a body of understanding, like when the Scripture is written that Christ Himself spoke through His apostles and set out for us a structure for our own good, like pastors and deacons and elders and all of this structure that's like, oh, Bad Religion, like God set up

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so so that we would be cared for and kept and kept in the faith and looked after and just and you just think of just how much gets lost when all that's just labeled as something to be thrown away, versus like this body and wealth of

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of religion that that that Christ has given us, we just kind of toss that away, which is just pretty sad. Yeah, I think also, like

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the Bible presupposes, in addition to explicit texts, it presupposes that you are part of an organized version of Christianity. I mean, that's why you have instructions about here's qualifications for leaders, here's here's a stuff around orderly worship. Here's instructions for

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giving or charity. Here's instructions around or stories around baptisms like it, you know. Here's a passage on, hey, listen like, you know, don't be quick to be on teacher, because we who teach your image more strictly. Here's another one about, listen to your leaders. Like leaders like it assumes that you are plugged into an organized community of believers. So I would say the testament not only affirms organized religion. I think it absolutely teaches it, you know? Yeah, no, yeah. I would say that we want it to teach it, right? Because, like, what would it be if God did this mighty thing through Jesus Christ, and it had and it can't tell me anything about how to raise my family. He can't tell me how to gather with other people who believe the same thing, yeah, and it can't tell me how I should be in my marriage. But whereas every other false religion is telling them all that it.