Now if you read yesterday’s message, you will know that I really mean it when I say, honestly, I’m fed up with religion. But you will also know what kind of religion it is that turns me off.
It’s all ‘stage’ Parsons, and the church a kind of cloistered religious club appealing for money, moaning about the people who don’t come to its services on a Sunday. Well, anyone with any sense would run a mile away from that kind of thing.
But surely you can’t be fed up with the real thing, that’s dynamite. It’s all about Jesus Christ, it’s concerned about taking sinful self-centred people, cut off from God and without a hope in the world, and filling them with joy and a purpose for living, and this can only be described as a miracle.
It dares to say that human nature can be changed and then gives the power to do it. It dares to believe that Christians together, and that’s what the New Testament means by the word ‘church’, can turn the world right way up when they forget themselves and put their Lord at the centre where He belongs.
Read the Acts of the Apostles, Chapters 2, 3 and 4, for example, today, and tell me, how can anyone find that dull?
If you want to know more about that kind of spiritual dynamite, then read tomorrow’s message but in any case the real thing doesn’t depend upon a kind of religious belief or a creed, it depends on a living personal experience with Jesus Christ. That experience is available to you today.