Did you know that there was a very impressive kind of religion that god can’t stand? Did you know there was such a thing?

I’ve got the account of it right in front of me. It is a detailed statement in which God says that men will build beautiful shrines inside which they think they can enclose God, but God is the God of the heavens and the earth. You can’t lock him up in the church or your religion.

The writer then gives a list of things concerned with religion that he says God just can’t stand. He says that a genuine shrine, a pure place of worship, is an honest, broken and humble heart that trembles at God’s word. That God can live with.

But the other kind which can involve beautiful ritual and sacrifice, all laid down in God’s law, this writer says has become absolute abhorrent to God.

What is it that makes religion something that the living God can’t stand? Well, one list you will find contained in the statement from which I have been reading. It’s in the early part of Isaiah, Chapter 66. In it God says that people will do all the religious things but will not listen when he speaks, and keep on doing evil and think that their impressive religion will somehow act as a cover-up.

Jesus of course knew exactly where this kind of prophetic voice came from, for in fact it was the same message he preached over and over again. Jesus said “The time is coming, and is now, when real worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth”. And he himself came to make that relationship and that worship possible.