You're listening to Mountain View Church Audio, Christ-centered teaching from the Wilderness City, Whitehorse, UConn. Here's this week's message. Karl Marx, who is the co-writer of the Communist Manifesto, wrote this. He said, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the masses, which that last part's the part that we know the best. He believed that religion disconnected, disadvantaged people from reality. And while I'm not a communist, I do believe that religion, in some ways, can disconnect people.
Thomas Jefferson, who is the third president of the United States, said that in every country, in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He has always been in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for the protection of his own. And while that's a generalization about priests, pastors, leaders, whatever that may be, in far too many historical cases, he wasn't wrong. Mahatma Gandhi said the most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion are equally noble motives. And I think there's no denying a lot of terrible things have been done in the name of religion throughout history. And less famously, but maybe more accurately, comedian Kathy Ladmore simply said, all religions are the same. Religion is basically guilt, but with different holidays. Sometimes I look at that and I think it's the best description of religion we have. So my name is David Harita. I'm the regional director for Fellowship Pacific. And welcome to Fellowship Sunday 2024. And in case you haven't picked up on it, today we're talking about religion. Really fun topic, religion. Why?
Because over the past decades, and maybe decades specifically, evangelicalism in North America has become kind of rule-based, looking for solutions at the expense of the mission that Christ has called us to. We've started into the pursuit of meaning through religious behaviors rather than through our identity in Jesus Christ. And we've seen that increasingly throughout COVID and post-COVID. And there's all kinds of indicators that that's true. So here's some of them. We see it in the rise of Christian nationalism, believing that somehow if we have control of the political system, we're going to have more of a Christian country.
We see it in the belief that we can protect ourselves and our families from spiritual dangers if we have a stronger, top-down, hierarchical, controlling kind of religion that tells people what to do. And there's no shortage of people who want to tell people what to do. We see it in the extremism of Christian people who either want more rules or want no rules at all, going to those two different outside edges. We see it in a weekly litany of pastors, celebrity pastors particularly, and leaders who we've put our faith in religiously and come crashing and burning, seems case after case after case. We see it in domestic violence in the church and abuse at a rate that is equal to that of society, even though in the church we ought to be different, know something different, and live something different. The danger of religion has haunted Christianity from its inception, and nothing's really changed. It's a problem that was true in the early church. It remains very real, very pervasive in the church today. And sometimes it's really big. Sometimes it kind of has a superficial sort of tension. For example,
A number of years ago, I was doing communion in a church, and the woman who was doing that, preparing all the elements, the bread, the juice of the communion service, came to me and said, do we need to use bread, which is what we normally used, or could we use crackers? And I said to her, sure, we could use crackers. Some churches like Little Wafers, there's all kinds of ways that people actually practice communion. And she said, okay, so you're sure I can do it? Yep, go ahead. If you want to use crackers in the next service, go ahead. So the next service was our Thanksgiving Sunday service. We had communion right in the middle of that church service. And in that, we were trying to focus on Jesus as the center of what we're doing and the center of Thanksgiving. And so we were thinking of his body and his blood. It's an important time, which we all know. So I got up there like you kind of do in church and whoever prepared it, put a little cloth over the bread to hold it. I pulled the cloth off the bread and I looked down and I realized there were these little cheese crackers. And I wasn't expecting that, so I picked one up.
And to my surprise, this little cheese flavored cracker was actually a duck. It was a little cheese flavored duck. And I just stood there and there was a couple of people that were serving beside me. And I turned to the one right beside me. We had our backs to the congregation. I said, I said.
Crackers, not quackers. And he started to shake, which probably didn't help the communion service. And I just stood there for a minute. I thought, I don't know what to do with this. Not sure what to do with this. And then I finally said, well, look, I think this is the literal case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. So I just went and got a chair. We went through the service. I turned the chair around so I could sit and watch it as it went out to all the people thinking to myself, well, I might go down on this. I may as well watch. And there was person after person as this went through, stopping, looking down, looking up, looking down. And then they take this cheese flavored cracker, duck, and move it along.
It was a very odd kind of thing. It did give, in an odd way, an opportunity to explain the significance and meaning of communion and say whether it's a cheese-flavored duck or something else doesn't change the fact that we're doing this to identify with the person of Jesus Christ. It was a different service. And just so you know, nobody complained. Nobody. But while I was standing there, I was worried about cheese-flavored ducks. Why? Religion.
I was terrified that if I served this, people were going to get really, really angry and start to say I was mocking the Lord's Supper, which is, of course, not the intent. It may be a legitimate fear, but the truth is it gave that opportunity to explain what we're doing here even more. Later on, I asked the woman who had served us, what were you thinking with the cheese flavored ducks? And she said, well, I thought they looked like little turkeys. I think she didn't really get it. I'm pretty sure she didn't really understand. So we had a whole explanation about it. But really, it was about religion.
most often when we talk about religion, it's a much more serious issue. And we're looking today in Colossians chapter 2, verses 16 to 23. And in these verses, Paul's talking to one of the early churches that was struggling with the same problem. And in these verses, we're reminded to not bankrupt ourselves with religion when the value proposition is relationship, our relationship with Jesus. It is not the same thing as religion. And so Paul writes to them, Colossians 2, 16, and he says this.
Therefore, do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink or with regard to a religious festival or a new moon celebration or a Sabbath day. They are a shadow of the things that were to come. The reality, however, is found in Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person goes into great detail about what they have seen. They're puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.
Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belong to the world, you submit to its rules, do not handle, do not touch, do not taste. These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom with their self-imposed worship, their false humility, and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. Awesome passage. Great passage to look at. But before we get in, let me just remind you that there's a bigger context to scripture and this taken by itself can lead to license and sin. That's not what I'm talking about today, not our point. But with that said, Paul is still warning us about the pervasive nature and danger of religion as we seek to live a Christ-honoring life. Religion's a problem. So how do we know it when we see it?
What does it look like? And the Apostle Paul describes it, and specifically in verse 22 and 23, he talks about it. He tells us that religion is a self-defined thing. So these false teachers coming into the church were telling people what to eat, what to drink, what the Jewish food laws were, how they had to follow them. They were legalistic about special days, about holidays, about Sabbaths, about holy days. They were judging people, other people, in their church based on their personal views of what's right and what's wrong.
Second, Paul warns them that religion of that sort, religion, is self-styled and self-important. And it has a particular form of worship that's focused on the self. So in verse 23, their personal take on worship has to look like, or he says the word, is self-imposed. It's a word that means that they created it for themselves. It's about worship of angels. It's about inside track to God. They believe they're the only ones who know the truth. And if people don't follow that exact truth, there's a problem with it. And so he says they go into massive detail about their visions that they've been given, their insider view. Because if it isn't followed, at best it doesn't count. At worst, it's sin.
self-styled worship. Third thing he says is that religious people are self-promoting, have a self-promoting kind of humility. And they would go to extremes. In fact, in some cases, even hurting themselves. And you'll remember this at Easter's over years. You've seen that and probably just seen it because we just went through Easter of people around the world at Easter who will start whipping themselves or carrying crosses or putting different kinds of paraphernalia on their body to increase pain in the hope that somehow that pleases God or pleases Jesus. And that's not really unusual. Some of our greatest reformers, people like Martin Luther, prior to his encounter with Jesus would lie naked in a monastery cell at night.
beating himself, seeking peace of heart. It's not that rare. People who are religious play a game with their false humility. People will start telling you how humble they are or how much they sacrifice or how spiritually they act. And you'll know them when you run into them because you're usually annoyed. I'm usually annoyed. They want us to know how humble they are while transparently believing that they're more spiritual, more gifted, more powerful, more whatever, more of all kinds of things than anybody else. And it's really just a self-promoting kind of humility. I remember being in a church consultation where this sort of funny thing happened. We were talking about what's good about your church. And this one guy got up and he said,
Really, what I love about our church is that we're not judgmental like all the other churches around. Do you get that? When I heard it, everybody in the room just kind of stopped and looked at him. And then the only comment that got made, I said, really? And it was just an odd kind of thing. We're not judgmental like the other people. In all of these kinds of things, these kinds of worship, self-defined wisdom, self-styled worship, self-promoting humility, self is at the center of it rather than Jesus. And that's the problem with religion. We're attempting to be someone, to do something, to add something, to create something that earns credit with God.
that says we've made our way there on our own. And Jesus has already paid the price. There's nothing we can do to earn it. It's why Paul will say in verse 14 of chapter two, these words, Jesus forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness that stood against us and condemned us. He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. I love that phrase, nailing it to the cross. When we understand this at the core of our being, the center of who we are, it is deeply humbling. It realigns our understanding of wisdom and it drives us to worship from the heart in both spirit and in truth. That's not religion. That's Christianity.
So you might ask, why would we ever imprison ourselves in this religion when we've been set free with Christ? And in fact, in these same two verses, verses 22 and 23 of Colossians 2, Paul tells us that this kind of religion is superficial, it's temporary, it's ineffective. In verse 22, he says it's based on merely human commands and teaching. It only has the appearance of wisdom. So instead of pursuing and living in the wisdom of God, we're just pooling the ignorance of people.
That's all we're doing. Verse 23, he adds it's temporary. He says it's destined to perish with use. And this word perish that's here is pretty graphic. It means that we eat and drink some really bad stuff and it's certain to end up decomposed. I'm using a euphemism, decomposed. You can think of other words for what happens to the bad stuff you eat. You can figure it out. But Paul's point is simply this. None of it is going to last. It may seem spiritual for the short term, but it ends up empty. He goes on saying in that same verse, it's also ineffective. It doesn't do anything to help you live the spiritual life. In his words, he says it lacks any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
It's an empty approach that's ultimately self-centered and it does us no good when we run into temptation. It doesn't help us at all. It creates this outward image of dedication and discipline and spirituality, but the struggles of the inner life rage unchecked. Why? Because we're doing it ourself rather than being found in Jesus.
And it's not really a surprise. If we live by a self-focused religion, it means we're on our own rather than living in, through, and with Jesus. So Paul tells us in verse 17 that the external things, the religious things, are only a shadow of the things that are to come. The reality, he says, is in Jesus. And since that's true, we have to keep ourselves connected to the head, which is Jesus, from whom the whole body, supported, held together by ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.
And isn't that what we want? Isn't that what you want? To grow in Christ, in Paul's words, who is our life. Isn't that what we signed up? Isn't that what we're desperate for? Isn't that what we sing about? Isn't that what we tell others? Isn't that what we look forward to in eternity?
Obviously, because I've said it enough already, I'm not a big fan of big religion. I'm also not a fan of small religion. I'm not a fan of religion at all. Even when I start saying that, I start wanting to do a little Dr. Seuss thing. You know, I'm not religion on a boat, not religion with a goat, not religion in the rain, no religion on the train. I just want to do it, and I'm not going to really. I'm not going to go down that line. But understand, when we start getting into this religious thing, it is not what we were called to. It's not what Jesus wants for us at all. Big religion is not our future.
So what do I mean when I talk about big religion? Well, let me use a different term maybe that you understand a little bit better. So you've probably heard the term military-industrial complex. It's a negatively nuanced term referring to a country's military and the defense industry that supplies it, which generally gets a lot of money and becomes a major influence on public policy. Generally, it creates money, power, politics, all kinds of things, and it's used for self-interest, whether that's a corporate self-interest or a personal self-interest. And so when you hear about the military-industrial complex, generally people, unless they really like war,
are not that keen on it. They're not thrilled. When I use the term big religion, I think of the massive connections in what's sometimes facetiously known as the evangelical industrial complex and the politics, the power, the churches, the industry, the celebrity, the money that guide it. And that's still a real thing. It happens all the time. I just saw on the news, was told about it actually at lunch, that one of the U.S. presidential hopefuls has started selling God Bless America Bibles for $60, sold as Bibles, the only Bible endorsed by Donald Trump.
I don't know how that strikes you, but regardless of how you might want to vote, it does not strike me well at all in any way. I missed the part somewhere where the Bible needed to be endorsed by Donald Trump. It doesn't seem right to me. What that is, is part of big religion. What that is not, is part of Christianity. Nowhere. So let me just bring some reality to that in our own world, Fellowship Pacific, of which you're part if you're watching this.
your church is probably a part of. In Fellowship Pacific, typically in our churches, we start thinking about ourselves and we think of ourselves as a small regional group of churches. When the truth is, in a bigger picture, we are one of the largest evangelical groups in Canada. Within Fellowship Pacific, on its own, we have 100 plus churches, over 15,000 people going to those churches every Sunday, depending, maybe up to 20,000. It's comprised of many different ethnic groups. It partners with agencies that operate 21 seniors' residents, transition homes, three camps, schools, community services, food banks, among a whole lot of other things.
In some ways, it's a very big organization. And likely, if you do really quick math, we are minimally over 500 million in assets, maybe as big as a billion dollars in assets. And that's just us. And that's just talking about money. It doesn't count the other families of evangelical churches and other groups of evangelical churches all around us. It doesn't include this whole country as a whole. And it certainly doesn't include the wider swath of Christianity beyond evangelicalism. All of which is to say, when we talk about big religion, we are still continually talking about money, power, votes, all of those things. And if we believe that doesn't influence anything we do, we're kidding ourselves.
It's still a problem. And it would become, and has become, very, very easy for us in our personal life and in our church sometimes to put confidence in some of the scale and the scope of assets, the influence, even the votes of the number of people, those kinds of things, rather than in the gospel. And the second that becomes true, it has become big religion. And too often, we do it. In the Fellowship Pacific, we try very, very hard to keep our eyes and our focus on mission. We talk a lot within our own circle of employees that work in our ministry center about self-awareness, about personal faith, about Christian character, about growing as disciples, about being hungry, being humble, being people smart. We want as individuals to be Christ followers first, church builders second, and denominational developers last.
It's the least important thing we do. Now in that perfect world, we do all three of those and we do them together and we help one another to do it. But the more we realize that, the more we center on that, the more it allows us to do things like plant 13 churches, which we're in the process of doing right now. It drives us to be methodologically innovative, doing things like private networks to connect churches across vast geographic space. It allows us to be hyper-focused on helping churches to be healthy. It forces us to ask, how can we connect the next generation to Jesus in a better way? How can we build a pipeline that helps youth right from high school through to...
early 20s, into university, into going through the entire program to say, how are we going to develop leaders and focus on these people from a young age and help walk them through as disciples who become Christ followers and are leaders of the future? All of those things are more important to us, have to be more important to us, centered on the gospel, centered on Jesus rather than centered on self, and they are not big religion. So, what about small religion, or what more accurately we might just call as our individual walk with God, or if you want to use the term, individual religion? And simply put, Paul's forcefully reminding us not to allow our individual spiritual lives to become subject to religion, whether through our own choices or the choices of others.
Our walk in Jesus is found in him. Our walk in Jesus is not found in all these other external things. And throughout the history of the church, there's always been people who gravitate towards a legalistic, rule-bound, judgment-oriented perspective on Christianity. In fact, if we tell the truth, I think we know, you would know in your own church, your own experience, by its very nature, religion attracts those people. They come into it. They want it. And every generation has its new crop of religious lawyers, the neo-Pharisees, if you want to use that term. People who love to make rules to control others, believing themselves more spiritual when they do it. They love to make absolute statements based on their personal perspectives, and then they attempt to force everybody else to follow them. Paul talked about that in Colossians, in the early church. We could talk about that in every generation of the church till today.
And it's still true. In fact, there's an entire chapter, shocking chapter really, on the hypocrisy of that approach in Matthew 23, where Jesus makes some of his most extreme kinds of statements. So speaking about religious leaders, he says, you blind guides, you strain out a gnat and you swallow a camel. He goes on in all kinds of other things, saying things like this, woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites, you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you're full of greed and self-indulgence. You get the idea.
it's not good. Not to mention that these kinds of behaviors, when they're tolerated in a church, are anathema to the younger generation. And so we start to talk, and I'm sure in your church you've talked about it, as we do in fellowship overall, about losing the next generation, about 60 to 70 percent of these young people dropping out of church after high school and wanting nothing more to do it. And sometimes we wonder why. At its simplest level, the simplest answer is religion. The simplest answer is they see the meaninglessness of that versus relationship in Jesus, and they look in the church, and they know they want nothing to do with that. They want something more authentic, something more real, something that's worth their life.
We have to be very wary of this. And I wish I didn't have to talk about it. The truth is, our staff, some of which you are sitting here, tell me, be upbeat, be motivating, be cheerful about it all. And you know what I'm cheerful about? I'm cheerful about Jesus. What I'm motivated by is Jesus. What I love is the church that's following Jesus. Because religion in any way, in any shape, whether big religion or small religion, is a terrible thing. A terrible thing.
And unfortunately, while the church is beginning to show signs of rebounding past COVID in a post-Christian Canadian milieu, we also seem somehow to have given further energy to the truly religious among us. And by that, I mean capital T, capital R, truly religious. but it really is not what we should be talking about. It's not what should drive us. It's not what should be at our heart. It's not what should consume us. This is not the life we signed up for. And rather than being caught up in legalistic righteousness, we should be getting caught up in Jesus. And Paul writes these really amazing, amazing words in verse nine in Colossians chapter two, where he says, for in Christ, all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. And in Christ, you have been brought to fullness. Let me say that again, because we just waft over that like this and we miss it. In Christ, all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form. And in Christ,
You have been brought to fullness. That's a mind-blowing kind of statement. It's an idea that if we get it at all, it makes us gasp. It's so big. It's so beyond our comprehension. It is so positively hope-laden that it should make us speechless. In Christ, all the fullness of the deity dwells. Everything of divine, everything of God dwelt in Jesus Christ. And in Christ, in our relationship by being in him, finding our identity in him, living our life through the power of the resurrection, in him, in Christ, you have been brought to that fullness.
We participate in it with Jesus. All of what's divine, the fullness of the God that is present in the glorified Christ and his followers, we are in vital, complete union with him. We share in it. And I think when we begin, just begin to understand or simply feel even the smallest portion, the smallest iota of the life and the eternal changing nature of that statement, then we are never going to shrink the size and scope and ecstasy of our relationship with Jesus for some meager and spiritually destitute religion. We will never do it.
It reminds me a bit of one of the Marvel movies. I don't remember which one because I don't know my Marvel movies very well. But in it, there's one where the Hulk, the big green guy Hulk grabs Loki and he starts bouncing him back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Then he throws him to the ground and he says, puny God. I don't know. Some of you have probably seen it. I remember, I don't remember much about the movie. I just remember that because it struck me how often that's the God we follow. A puny God, a little God. And our God is not puny. In Christ, all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form. And in Christ, you have been brought to that fullness. What does that mean?
It means that every spiritual need is met. It means that there is no need to have trivial arguments, rituals of the law, lame attempts at pleasing people all the time. All we need is Jesus. All we have is Jesus. And the Bible teaches us over and over and over again, it is more than enough. We sing it all the time. And looking for more than Jesus really diminishes the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. We live in a world where the puny God of religion can be found anywhere. It can be found in our churches.
Too often it's found in our churches. It has always been one of Satan's biggest ploys in seeking to harm the church. And so the apostle Paul in Colossians comes to it and he warns people about it because the fullness of God that we're invited to is diminished, reduced, and shrunk every time we buy into religion. Paul warns us about it. We need to hear him. And I need to know, or I need you to know, I guess, that in my role I run into this way too often and tell you, you didn't sign up for this when you signed up for Jesus. You signed up for a life that is abundant, a life that is full.
And we need to claim it. If we're going to achieve this, it's because we're abiding in Jesus and we're resisting religion in its many guises. So my super simple message today is, again, do not be bankrupt by religion when we are intended for the surpassing value of life in Jesus. My prayer for you, for your church, is that would be your experience, the life you live in Christ. Thanks for this time.
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