Manmade Religion presents the faithfulness of God like fragile broken eggshells beneath our feet

when in truth God’s faithfulness is stronger than anything

Stronger than Peter’s denial
Stronger than Thomas’ doubt
Stronger than David’s lust
Stronger than Moses’ murder
Stronger than Paul’s persecution

Stronger than life
Stronger than death
Stronger than sin
Stronger than shame

Stronger than your worst day
Stronger than your greatest mistake
Stronger than anything you will ever face

God will be faithful to you
He will never leave you
He will never forsake you
He will be faithful to you

Because he loves

And it’s his joy to rescue you

Even from yourself

~Jeremiah Johnson

“21 Things I Did, Exploring Spirituality Beyond Institutional Religion:

1. I made peace with my religious past.
2. I took responsibility for my spiritual journey.
3. I stopped dividing up the world into “sacred” and “secular.”
4. I began listening to and trusting my inner voice.
5. I started looking past the externals, and relating to the deepest reality I knew was present in every human being.
6. I quit making my humanity the enemy.
7. I resisted the need to build a persona around being an enlightened person.
8. I opened myself to the rhythm and flow of life in nature.
9. I explored what the natural sciences have to say about the universe and my humanness.
10. I focused on addressing the root of my suffering.
11. I paid attention to my deepest desires and passions.
12. I sought to cast off my fictitious self, and be an authentic and fully-expressed me.
13. I questioned and applied critical thinking to my default assumptions and beliefs about the world.
14. I expanded my relational world beyond religious sub-culture.
15. I resisted creating a new religion out of my latest discovery.
16. I operated with the assumption that every human being knew something I needed to know.
17. I resisted latching onto the latest guru, and began seeing all people as my teachers.
18. I explored new fields and areas of interest that were largely unknown to me.
19. I shifted my focus from the question of life after death to making the most of my life before death.
20. I approached my life as a reality I was free to create.
21. I became interested and involved in the lives of people I encountered naturally along the everyday paths of my life.”

– Jim Palmer

IS YOUR ENTIRE BELIEF SYSTEM pretty much the same now as it was five years ago?
And do you really think that’s a good thing?
Don’t you know the Holy Spirit has been imparting tons of fresh revelation?
Can’t you see there are things He can tell us now that He couldn’t tell Peter, James and John?
God never intended for the Bible to become itself a religion.
Hey, He never intended for religion to become a religion.

When you reject religion as I do
Are you rejecting Jesus?
Are you rejecting the Christ?
Or, are you rejecting man-made Christianity?

That last one’s a tough one.
Isn’t there a biblical counterpart to
“Don’t throw the baby out
with the bathwater!”?

Or maybe the only way to clean up
the mess that religion has made
is to see it implode upon itself
and give mankind back their own mind.