God Hates Religion

Welcome back to Ignite. Do you know that God hates religion? I'm serious. I'm serious now. God hates religion. I have no compunction. I have no hesitation to tell you that. God hates religion. Religion, if you think about it, is man's attempt to earn God's favor, his love. And that's absurd. We can't earn his love. There's nothing we can do. You know, the scriptures tell us very clearly, all have sinned and fallen short. There's none righteous, not one, and the ways of sin is death. But the gift of God, he gives it to us. We can't earn. It's the gift of God as he turned a life. It's amazing how this creeps into our lives, even as Christians. To the largest scene, you have people who, they call them what, Christmas or whatever. They go to church on Christmas and Easter to be religious, right? You can do all kinds of things to earn God's favor, thinking that he's going to really like it because I'm doing all these kinds of things. But it just doesn't work that way. He doesn't say, go eat the world and be a good person, doesn't he? No. Do you know that most evangelicals, they believe being a good person is being a faith-shared? That's how you share your faith, but being a good person. But being a good person doesn't get you or anybody else into heaven. It just doesn't. I often talk to a car guy group, so I say, you know, car guys, it's God's too. If you love a car, if you're a gal, you love a car, you're a car guy. So I mean it all inclusively, and I often say to car guys, if you could earn your way to heaven, you'd be at the front of the line. No question. The people group of car guys, and there's 30 million of us in the United States, is like the most incredible group of people I know. Talk about over-achieving and giving and loving and caring and going the extra mile. All the things they exhibit, car guys without even knowing it, exhibit scripture. But doing all that doesn't get them one step closer to heaven. They think it does, but it does not. I often say it's easier to reach a scoundrel than a good person. Because a scoundrel knows their loss. A person doing good things thinks I've earned my way to heaven. There's a lot of public figures even that are doing great things. And they think because of those good things, they've done things in legislation for the church or whatever, they're a Christian. They're not. They get some brownie points I guess, but they have something to do with their own salvation. Going to church, whether you go to church on Christmas or Easter, or if you go to church 365 times a year, if you can read scriptures every day, piously reading scriptures every day, you can pray every day. It doesn't matter what you do. All of that is being religious if it's not changing your heart. God knows your heart. Did you hear me? God knows your heart. That's not being religious. It doesn't matter what you do. I don't care what you do. There's so many people that do things and they're applauded. I look at the church and organizations and ministries and how they applaud their major givers and saying all these platitudes and doing videos on them and taking them on trips and all kinds of things going on, none of which has anything to do with salvation. They may. And we should be doing that. We should be giving generously. I'm not taking you away from that. But it also tells you there's a lot of folks doing a lot of highly visible things being greatly honored. And they're doing it for self reward. Now in discernment, you can picture that pretty quickly. There's a powerful scripture in 1 Samuel 16 to 7. It says, the Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. Wow. This is a powerful message, folks. I hope you grab onto it every day. Every day you need to check your heart. Because that's what's God's doing. That's exactly what God is doing. See you next time. Thank you.