Why Joy Only Comes When You Let Go of Religion Rather Than Clinging to It

I’m amazed I remember this at all.   I’ve done more weddings than I can count.  Yet somehow, with all those weddings, I still remember this one conversation.   I don’t remember it because of who I was talking to.  He was the father of the groom, but I couldn’t tell you his name.   I don’t even remember when it happened, though it had to be years ago.  And yet, still, after countless wedding conversations, this one I remember.  Why? It’s because of what we talked about, and something I said, something I wondered afterwards if I should have.    I had known the bride’s family for years.  But this guy, I had only met that weekend.  But as we sat together, we hit it off.   And the more drinks he had, the more comfortable he became.  I liked that.  People sometimes get so uptight when they meet a clergy person.  This guy admitted that he had been one of those folks.  But after we had gotten to know each other, shared a few drinks, he told me.  “Hey, you’re like a normal guy.  And you know, Kennedy, I’m not really religious.”  That’s when I said it.   I said, “Oh good, because I’m not religious either.”    I wasn’t lying.  I’m not that religious.   But that comment doesn’t come off too well, from somebody who is doing a so-called religious job.  

Yet, as I’ve thought about it over the years, I’m glad I said it.  It opened up a conversation that went deeper than the stuff you usually talk about at a wedding.  More than that, I was telling him something I deeply believe.  I do believe being religious will do more to damage your life, your relationships, including your relationship with God, then almost anything else.  And not only that, I think God agrees with me.   Why do I think that?   It’s because of the words you’re about to hear.  If you wonder how religion could be that deadly, here God shows you the way.   So, let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Philippians 3:3-9

In these words, from a once very religious man, God shows you the uselessness, even the danger of religion.  Now, how can religion be not only useless, but dangerous?   It’s useless because it can never give you what it promises to give.  And it’s dangerous because it deceives you into thinking it can.  Only when you realize that what religion promises to give you, you already have, only then will you discover the joy and fulfillment that God yearns to give.

Do you see what Paul is doing here?   Paul is giving you his religious resume.   And he has a very 

impressive one.   He tells you. He was circumcised on the 8^th day.   He’s saying.  I’m not some convert to Judaism.  I’m a Jew from birth.  And I come from the tribe of Benjamin, he tells you, one of only two tribes of Israel, that stayed loyal to the house of David, Israel’s greatest king.   So, I’m not only Jewish. I’m a Jewish blue-blood, part of the ethnic elite.  And yes, I am writing to you in Greek, Paul says, but I’m not one of those Greek speaking JINOs, Jewish in name only.   I spoke Hebrew at my mother’s knee. That remains my mother tongue.  And on top of all that, Paul says, I became a Pharisee, the ancient day equivalent of a Ph.d in Jewish law.   And I lived that law blamelessly.   I even became an esteemed leader, organizing the persecution of the Jesus movement. 

Now, Paul isn’t trying to impress you.  He is doing it to make a shocking point.    For, in the end, he calls this resume rubbish.  No, he doesn’t say that word.   He says one more shocking, a word that translators get too squeamish to tell you.   He uses the word for excrement.  He tells you that all that stuff is so much crap.  And here’s the point that Paul is getting at.   He’s not the only person with a religious resume.  Everyone has one, even if they don’t call it that.   So, what is a religious resume?  

Well, it acts the same as any resume.  And what does a resume do? It makes a case for you.  It makes an argument of sorts, a case for yourself.   And why are you making that case?  You are making it to get in somewhere, a great new job, a top university, all sorts of stuff.   If you do on-line dating, and you write a profile, you are writing a resume.  This is who I am, and here’s why you definitely want to get into a relationship with me, super attractive person whoever you are.

But what Paul is trying to tell you is that you don’t simply do this for jobs or relationships.  You do a resume at a deeper level than that.   You use a resume to evaluate yourself too.  You don’t simply wave a resume for a job or a relationship to let you in.   You wave a resume to let yourself in.   In other words, if you mess up in your life, if you feel you’ve built a lousy resume, you shut the door on yourself, on your value, on your worth.   Now you may not measure your worth the same way Paul did, but Paul is telling you that you do have some way of doing that.   Everyone does.   Everyone is trying to live up to something, some set of values and achievements that you place your confidence in as Paul did his.  

For example, a while back, I had a situation where I spoke about a friend behind his back, things I should have shared with him first.  Instead he found out about my words after the fact, and felt deeply hurt, even betrayed.  His anger cut me to the heart.  And yes, I felt badly because he was right, and my actions had been cowardly and wrong.   But deeper than that, I felt terrible because my actions punctured a cherished belief about myself: that I was such a good, honorable and courageous guy, I would never do anything that would be that hurtful or unfair.  But I had.  That painful fact blew up a good bit of my religious resume, what makes me feel good about being me.   All of a sudden, being me didn’t seem to be such a good thing.  Now that may not be part of your resume.   Your resume may have to do with success at work or a great relationship or marriage or great kids   It may be intellectual achievements or net worth or friendships or popularity.    It may be all the good things you do for others, even your involvement in a religious community.  The list could go on.   But whatever it is, you have one. 

And the point God is making in Paul’s words is this.  You have some set of things that you use to get value and worth, what Paul means by his righteousness.  You have things that make the case for why you are worthy of love from God, from yourself, from others.   And yet, God says here, that all of that stuff is not only crap, and the more you let it rule your life, the more it will limit that, diminish it, even, at the extreme, destroy it.  Why? 

It’s because as much as you work to build that resume, you will never be sure it’s good enough, even for you.  It promises you worth and value, but it doesn’t give that.  It gives you insecurity and anxiety instead.   No one that I know described that better, then the writer David Foster Wallace in a famous commencement speech he gave that I quote a lot.  Wallace, a writer who was not a Christian, said this:     

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.  And the compelling reason, Wallace said, for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. He explained further.

“If you worship money and things if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.  And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.  Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.” And then Wallace delivered his final point.  He said.  “But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is…. they’re unconscious.  They are default settings.”

In other words, this compulsion to build a religious resume lives in you without you even realizing it.  What helps you realize it?  Ask yourself, what makes you anxious?  What do you fear losing the most, others finding out about you the most?  Those questions will give you hints.

So, if everyone has this default setting, how do you get free?   In Paul’s words, God tells you.   For why does Paul now regard all his former religious accomplishments as so much crap?   It’s because he has found the real thing, a righteousness, a rightness, a worth in Jesus Christ.    Now, how is that different?   How does that free you from the power of the religious resume?

To understand that, you need to understand, what makes that resume so attractive.  It gives you the illusion of control.   You can say. If I do these things, if I act this way, if I have these accomplishments, I am a worthy person, a good person.  I am even one approved by God.  I have the control.  But of course, you don’t have the control. Your resume does.   

But in Jesus, you discover two powerful truths.  First, you discover that this whole resume deal 

doesn’t even work.  No matter how awesome, you think your moral resume might be, God looks at it and goes, ehh.  That’s not really gonna do it.  But then God says, don’t you get it?  I don’t need your resume.   I already have one for you.  In Jesus I gave you one myself.

You see.  When God saw how lost we had become, so lost, in getting value and worth in all the wrong places, God reached out to show us the way home.  God said.  Don’t you get it?  You already have value and worth because you are my child, because I love you. That love doesn’t depend on what you do or don’t do.  I love you no matter what.   All this scrambling for worth just draws you away from me, from my love for you.   And in Jesus, God put flesh and blood on those words.  He said, this is how much, I love you.   In Jesus, God came to you, even gave God’s life for you.  God even forgave you as you nailed God to a cross.   And God did all this to set you free, from your blindness, from your bondage to your religious resume, to experience this truth. It’s God’s love, God’s love that went to death and beyond for you, that gives you your righteousness, your worth, your value.   And when you know this, really know this, this love humbles you, and it frees you.   It humbles you because you realize your religious resume ain’t all that.  But then you realize that even on your worst resume days, God’s love for you remains the same.  And when you know that, you can let go.  You can let go of your bondage to this resume.  You can let go into the God whose love, whose infinite, unwavering, irrevocable love has made you right forever.