The Do Not Church

Growing up my impression of the church was summed up in the name I gave it as a teenager: The Do Not Church.  Righteousness was taught as a matter of avoiding sinful things.  A mantra I derived from this mindset is "Do not smoke, or drink or chew; and do not date girls that do."  Don't cuss, don't dance, don't gamble, don't whatever and God just might let you into heaven one day.  Although, there was never any promise of that as we could always slip up and God would be sure to nail us.

The problem with this theology is legion but the root is found in rule over relationship.  There existed a fundamental trust in rule following, that the closer you maintained them, the closer you were to gaining your final reward.  The more you could withstand the bad things in the world the more godly you had become.  Righteousness was an activity rather than a state of being.

But God is not interested in how well we can follow rules, he is interested in how much we love him. He doesn't want us to do the "right" thing in order to gain his approval, the Lord wants us to be in a relationship with him that promotes doing the right thing because we want to honor and serve our King.  Notice what Jesus says in Mark 2:27, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."  In other words, man was not made to follow rules, but rules were made for the benefit of man.

God does not want us to give our allegiance to a set of rules or practices, he desires that we give our hearts to him, that we do much more than perform, that we change from the inside out in the likeness of  His Son.  Micah put it this way, "With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly a with your God" (6:6-8).

It was never all the sacrifices or the rituals or the rules; it was an active relationship with the Lord that came from a dedicated heart, which longs for justice, loves mercy and daily walks with its Lord.  Jus' Say'n.