Religion or Relationship?

Part of our post-modern, politically correct world is constantly changing our vocabulary. Certain words become bad, and one of them is religion. The sad thing is the one place where Christians have participated in post-modern political correctness the most enthusiastically is in trashing the word religion. It's a thoroughly biblical word, and what has been put in its place is relationship. We hear it again and again, Christianity is not a religion; it's a relationship. Implying rather strongly that religion is a bad thing and relationship is a good thing. Is that necessarily true or an either-or?

You won't find the word relationship if you read through all of Scripture. What you will find are words like fellowship and communion. What does fellowship mean? What does communion mean? Communion and fellowship are communal things that take place, not individual. So, in this relationship, if you want to say there is individual faith, we are brought into a collective body - the body of Christ, His Church. And within that body is how we communion with Christ and one another.

What's odd about this relationship idea is that Scripture is very clear on how we have that relationship with Jesus; he calls it communion. What is communion? That's the Lord's Supper; that's the fellowship. Jesus is coming to us in His body and blood in the bread and wine to give us His life, salvation, and forgiveness of sins. You can't get any closer to Christ than that. So when we see how the New Testament speaks, it blows this whole idea; "it's not a religion; it's a relationship" out of the water. Even the relationship they think and want to have with Jesus is nothing compared to the communion we individually and collectively have with Christ.

Pr. Richard Futrell

Do This In Remembrance of Me

 Most Protestant churches don't have an altar; they have communion tables. You will almost always see "In remembrance of me on that table." To them, that is the most important thing, thinking back on Jesus' sacrifice for you. If you take that as Jesus meant, how do we know what Jesus meant? Jesus was a Hebrew and spoke in Aramaic, not Greek, even though the New Testament was written in Greek. He spoke Aramaic, and in Aramaic and Hebrew, the word 'remember' means 'continue the action,' bringing the reality of the past into the present and continuing the action.

-Rev. Dr. Charles Spomer

Doctrine Of The Trinity

Anytime you undermine a proper understanding of who Jesus is, the true Son of God who became man for us and our salvation, you undermine our salvation. It's always the atonement, it's always the cross, and the work on the cross for us and our salvation. So if Jesus is not God, then we cannot look to the cross and say there is God for me, defeating death, sin, and the devil and rising again for my justification. If He is not God, whatever He is doing, He can only do for Himself; He cannot do that for me. He cannot do that for the world. It is always the heart of the Gospel that gets compromised when we compromise things like the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of Christ, and so forth.

- Dr. Carl Beckwith

Accommodating Worship

Dr. Joel Elowsky, professor of Historical Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Early Christian Texts, on the subject of making a church service more accommodating for unbelievers he said: "The early Church would have a real problem with that, and it seems like in the early period of the Church they made it harder to come into the Church, and it was all part of this habitus if you will; nobody could come to Church without a sponsor. They actually had people who watched over the doors, called porters or doorkeepers. The early Church would close the doors when the worship began because they didn't want shall we say, 'cast their pearls before swine... so to be trampled upon.'

When it came time for communion, those who were unbaptized or not catechized were asked to leave the service. So when it came to worship, the early Church didn't let the culture color what they were doing; they saw the church service, i.e., the liturgy, as a way to be refreshed so as to go out into the world the next week to serve the Lord. Still, they didn't see this idea of accommodating their worship for the culture.

-Dr Joel Elowsky

Folded Burial Clothes

Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus head not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself." (John 20: 6-7)

"How often has John given us the little details that are pregnant with meaning? They came to the burial site, and the burial garments which their Master had been wrapped by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus with all those spices were still there and not only so, but folded and with the face cloth folded up in a place by itself. Do you realize what this means? On the most stupendous morning in human history, God in the flesh woke up, took off his burial wrappings, and folded them. He made up His bed, if you will. He is that sort of God, not of confusion, but one who loves to do all things decently and in order.

St. John Chrysostom, the great commentator on John from the fourth and fifth centuries, writes, 'Now to separate and to place one thing by itself and another after rolling it up by itself was the act of someone doing things carefully and not in a chance way and as if disturbed.' You see, he sees the care given to the clothes as a sign that there absolutely was no grave robbery here, as the women might have feared. Rather, there's deliberate care setting aside what He no longer needed - clothes for burial. He is alive!"

Pr. Will Weedon

The Triumphal Entry

At the beginning of Jesus' ministry, Jesus tried to shush up those who wanted to spill the beans on who He was or even the miracles He so often brought, but now He is taking the wrapper off the gift.

Messianic secret over, Jesus is about to tell them in a coded way that only lovers of God's Word would get. He is about to fulfill the prophecy found in Zechariah 9:9 'Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.'

Just like when all of Jerusalem learned that David had appointed his son Solomon to be king when Solomon rode the king's mule into the city (1 Kings 1:33), so everyone who knew the Scriptures would see that the long-awaited restoration of the Davidic monarchy was unfolding before their eyes when they saw Jesus ride in on the donkey. The Romans, of course, would just see a guy on a little donkey. The people of the Word would see the promised Messiah.

'Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest.' The shout is from Psalm 1:18, and Hosanna means "save now." Save us now, Son of David, save us. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, save us in the highest.

By the way, Palm Sunday is four days before the Passover. It's the day the lambs were to be taken; were they being driven into the city at the same time as the Lamb of God descended the slope and approached?"

-Pr. Will Weedon

The Lodge - A Lutheran Response

 A response to the religious teachings of lodge organizations has been implied as the above concerns have been described. Lutheran Christians believe in the Triune God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as He has revealed Himself in the Holy Scriptures and as the Christian church universally has confessed Him in the ecumenical creeds from the early years of the Christian era (Apostles’ Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds). God has clearly revealed Himself in the Bible as the one and only true God (Is. 44:6). The Scriptures consistently and repeatedly teach that Jesus is God together with the Father (John 1:1,14) and that the Holy Spirit is also God (Acts 5:4). Thus, the true God is the Triune God—three Persons (Matthew 28:19) but one God (Deut. 6:4). 

Furthermore, since the Father can neither be known nor confessed apart from the Son (John 5:23; 14:6), prayer to God is always to be offered through faith in the name of Christ (John 14:13; 15:16). Man is more than an “imperfect Ashlar.” He is by nature dead in his trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1). He is powerless (Rom 8:8) and an enemy of God (Romans 5:6, 10), incapable of hewing the rough edges off his life to make himself acceptable to God (Romans 3:20-24). A person can be reconciled to God only because salvation is completely of God (2 Cor. 5:18) through the saving work, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Romans 6). The benefits of this salvation are not received because of human effort to obtain them but are God’s gift received through faith in Christ (Gal. 2:16). St. Paul summarizes the primary conflict between the “religion” of the lodge and the central teaching of the Christian faith: “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law [“purity of life and conduct’], Christ died for nothing” (Gal. 2:21). St. Paul rejects and condemns any teaching that people may be saved by the addition of human works as “another Gospel” (Galatians 1). 

The Scriptures teach that Christians with integrity are to confess Christ and His Gospel boldly and without compromise, mindful that God’s Name—which they are commanded to keep holy—is God has He has revealed Himself to us in His Word (John 17; Matt. 10:32; Rom. 10:9-10; 1 Tim. 6:12;1 John 2:23, etc.). In the view of this evaluation, it is a compromise of the Christian confession to take part in ritual, religious acts, in the name of a generic deity, that intentionally delete the Name of the true God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent to be the only Savior of the world (Luke 12:8).

-LCMS PDF Document