Religion is an interesting animal. It can bring life and it can bring death. It can instill hate or it can inspire peace. It can unite or it can divide. Truthfully, it has been known to do all of these things through out human history. This is why religion makes me nervous. In fact, religion terrifies me because religion is too private and too subjective It acts out of the context of its own created foundations, and assigns the reason for the action, be they good, bad, or ugly, to God. So, religion is very human, very self-promoting, and very dangerous. It manipulates God to be what the religionist needs for God to be.

This is one of the reason I follow Jesus. I do not believe He is present to start religions. He is present, rather, to draw us to the living God. He expresses God’s desire for His creation to “seek him and perhaps reach out for him, and find him” (Acts 17:27).

Jesus shows us that it is God who created us and loves and that it is “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God has spoken into human history in the person of Jesus, and when He raised Jesus from the dead He manifested the fact that people can turn around and live differently than they once lived. Renewal is possible in this world.

The life of God can come into dead and barren places and breathe the breath of true life into them. Evil does not have to win. In Christ we see that God has spoken “with justice” (Acts 17:31), and has new things to do in us and in history.

It is when people let God be God in their lives we see the dramatic new reality God has in store. We don’t worship a principle or a theology or a doctrine. Rather, by grace we are drawn to a person, Jesus. In Him we see who God really is. We see God not as the unknown so much as the one who in Jesus makes Himself known, so known that renewal is always at hand.