Love, not religion!

Reflecting on Mark 7:1-23

“For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come.” (Mark 7:21)
As a Jesus follower, I pay a lot of attention to my heart.
In Hebrew thinking, the heart was the control center for the person.
Everything about us, how we thought and lived and what we loved, was centered there.
The heart was very important, but also very difficult to figure out.

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23)

“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

Jesus also points to the heart as the source of our thoughts and desires.
These in turn flow out into our words and actions.
“For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” (Matthew 12:34)
Religion focuses on controlling external words and behaviours.
(Washing hands, dressing up, following rules, reciting creeds, going to church).
Jesus urges us to pay attention to what is going on in the inside.
What should be going on in the heart is love.
Not self-love, but God and neighbour love (Matthew 22:34-40).

If love is the fulfillment of the Law, then sin is not loving.
All the sins Jesus mentions are somehow unloving towards others.
Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed.
Malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.
These are not wrong because they are on a list of rules.
They are all examples of ways of not loving people.

If you love someone…
You don’t use or abuse them sexually (sexual immorality).
You do not take what belongs to them for yourself (theft).
You don’t kill them or ruin their lives (murder).
You don’t betray your marriage vows to them (adultery).
You don’t love things more than them (greed).
You don’t don’t have bad thoughts or ill will about them (malice).
You don’t trick or cheat them through lies (deceit).
You don’t speak or act in vulgar, shameful ways (lewdness).
You don’t resent them because of what they have (envy).
You don’t bad mouth them to others (slander).
You don’t elevate yourself as if you are better than them (arrogance).
You don’t choose selfish, heartless ways that harm them (folly).

The solution to all this is NOT to try to not do these things.
Rather the solution is to set your heart on love them with Jesus-like love.
Love, not laws, is the answer to our heart problem.
And before we can become loving, we need to know what love is.
We do not love by trying harder, we love by being loved.
“We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
The better we know (experience) God’s love in Jesus, the better we show it.
Paul’s prayer for people is that they would be rooted and established in love.
Only by experiencing God’s love in Jesus can we be filled with it for others.

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:16-19)

We have a spiritual heart problem, not an external religion problem.
All people, including us, do not fully know God’s love.
And until we know and experience it, we cannot show it.
We do not help people by imposing religious creeds on conduct on them.
We do not help people by posting the 10 Commandments in front of them.
We do not help people by telling them what terrible sinners they are.
All people, including us, need to experience true love first.
Gracious, merciful, compassionate love – this is how God helps us.
Loving ‘sinners’ this way, like Jesus, is how we help God help them.

Church, religion, rituals, traditions, rules, creeds… these are all externals.
People desperately need to experience love, so that it can change them.
We have a spiritual heart problem; only Jesus-like gracious love can deal with it.

PRAYER
Lord Jesus, I want to be rooted and established in Your love, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep it is, to know Your love which surpasses knowledge. I want this for me, but I also want this for others. 

Help me to be less religious and more loving. less judgmental and more compassionate, less like the church and more like You!