Forget religion.
Forget the rules of conditional acceptance and the lousy things a religious person said or did and the spiritual leader who disappointed you.
Forget about trying so very hard to be everything and feeling like nothing.
Forget about the Sunday morning guilt trips that continually insist that you don’t qualify for the eternal life of heaven and when you do make it in, all you’ll get is scraps from the table because rewards are for better people than you.
Leave behind the shame and the guilt, the self-loathing, that eats at you in the middle of the night no matter how much money you donate or how many hours you serve.
Let go of the idea that God is angry with you and that every hard and difficult thing that has happened in your life is somehow a punishment that you deserved.
The disappointing reality is that religion in the hands of humans is a messy, twisted, dysfunctional attempt to be better than the messy, twisted, dysfunctional mess that humans are. Holy things in the hands of humanity are inevitably going to be mistreated.
But, forget all of that for just a moment.
Maybe there is another way to look at it.
It’s possible that religion has warped our view and our understanding of the God we attempt to pursue. Human behavior within religion shapes our perception and becomes the core of our idea of what God is like.
But what if some of the humans in the religion we have encountered have gotten the idea of God wrong? What if God is different than the denominational arguing, church splits, and moral failures? What if God isn’t mad at you like some of them say? What if you don’t have to achieve some level of goodness before God welcomes you into His family?
The Bible says that the arrival of Jesus on earth was “good news of great joy” (Luke 2:10). Maybe we have heard the story of Jesus and haven’t experienced great joy because humans don’t always tell the story well.
Jesus didn’t come to intervene in God’s vengeance or to step between us and an angry God who waits to punish us every time we make a wrong choice.
Jesus was God’s plan all along.
This Christmas season, I invite you to read the story for yourself, found in the New Testament Gospels of Mathew and Luke. But don’t just read the familiar words of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Read the whole story from first chapter to last. Investigate for yourself whether the perception you’ve acquired of God is what He is really like.
In these passages, see the God who came to earth to be with us. Read the words of Jesus as He walked among men. Find out for yourself why He came to earth and how he feels about people who search for Him. See for yourself how passionately God loves humanity.
My hope and prayer is that you will look closely and see a God of hope, help, and love. I pray that you will see the gift of life that Jesus is and that you will experience the “good news of great joy” that Jesus came to personally deliver.
And may the glad tidings of the Gospel message bring you great joy this Christmas.
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