"Do you want a religion with God, or do you want a relationship with Him?"

Religion, loosely defined, is a manmade system designed to help people connect with a higher power. In Christianity’s instance, God.

Religion is beneficial. It provides comfort, answers, and a sense of togetherness with other believers. Sometimes, religion comes with rules. It’ll claim to teach you how to live, how to pray, how to love, but religion itself is not alive and it does not love. It’s a closed conversation. It neither grows nor shrinks, it feels nothing, and what it can offer has a cap.

So many people walk into churches looking for religion. So many people walk out of churches because that’s all they found.

“Don’t do that, do this.”

The problem is . . . our God isn’t a “do-God.” He’s a “done-God.” And He’s not knocking on our hearts asking for a religion with us. He’s a living, loving Father, and He’s seeking a relationship.

I’m gonna make this personal. If you’re familiar with the author, then you know I’m a small person, but I feel positively miniscule when weighing myself against the rest of the world. These problems I’m facing . . . they must be the equivalent of a bad hair day for the God I bow to. Why then, should I even bring them to His attention. He’s got far more important matters to tend to.

I’ve been wrestling with this a lot lately. It’s something I’ve alluded to often—frequently finding myself running away from God with my problems rather than running to Him to lay them down at His feet. Because who am I to trouble the King?

And there’s been this repeated message in the sermons lately. “In the beginning, God created.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. Cool, cool.” Because I know that, right? We all know that. God created the earth and the animals and the flowers and the trees and He created you and He created me. And so naturally, He had to create my parents so I could be here, and their parents before them and so on and so forth. But the period at the end of “created” changes things in a way I only recently came to understand.

God created . . . this moment. He set all the balls in motion. He made sure the tides aligned. He created every aspect of every moment, crossed t’s and dotted i’s to ensure that within every moment lies an opportunity to know Him.

Not religion. A relationship.

And just like that, I found the answer to my question.

Who am I?

I am His.

And He wants to be mine.

We were made to know God, created for intimacy with Him, and every moment before, during, and after us serves to make that message known (Acts 17:26-27).

OT believers weren’t awarded the same choice that believers today are. Paul references this in the opening verses of Galatians 5. Christ dying on the cross bought freedom for us! Freedom from the bondage of sin, freedom from the old law, freedom from the “don’t do that, do this’s” religion so often comes with.

When the veil was whole, there was a barrier between man and God. But that veil was surely torn when Jesus became the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Friends, there’s no more division. No barrier. God still can’t be in the presence of sin, but through Jesus’s sacrifice, His Holy Spirit now resides IN US.

Alive in us. Breathing in us. Something religion can’t give us. Only a relationship can.

This is why, in Romans 12:1, Paul urges us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord.

The cost of our sins wasn’t free, but the grace bought with Christ’s sacrifice is.

We are free to have an intimate, personal, proper relationship with the God of the universe.

“I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus says in Revelation 3:20.

Friends, open the door. It costs literally nothing. And it promises to change literally everything.

You see, our view of God determines how we live. Why not view Him as the God who gave His very Son just for a chance to know us? Because, spoiler alert: He did.

Lean into that, and as we cultivate and nourish our own relationships with God, we also will find ourselves watering the fruits of the Spirit. As we draw ever closer to the Lord, we develop unselfish love, true joy, and lasting peace, and in our relationships with others, we’ll reflect His patience, kindness, and goodness, all while edifying our own inner strength, faithfulness, and gentleness.

I wanna cycle back to Acts 17:26-27, because it truly is such a beautiful passage.

“From one man, He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any of us.”

Before today, those verses were unmarked in my Bible. But friends, don’t you see? We are never abandoned, never hopeless. He’s a loving Father. Since the beginning of time, Day Zero, He’s known us, loved us, had a plan for us, and relentlessly pursued us.

From Genesis to Revelation, everything connects.

“God had you in mind when He created the world. In the beginning, He thought of you, and everything that has occurred since Genesis 1:1 had to happen to lead to you, to lead to this moment right now.”

-Pastor D. Wede

We were created. Created for freedom. Created to know Him, seek Him, and have an ongoing relationship with Him.