The Gospel Coalition

This is the third installment of a series of posts which began the other day on ways people might be decieved into thinking they know God when in fact they don’t. These are taken from my book Do I Know God? If you missed the first two posts you can click here and here.

Deception 3: “I’m religious. Isn’t that enough?”

As we saw in Jesus’s remarks in Matthew 7:21–23, it’s possible—in fact, easy—to do much good in the name of God without having real affection or love for God. The Bible describes many deeply religious people who didn’t really know God. Probably the clearest example is the Pharisees.

An Ancient Problem
During Jesus’s day, the Pharisees were a large, well-respected, rigorously devout religious group within Judaism. They were particularly influential in Galilee, where Jesus conducted much of his early ministry.

No one doubted the Pharisees’ religious commitment. They organized every part of their lives around God’s Law as it had been revealed through Moses in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible). They were so serious about their religion, in fact, that they created an immense body of secondary rules for how the Mosaic Law should be understood and applied. For example, the Jewish Talmud, a collection of oral rabbinic teachings, lists thirty-nine categories of work that were prohibited on the Sabbath. Each of these categories was further subdivided into thirty-nine sections, creating more than fifteen hundred rules and regulations that the Pharisees tried to obey for the sake of the Sabbath.

No detail of life seemed to escape their religious scrutiny. Here’s a sampling of their Sabbath rules: “It was forbidden to unfasten a button, cut your toenails, or carry anything heavier than a dried fig. A man could not wear false teeth, because if they fell out, he would have to carry them, and that would be work. A tailor could not carry a needle in his pocket on the Sabbath because that was one of the tools of his trade, so carrying it would be work.”

Without question, the Pharisees were dedicated, religious people. Yet Jesus reserved his harshest criticisms for them. Why? Because Jesus saw that while on the outside they were religiously devout, inside they were relationally devoid. (He called them “whitewashed tombs” [Matthew 23:27]) He knew they were obsessed with practicing their religion but careless about knowing the God of their religion. They were devoted to the religious letter of the Law (dos and don’ts) but not the relational spirit of the Law (captured in Jesus’s commands to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself).

Rebuking the Pharisees for their arrogant double standards, Jesus said, “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me.’ (Matthew 15:7–9)

It’s easy to be hard on the Pharisees, but have you noticed how easy it is for church activities—especially when we deeply invest our time, energy, and money—to give us the feeling that we’re on intimate terms with God? Many pastors I talk to see how deluded we can become. The truth is, rather than guaranteeing a relationship to God, religious activity can actually hinder us from knowing him. We can easily fall into the trap of thinking that religious achievements are all he wants.

But God wants so much more. He isn’t primarily interested in our religious activities. Rather, he wants us to know, love, and serve him. As an old hymn states, “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

A Contemporary Problem
My friend Steve recently told me a story about his childhood pastor. He was a devoutly religious man. He had served the same church for more than twenty years. One morning he was preaching a sermon about the cross of Christ and the salvation God had secured for his children. In the middle of his sermon, the pastor broke down and wept, then bowed his head and prayed out loud, asking God to save him. He became a Christian through listening to himself preach! Here was a man who had ministered in God’s church for years but who suddenly realized that he did not know God.

My grandfather says that when he invites people to enter into a relationship with God through Christ at the end of his messages, many pastors and church leaders often come forward. They, too, finally recognize that while they’re devoutly committed to religious activities, structures, and institutions, they don’t have a living relationship with God.

Many today believe they are right with God simply because they are connected to a religious institution or perform religious or charitable acts such as tithing, fasting, being baptized, or eating the Lord’s Supper. These people aren’t terrorists, child molesters, or thieves. They’re decent and devout people who spend their time, talents, energy, and money doing things for God. Yet they can wrongly conclude that because of their religious deeds, they have a relationship with God. The apostle Paul warned Timothy of people like this, people who have “a form of godliness but [deny] its power” (2 Timothy 3:5, NIV).

I pastor a church where several hundred people gather weekly for worship. Many come week in and week out because they know God and long to experience his presence in public worship. But I fear that some assume they know God merely because they show up regularly, enjoy the music and the message, and put some money in the offering plate.

It’s possible to be in church without being “in Christ,” as the New Testament describes that relationship. It’s possible to be connected to religion while remaining disconnected from God. Why would walking into a church make you a Christian any more than walking into a garage makes you a car?

Please understand, I’m not saying that religious activities such as church attendance and caring for others are unimportant or unnecessary. The Bible strongly encourages children of God to invest themselves in the local church: “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25, NIV). A real relationship with God will show itself in a real relationship with his people (more on this in chapter 9). But as important as church attendance and other religious activities are, they don’t mean that someone has an eternal relationship with God.