Religion, it’s an amazing, powerful tool that God has created for us where we gather together in a community of like minded believers and we celebrate his presence in our midst. That’s the best description I can give of religion, but it has a shadow. Like all human institutions, it can get off center. Just like the temple during the time that Jesus walked this earth was so far off of what it was intended to be by God. God wanted the temple to be a source where people could come in contact with him, with his teaching, with his rules and his laws that he gave in the Old Testament. But when you look at it, when you see the corruption that’s in the temple, you’ll notice that it turned out that those rules and regulations, instead of being being guides for people, became a burden to them.

And it created in them an overwhelming sense of failure because the rules and regulations were so rigid that people had such a hard time following them that they were constantly in need of forgiveness. In fact, the temple made a gigantic business out of rituals that would forgive people for breaking the law. So you can see that in religion there’s one shadow that’s very, very dark. And that is when it puts too much emphasis on regulations and rules that we would then imagine are our way of convincing God that we’re lovable. God does not want us to love him by earning it from Him. He wants us to know him well enough to know that his love for us has little to do with our performance.

It has everything to do with who we are and who he created us to be. And he knows more than anyone else that what people need to feel from this God is not reward for a performance, but some kind of appreciation for their very essence. So watch out for that negative side of religion. It’s there and it’s part of it. But you know what? When you see it for what it is, you can be free of it and still engage in a wonderful experience of life with people.

Knowing that you’re loved, that’s the key. Knowing that you’re loved for who you are.