LRC, Houston - the weekends-free church in Houston, Texas

Many followers of Jesus have made the Bible and Christianity a reward-punishment, win-lose approach to life. In other words, Christianity has just borrowed from the culture, or set up house within the confines of society and practiced living with religious words, but humanistic principles. No transformation can ever take place in such a lifestyle.

Everyone (can you say ALL?) have been invited to a mystical banquet. Few have accepted.

A religion that puts an emphasis on duty and obligation (requirements) and not on grace and joy will always leave the participants empty and with a hole in their soul. the guilt-based history that the church has embraced and followed for thousands of years does not work: never has, never will!

It’s probably an overlooked comparison; however, in John, chapter 2, we see Jesus making a transformation of an item. Jesus takes the “jars of purification” (2:6), the symbol of ritual, cleansing, and law rituals and turns them into tens of gallons of the best wine (2:7-10). How much more clear does the message have to be?

And yet all the religious leaders can do is worry about Jesus and His disciples not washing their hands before they eat, healing on the Sabbath, or other such forms of “meritocracy” that the church loves to uphold. Thus instead of transforming society the church has mirrored society. Is there any wonder that there’s little or no difference in the percentages of divorces out of the church vs. in the church?

Purity codes, debt codes, and atonement theories that the church majors on are nearly worthless!
1-We’ve substituted the precious power of communion with potluck suppers.
2-We’ve made the GOOD NEWS impotent by making it the ribbon on the box called moral achievement
3-We’ve set grace aside in favor or “earned worthiness”.
4-We’ve created a list of who is IN and who is OUT, making the 11 am Sunday hour the most segregated time in America’s week instead of embracing Isaiah 56:7 (My house is to be a house of prayer for ALL the people).

We’ll never grasp what Jesus taught until we’ve had our minds renewed as Romans 12:1-2 says, because how our minds have organized THIS world is not how the Kingdom operates. The Kingdom is a WIN-WIN lifestyle that our egos simply can’t comprehend. Maybe that’s what we need to be saved from: the win-lose thinking of religion!