Gospel versus Religion

Tim Keller gives these helpful contrasts between the message of Jesus and religion.
It comes from his new DVD and book gospel in life: Grace Changes Everything

Acceptance

* Religion: “I obey; therefore, I’m accepted.”
* Gospel: “I’m accepted; therefore, I obey.”

Motivation

* Religion: Motivation is based on fear and insecurity.
* Gospel: Motivation is based on grateful joy.

Obedience

* Religion: I obey God in order to get things from God.
* Gospel: I obey God to get God – to delight in and resemble him.

Circumstances

* Religion: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I am angry at God or myself, since I believe that anyone who is good deserves a comfortable life.

* Gospel: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I struggle, but I know my punishment fell on Jesus and that while God may allow this for my training, he will exercise his Fatherly love within my trial.

Criticism

* Religion: When I am criticized, I am furious or devastated because it is critical that I think of myself as a “good person.”
Threats to self-image must be destroyed at all costs.

* Gospel: When I am criticized, I struggle, but it is not essential for me to think of myself as a “good person.”
My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on God’s love for me in Christ.

Prayer

* Religion: My prayer life consists largely of petition, and it only heats up when I am in a time of need. My main purpose in prayer is control of the environment.

* Gospel: My prayer life consists of generous stretches of praise and adoration.
My main purpose is fellowship with God.

Confidence

* Religion: My self-view swings things between two poles.
If and when I am living up to my standards, I feel confident, but then I am prone to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people.
If and when I am not living up to standards, I feel humble but not confident – I feel like a failure.

* Gospel: My self-view is not based on my moral achievement.
In Christ I am simul iustus et peccator –simultaneously sinful and lost, yet accepted in Christ.
I am so bad that he had to die for me, and I am so loved that he was glad to die for me.
This leads me to deep humility and confidence at the same time.

Identity

* Religion: My identity and self-worth are based mainly on how hard I work, or how moral I am – and so I must look down on those I perceive as lazy or immoral.

* Gospel: My identity and self worth are centered on the One who died for me.
I am saved by sheer grace and I can’t look down on those who believe or practise something different from me.
Only by grace am I what I am.

HT: http://jonosmith.com

Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine

I like this observation by Melanie Phillips:

For someone who has made a career out of telling everyone how much more tolerant the world would be if only religion were obliterated from the human psyche, Dawkins manages to appear remarkably intolerant towards anyone who disagrees with him.

She goes on to say that Dawkins has become

the apostle of scientism, the ideology that says everything in the universe has a materialist explanation and must answer to the rules of empirical scientific evidence; to believe anything else is irrational.

A second's thought tells one this is absurd. Love, law and philosophy are not scientific yet they are not irrational. So it is scientism that seems to be irrational.

As for Dawkins's claim that religion is responsible for the ills of the world, this is demonstrably a wild distortion. Some of the worst horrors in human history - the French revolutionary terror, Nazism, communism - have been atheist creeds. And although terrible things indeed have been done in the name of religion, the fact remains that Christianity and the Hebrew Bible form the foundation stone of Western civilisation and its great cause of human equality and freedom.

Three religious truths

There are three religious truths:
1) Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.
2) Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith.
3) Baptists do not recognize each other in the liquor store or at Hooters. ~Author Unknown