A story I heard

Imagine if you were alive at the time of Jesus’s resurrection. You heart about what happened via a trusted friend, who heard of it via a trusted friend, who heard of it via a trusted friend. You knew that what you were hearing was the truth, and so you began to follow the teaching’s of Jesus. You got together at people’s houses, or went door to door, just meeting up with people, talking about what you’ve heard, sharing what you learnt and praying together. 

A millennium or two later, and organised religion distorts the picture. The simple messages have been hijacked to control, and oppress people. To shame them and guilt-trip them. The simple story of what happened on earth, gets tangled up with the very thing that Jesus warned against. So tangled up to the point, that if you find yourself, hearing a story from a friend, and believing it to be true, many people will not believe you set out on this journey of your own free will. They will think that the story was forced on you, even if you picked up the book of your own accord, even if you lived like those in the early days, just sharing the words with friends, and meeting up with other friends, and talking a little about what you learnt.

Religion, wants to swallow up your story, like a hungry beast, feasting on your own discerning mind and leading it elsewhere. But if you are aware it cannot succeed.

I wrote this post to share that following Jesus and being ‘religious’ are two separate things, because it can be hard to see that in our modern time, of spiritual deception, and distortion.

Many of us followers are not ‘religious’. We just heard a story, and felt convicted of it’s truth.