Not a Recreational Religion: Part 1 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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“I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Amos 5:21-24

Transcript

Good morning. Well, as we start a new week, I want to talk to you a little bit about your view of what the Christian life is and what it means to be a Christian.

Because really we need to come to the understanding that the Christian life is not a recreational religion.

You know, you look at a lot of, Christians and how they live, and that’s how it seems. They view the Christian life as a recreational religion. Think about your recreational activities. You might like soccer and join a soccer club because you enjoy hanging out with other people who like soccer, you enjoy playing the game, it keeps you fit.

But it’s just something you do one night a week and see those people and enjoy hanging out, and then you go back to the other issues of your life. And for so many people, that’s exactly what their Christianity is like. It’s about gathering with other Christians on the weekend, and having a good time, seeing your friends, enjoying the worship music and hearing the Bible taught.

It’s a great experience, but it has not a lot of impact on the rest of their lives, and this is never the design that Jesus had for your Christian life. God wants your relationship with Him to be front and centre in your life.

In in fact, you see, in a number of places, God talking about how he feels about recreational religion.

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In the Old Testament in the book of Amos, Amos is a prophet, and God sends him with a message to his people, the Jews, to talk to them about how they were treating their relationship with Him, and what he says to them is that he actually hates their religious activities when they aren’t based on a life commitment to God.

There’s no reality past those gatherings that they have together. Listen to what he says in Amos chapter 5, starting in verse 21. He says:

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs. To the melody of your harps I will not listen, but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Well, this is the picture of what God is looking for in your Christian life. This is what the Christian life is really all about. It’s about walking with God with your whole life, with your whole heart. It’s being all in about your Christian life, not just treating it as that recreational experience that gives you a little emotional boost to help you through the week.

That makes you feel better about life that enables you to make it through some challenges that you’re facing. No, the Christian life is not about making it through. It’s about living for God, living in close relationship with God, building your whole life around God. In fact, when you try to live the Christian life in any other way, you find very quickly that it just does not work.

And maybe you look at your own life and you think, well, I hear people talking about a relationship with God, but I’m not experiencing that, or I hear about people whose lives have really been changed since they came to know God, and I’m still in the same place as I was before.

Well, I want to tell you that Christian life only works when you are totally committed to Jesus Christ and to what God wants to do in your life and what God wants to do through you. Any other way of living the Christian life is bound to end in frustration and a sense of failure, but you don’t have to live in that place. If you want to truly walk with God and see God involved in your everyday life in a powerful way, then you simply need to take this first step of bringing your whole life to God and saying, God, I don’t want to just add you on to my life. I want to build my life around you. I want to read your word, the Bible, every day, listen to you and build that into my life.

I want to learn how to pray all through my day. Just a conversation with you that I pick up and listen to you, talk with you, keep on doing what I’m doing, and constantly am depending on you, growing in my relationship with you. As you begin to build that all in relationship with God, you’ll find that when God finds someone who is totally committed to Him, He is also totally committed to them.

And you’ll begin to see the activity of God in your everyday life in a way that you’ve never experienced before. This is what God wants for you. He is a God who hates recreational religion. It’s not real. It’s not what life is about. He is what life is about, and He wants you to build your life around Him.

As you do that, you will see God bringing your life into order, changing your life in the ways that are truly significant, and beginning to use you as a person of influence who deeply impacts the lives of the people around you as God works through you in their lives as well.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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