delusional

The modern expression of Christianity is quickly becoming a delusional religion.
We spend fully half our time thinking up new names to call a something when we don’t even know what it is. Discipleship. Spiritual Formation. Growing. Experiencing God. In any given week, we will invent more names.
Once we’ve invented the name of the week, we spend the rest of our time teaching how to attain it by following prescribed methodologies and disciplines that will help you apply principles to your life, and thus make you closer to God. Honestly, I can only think of one time where it is recorded that Jesus ever spoke of this kind of method for finding God.
A certain ruler had come to Jesus asking how to receive eternal life. When Jesus mentioned the 10 commandments, the man said that he had followed them all since his youth. Then Jesus said he was still missing one thing, to sell all he had and distribute it to the poor so that he could have treasures in heaven, and then come and follow Jesus.
At first, this does seem like a methodological approach;
1) Follow 10 rules (He lists 5/10),
2) sell everything and give to the poor,
3) follow Jesus.
But if you look at it again, the man didn’t ask how to grow spiritually or know God better; he asked how to have eternal life. This is kind of ironic because I’ve never heard anyone preach these things as a means to eternal life, though I’ve heard thousands of sermons on salvation. Rather, we place the methodological approach on one of the things that Jesus listed as required for eternal life – discipleship. A relationship with Him. But our desire for discipleship is not as one of the means to eternal life (beginning now), as Jesus has listed it. (In fact, I think discipleship was His entire point; that the man’s things and stuff were what was keeping him from following Jesus, that discipleship WAS the means to eternal life but the man couldn’t do it as long as he was following his stuff.) Rather, our desire for discipleship is as a means to more peace and happiness after we receive eternal life, though Jesus warned us that to follow him would bring a world of trouble.
So we present it as, “now that you’ve received eternal life, you should be discipled, while Jesus said, be my disciple so that you can have eternal life. Fact is that Jesus talked to this man right in the midst of his going ‘round teaching how to be his disciple. So that must have seemed clear. We though, turn discipleship into 7 steps to follow. This, no doubt, would have been easy for the man Jesus was talking to, because that is where the conversation started; Jesus outlined some steps, and the man said he’d always followed them.
The point that I’m trying to get to is this. The seven steps don’t work. Following six principles of discipleship doesn’t work. We do them, and because they didn’t accomplish the point, we begin to think the point was following the steps or principles. At that point we become disciples of the steps and principles rather than disciples of Jesus. We don’t feel closer to God, but we feel very disciplined, separate and religious. We begin to equate disciplined, separate and religious with closeness to God. It is not something that we love. It is not something that we would call a relationship, though we call it a relationship. All the while we’re going about doing these things, teaching these things, defining these things, we just don’t get it. We pretend we get it, because everyone else seems to get it. Everyone else is going around pretending, so we all just keep our mouths shut. No one has the guts to say, “I don’t get it. I’m supposed to know God, to feel closer to Him, to actually love Him. But I don’t feel any of that.”
We eventually come to believe that the pride we feel from successfully following the steps is in fact a love for God. This pride keeps us asleep, and repulses others. And we become entirely delusional about what it means to have eternal life, abundant life, to be about Kingdom business.
The only possible way that we could teach bogus approaches to knowing God and spiritual growth and believe in the slightest that what we are teaching is true and that we know it because we have experienced it, is to have entirely confused the good feeling of successfully following a regimen or fulfilling a resolution, with actually accomplishing what the regimen was meant to accomplish.
This is delusional. We believe the wrong thing to be true. We teach the wrong thing. We cause people to believe that because our methods didn’t change them, they haven’t done them correctly, all while we know deep in our hearts that our methods haven’t changed us either.
Maybe we shouldn’t feel all that bad about this. Aren’t all the world’s religions delusional? I don’t think we’re practicing the religion that Jesus Christ taught. The culture all around us recognizes that we don’t teach truth. Maybe we had the last chance to present something that could be embraced by a skeptical culture. But we blew it by presenting something else. We lament that the culture now believes there is no truth, or that truth is whatever you believe to be true. But how can we blame them when we’ve given them no truth to accept or reject?