Religion is one of the most dangerous boxes a follower of Christ can find themselves trapped in. Barricaded in this box, we find ourselves limited by boundaries and restrictions God did not place upon us.

Religion, when defined, is nothing more than people’s beliefs and opinions concerning the existence, nature, and worship of a deity and his divine involvement in their universe and human life. It is an institutionalized or personal system of belief, with the key word being system.

Religion is man-developed, man-centered, and based on man’s beliefs and opinions. It is filled with endless rules, regulations, customs, rituals, duties, and expectations, which are nothing more than ways to measure a person’s strength or ability to do something on their own. Humans created religion to measure their own accomplishments. At the heart of religion is man, not God.

Religion is an empty box void of God with two deadly extremes. On the left wall of the box is the mantra that you must work harder and harder to chase the vaporous belief that it will make you better and more worthy of God’s love. Sadly, this is like a dog chasing its tail because you can never do enough to be good enough. You can’t measure up especially when you never know what good enough really is.

On the left face of the box is inscribed the belief that if you do the rituals correctly and keep all the rules perfectly you somehow become better than all the rest. It is a false sense of superiority and a deceptive sense of possessing some kind of super-spirituality that separates you from the rest of the crowd and makes you elite—one of God’s special ones.

Neither is true. Both create bondage—the former imprisons the soul and the latter incarcerates the mind. Religion is a dead-end box—a prison cell that places your abilities or capabilities at the center of your worship rather than God.

Revelation is the only key that can release a person from religion’s box!