Recently, I overheard a young man state that he "hated his religion". I assumed that his statement was made in reference to the Lenten Season. The forty days of lent represent the time Christ spent in the wilderness. The preparation is a time for Christians to honor the Lord's sacrifice on the cross at Calvary.
"What time is it? I am hungry," he said, his face wrought with anguish. "I can't eat meat... I hate my religion!"
Has that "religion" failed?
Jesus did not go to the cross in order that man be in misery with abstinence of chocolate, meat, or the like. He died in order that we might have life and that eternal. Those who participate in the fast, should do so in humility, self-examination, submission, contrition, and worship.
Christ also died that we would not be under the law. It was the Pharisees who had become so pious, looking down their noses at their fellow Jews inability to keep the Levitical laws. Paul says in Galatians 1:14-16 "I was one of the most religious Jews of my own age in the whole country and tried as hard as I possibly could to follow all the old, traditional rules of my religion. But then something happened! For even before I was born, God had chosen me to be his and called me—what kindness and grace— to reveal his Son within me so that I could go to the Gentiles and show them the Good News about Jesus."
Jesus came to bring freedom from that slavery, to break the bondage, remove the shackles, and rescue man from the penalty of sin.
Galatians 3:12-13 "How different from this way of faith is the way of law, which says that a man is saved by obeying every law of God, without one slip. But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself. For it is written in the Scripture"
True religion is a representation of the light, love, grace and hope of Jesus. Celebrate this Lenten Season as a time of appreciation filled with prayer, repentance, reverence, charity, and self-denial.
Search your heart. Is your "religion" a yoke around your neck? Throw off that burden and come to the cross. The love of Christ is not a rope, not a chain, not a lock and key. Christ's love left them in an empty tomb.
As the words of Chris Rice's popular song say, "Come to Jesus, and live"
