Dear Ray,
A person can leave a church building and carry the whole religious arrangement home inside himself.
He may no longer attend the meetings. He may reject the leadership, the teaching system, and the expectations that once governed him. He may speak with great clarity about everything that was wrong.
Yet the same source can continue supplying his life.
He still needs to be right.
He still wants recognition.
He still divides people according to whether they understand what he understands.
The building is behind him. The religious self has come along.
I think we need to face this because departure can feel like deliverance before the inward issue has been touched. We experience relief. The pressure lifts. We are no longer required to perform the familiar role.
That relief may be real.
But relief is not the whole work of the cross.
Soon we may begin gathering people around our account of what happened. Our criticism becomes our contribution. We find a new kind of importance in being the person who can expose the old arrangement.
We have left one platform and begun constructing another.
Paul’s words in Galatians 2:20 reach deeper than a change of religious address. The self that claimed the center is brought under the cross, and Christ lives in us.
Zoe was not acquired by our departure. Christ was already our life. What must end is the independence through which we continue to obscure His expression.
That includes the self that is pleased to have escaped religion.
Can I speak about what harmed me without requiring everyone to join my judgment?
Can I recognize something of Christ in someone who remains where I left?
Can I receive correction from a person who does not share my conclusions?
Those questions expose whether my freedom is becoming another territory to defend.
Leaving must become complete enough to reach the inward demand for superiority, vindication, and control.
Otherwise, religion will simply acquire a new vocabulary.
We will call our circle fellowship. We will call our authority discernment. We will call our rules sensitivity to the Spirit.
And the members will once again learn how to satisfy the expectations of the person who sets the tone.
Ray, the cross must enter the living room as surely as it must expose the religious institution.
It must reach the conversation in which I enjoy being the one who sees. It must reach the irritation I feel when someone questions my account. It must reach my desire to make departure the defining achievement of my spiritual life.
Christ Himself is the destination.
If I have left a building but remain occupied with the building, I have not yet given Him the room I imagined.
Let the old arrangement lose more than my attendance.
Let it lose its government within me.
I want to live from Christ already within us, not merely bring my argument home.
Your brother,
Brent
