What if the greatest enemy of Christ is the religion that bears His name? What if the problem is not that Christianity needs to be improved, but that we have made a religion out of a life?
Christ did not come to establish Christianity. He came to become our life. He came that we might abide in Him, that His life would become our living, and that God would be expressed through human beings. This is Zoe. This is the mystery hidden through the ages.
Yet we have built a religious civilization around Christ that can operate without anyone actually living by Him. We have buildings, ministries, authorities, traditions, and teachings. We have learned how to preserve and defend all of them. But what has happened to the life?
I believe we must be willing to call the substitution what it is. When something takes the place of Christ and then demands our loyalty in His name, that is evil. Calling it Christian does not make it holy.
Replacing Christ With Christianity
We teach people to be faithful Catholics, Protestants, evangelicals, or members of a particular movement. But where did Christ tell us to be faithful to Christianity? He told us to abide in Him.
A person can spend a lifetime attending services, contributing money, studying doctrines, serving on committees, and defending a church without learning to remain in Christ. All those things can be done through natural human ability.
This is what makes religious substitution so dangerous. It does not require us to deny Christ. We can speak about Him constantly while depending upon something else. We can defend the teachings of Zoe while living from ourselves. We can love the things surrounding Christ more than Christ Himself.
The name remains. The living reality disappears.
Putting Religious Authorities in His Place
Christian religion continually places certain people in positions of spiritual importance. Catholicism has its pope, bishops, and priests. Protestant denominations have pastors, ministers, and governing bodies. Independent movements have founders, leading workers, and recognized teachers.
The names differ, but the danger is the same. A few become indispensable, and the many learn to depend upon them. The believers wait to be told what to believe, how to meet, and what God requires. But Christ is the Head. His life is within His people.
Why should the living ekklesia revolve around a professional religious class? Why should a quiet sister who knows the Lord be treated as less important than an accomplished speaker? Why should anyone’s position give him ownership over the fellowship?
The evil is not that someone has a gift. It is that human authority can stand where the inward Lord should govern.
Making Abiding Into a Method
Jesus said, ‘Abide in Me.’ We have turned that simple word into programs, trainings, conferences, and spiritual techniques. We teach people how to reach a life that has already been given to them.
A branch does not attend a class on how to produce fruit. It remains in the vine. The life of the vine becomes its living. The fruit comes from the life.
But religion is never satisfied with something it cannot manage. It develops steps and procedures. It creates experts to explain them. Then the believer becomes dependent upon the method and the teacher. The method becomes important, while Christ becomes the subject of another lesson.
Abiding is not an accomplishment. It is remaining in the One who has become our life.
The Gifted Must Die to Their Importance
One of the greatest obstacles to the expression of the Body may be its most talented members. A gifted man speaks, people admire him, and soon everyone waits for him. His understanding becomes the accepted understanding. His ministry becomes the center. The other members become an audience.
Is that the fellowship of the apostles? I do not believe it is.
The five-talented brother must die to his giftedness. Not lose the gift, but lose the importance he has attached to it. He must be willing to remain silent, to be unnoticed, and to allow Christ to be expressed through someone with no impressive ability.
Religion does the opposite. It builds ministries around gifted people, preserves their messages, establishes schools to teach their understanding, and makes their work something that must survive.
What began as a gift becomes an institution. What began as a supply becomes a dependency. And the life of the Body is pushed aside.
Claiming Ownership of Fellowship
No denomination, ministry, or recovery movement owns the fellowship of the Father and the Son. The apostles did not create a fellowship belonging to themselves. They shared the life they had received.
Yet religious groups begin to regard their teachings as the test of oneness and loyalty to their workers as the test of faithfulness. Their history becomes sacred. Their practices become the measure of genuine church life.
We divide ourselves into Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, evangelicals, and countless other identities. We defend the names as though they were the life. But Zoe does not belong to any of them.
If you abide in Christ and I abide in Christ, we share the same life. We do not need a ministry to create that fellowship. No man can grant it to us or take it away.
The fellowship is Christ Himself shared among His people.
Making Buildings and Institutions Sacred
Consider the money, labor, and attention devoted to church buildings, cathedrals, meeting halls, campuses, and headquarters. We have made physical places central to a life that God intended to live within human beings.
Once a building becomes essential, it must be maintained. Money must be collected. Programs must fill its rooms. Leaders must oversee its operation. The institution must keep going, and the members are asked to keep it alive.
But if every church building closed tomorrow, would Christ disappear? Would Zoe cease? Would the fellowship of the apostles end?
No. The living Christ would remain in His people. The building was never the source. The ekklesia is not an address or a sanctuary. It is Christ expressed through those who live by Him.
What does it say about us when preserving the outward arrangement becomes more urgent than remaining in the inward life?
Replacing Life With Knowledge
We have produced an enormous amount of knowledge about God. Seminaries, theological systems, commentaries, conferences, and libraries explain nearly everything about Christianity.
But knowledge about Christ is not Christ. A man can explain abiding without abiding. He can teach the Body while dominating its members. He can preach the cross while protecting his own importance.
We may know every expression connected with Zoe and still react from pride, ambition, fear, or the need to be right. We may have inherited the finest spiritual vocabulary and have very little inward experience of what it describes.
The question is not whether we can explain the mystery. The question is what life answers when someone challenges us, overlooks us, or disagrees with us. Is Christ being expressed? Or are we simply defending ourselves with religious words?
Correct teaching cannot replace the life it describes.
Preserving What Should Be Left Behind
Religious institutions eventually begin to treat their survival as sacred. Their leaders must be respected. Their history must be protected. Their members must remain loyal. Their teachings and practices must continue.
And so believers are warned about leaving. They are told that loyalty to the work is loyalty to God. But the Lord never told us to abide in a ministry. He told us to abide in Him.
Why should we remain where the living Christ has been displaced by human authority? Why should we preserve a system that can function without anyone living by Zoe?
There comes a point when the question is no longer how to improve the institution. The question is why we are still there.
We do not need another reformation of the religious machinery. We need to leave what has taken the place of Christ.
Even the Recovery Can Become Religion
This judgment must reach those who believe they have escaped denominational Christianity. We may reject clergy, gather in homes, speak about the Body, and teach divine life. Then we develop our own ministries, methods, trainings, and recognized workers.
Before long we have another system to defend, another history to preserve, and another group convinced that it possesses the proper way.
The recovery itself needs to be recovered whenever it becomes a substitute for Christ.
We can leave a church building and carry its entire spirit within us. We can reject another man’s authority while secretly wanting authority ourselves. We can condemn methods and invent new ones. We can even make our opposition to religion into another religion.
The cross must reach the source of all of this. The natural life must die. Otherwise we have only moved the old world to a new address.
The Greatest Evil: Keeping People Occupied With Everything Except Christ
The mystery has been revealed. Christ is in us, the hope of glory. God intends His own life to become our living and His nature to be expressed through us. This is not a distant religious goal. It is the life we have received.
Yet religion can keep believers occupied for decades with meetings, duties, programs, studies, and loyalty to leaders. They may spend their lives maintaining Christianity while never discovering the simplicity of remaining in Christ.
We have made the Christian life something to accomplish instead of Someone to live. We have made the church something to build instead of Christ expressed through His people. We have made fellowship something to organize instead of divine life shared among us.
That is not a small mistake. It strikes at the purpose of God.
Cross the River
I am not calling for a better denomination, a new movement, or a more accurate arrangement of meetings. I am calling for something much more radical.
Leave the religious systems that have taken Christ’s place. Leave the dependence upon gifted men. Leave the methods that promise to produce what only Zoe can supply. Leave the religious identity, the need to be right, the need to be important, and the desire to establish something that others will admire.
Cross the river. And do not carry the old religious world across with you.
On the other side there is no new organization waiting to receive us. There is Christ. That must be enough.
If no one recognizes what we have seen, Christ must be enough. If no ministry agrees with us, Christ must be enough. If we never gather a following or accomplish anything impressive, Christ must be enough.
The crossing begins within us. We cannot abandon religious control outwardly while preserving pride and ambition inwardly. We cannot reject the prominence of gifted men while wanting prominence for ourselves. Everything that competes with Christ must be brought to the cross.
Let Zoe Triumph
Imagine Christianity without its institutions, professional religious class, denominations, sacred buildings, and famous ministries. Would the life of Christ disappear? Of course not.
Zoe existed before the religious civilization that now bears His name. The fellowship of the Father and the Son does not depend upon that civilization. The ekklesia is not Christianity’s achievement. It is Christ expressed through living people.
God does not need another religious system. He desires a people who abide in Him, who live by His life, and who have no other source.
Perhaps the great turning will not be another revival, reformation, or recovery. Perhaps it will be the end of our attempts to preserve Christianity as a religion.
Not the end of Christ. Not the end of His Body. Not the end of fellowship. The end of everything that has stood in His place.
The evil of Christian religion is not that it speaks too little about Christ. It is that it can speak endlessly about Him while replacing the living experience of Him with something else.
Let the gifted lose their prominence. Let the institutions cease claiming what belongs to Christ. Let the natural life be brought to the cross.
Let Zoe triumph.
And let us remain in the One who has always been our life, our fellowship, and our destination.
