Vol. 25 No. 5

All too easily, our life in Christ becomes reduced to the same old scene of religious habits and rituals- reading the same Bible chapters, saying more or less the same words in prayer, attending the same kind of meetings at the same times. All these things are good and wholesome of themselves, but unless we're very careful, put together they turn our wonderful relationship with the Lord into mere religion. We can make a religion out of our service of God, and turn it all into a kind of idol. And there is Biblical and archaeological evidence that Israel used their

Sep-Dec 2013

idols as a form of Yahweh worship. They turned Him and His service into an idol. And in essence, we in this age can do the same, the outward form of our religion doesn't make us atheists, but it can lead to an effective eclipse of God. And all this means that we have missed something very fundamental: We were called to work. By accepting Jesus as Lord, we signed up to being His servants. And each servant has been given a task to do- "to every man his work" (Mk. 13:34). When James writes of not being forgetful hearers "but a doer of the work" (James 1:25) he surely