What's Wrong with "Christianity Isn't About Rules, but Relationship?"

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Have you ever heard the statement, Christianity is not about rules, it's about relationship?

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Does it really matter if this is a true or false statement?

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Yes, it does.

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And I'm going to tell you why I think it's false and why it is damaging.

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Stay tuned.

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Let's get started.

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Okay, so let's talk about this whole statement about Christianity.

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It's not about rules, it's about relationship.

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Really?

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Well, I think that is a false statement.

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And not only do I think it's a false statement, I think it is a destructive one.

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We're going to talk not just about this statement, but we're going to talk about it in the context of a much bigger and more important topic as we dive into and continue our series based on Dallas Willard's phenomenal book, the Divine Conspiracy, Rediscovering Our Hidden Life with God.

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Okay, so let's talk about this statement.

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Christianity isn't about rules, it's about relationship.

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First of all, I do understand from a historical standpoint how that entered into our Western culture, at least here in the United States.

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That was a statement that we were hearing a lot.

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It still goes around.

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It's kind of become embedded, especially in our younger people's thinking and vocabulary about Christianity.

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But I think it is false and I think it is damaging.

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You know, all relationships have rules.

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Even the most, quote, open relationships have rules.

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You have a relationship with your bank, I guarantee you there are rules.

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You have a relationship with your coworkers, your neighbor, your siblings, whoever, you have a relationship, there are some rules in that relationship.

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And when we give ourselves permission to be intellectual lightweights when it comes to matters of faith, we Substitute pithy sayings for profound truths and this always ends up harming people, even when we have good intentions.

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And again, I understand the reason that that became part of our vocabulary and our language and I understand the heart behind it.

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But here's the thing.

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Good intentions are insufficient good hearted statements.

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Good hearted people can still end up causing harm.

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All harm is not done because people set out to intentionally do harm.

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Sometimes intentions don't matter.

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If I'm driving and I allow myself to be distracted by, say, like, I don't know, maybe my cell phone, and I end up running into your car, I can do just as much damage as if I decided I was purposely going to run into your car.

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Of course, that's not something I'm going to do.

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That's not part of my character.

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But you understand the concept there.

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I don't get by with running into your vehicle because I was distracted and I didn't mean to.

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And I don't have my responsibility lessened any for the damage that I caused because it was unintentional.

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I still have a responsibility for my actions and I have a responsibility for my words and the statements that I make both to myself and to other people.

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Another phrase that has entered into our vocabulary as Christians.

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And we even hear this from people who point fingers to Christianity.

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And that is about judging.

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And we hear a lot about the verse in Luke 6:37 that does say judge not.

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And yet we are also told to judge in Scripture.

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You know, in Matthew 7, verse 16, Jesus says, by your fruit, by their fruit you will recognize them.

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And he's talking about being able to pay attention to people who will come in proclaiming to come in God's name, and yet they are not really from God.

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And Jesus asked the question, are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?

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Well, when he says, by your fruit you will recognize them.

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Obviously we don't walk around with grapes and apples and oranges hanging off of us and a matter of going, oh, that person has oranges.

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Well, what do you know?

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That must mean that they are not a Christian.

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Oh, that person has grapes.

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That means they're a Christian.

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Obviously that's not what he's talking about.

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So what's he talking about when he talks about fruit?

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Well, fruit is how a person shows up with their character.

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And that requires judging.

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If I'm going to assess someone's character, that is judging.

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Also in his letter to the believers in Corinth and in Corinthians 6:3, in 1 Corinthians 6:3 Paul writes to them.

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He says, do you not know that we are to judge angels?

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How much more then matters pertaining to this life?

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And he's writing to them because they have these disputes going on that they're not settling between themselves and they're taking them out into the community and they're asking people who aren't even Christians to make the decisions, to decide, okay, this guy's right and this person's wrong, and he's saying, why are you guys doing that?

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You have the ability to judge these kind of earthly matters.

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Someday we will judge angels.

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I don't get what the whole judging angel saying is about, but I can understand that he's saying, if we're going to be entrusted with this really significant judgment someday, well, then we better get used to being able to do that here on earth.

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So how do we deal with the Bible that says judge not, and then it also says in various ways that we are to judge?

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And this goes back to our opening statement about Christianity isn't about rules, it's about relationship.

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Is it about relationship?

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Yes.

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Is it only about rules?

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No.

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But can you have a relationship without rules?

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No.

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I guarantee you there is no relationship that works for both people.

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If there aren't some rules, there's not some expectations.

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And people say, oh, I have no expectation.

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Oh, I'll guarantee you everybody has expectations.

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And the goal of maturity is not that we try to say we shouldn't have expectations or we get rid of all of them.

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Rather, it is that we have expectations that are reasonable and they are aligned with God's expectations.

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But as people, we tend to swing from one side to another.

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And because we do this as individuals, we end up doing this in our society and in our culture and in subgroups within our culture.

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And we see this that happens at large, and we see this that can happen in small groups, for example, within the church, as part of the larger culture.

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So one of the things that we have seen historically, and I don't just mean like in ancient times, I mean within my lifetime, and this still goes on today, and that is there's one side that says if you have the right set of inward beliefs, and this is a fairly large set of inward theological beliefs, plus you have a large list of external behaviors that you adhere to, then that is being a good Christian, that's godliness, that's righteousness, that's holiness.

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And we can look at that historically.

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And I know as I was growing up, part of that large list of external behaviors would include things like, you don't go to dances, you don't go to movies, you don't play cards.

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I mean, there was a whole long list of those different things.

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And that varies from church to church and over different periods of time.

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But that tendency to say, okay, here's this large list of external behaviors and then there's also this large set of inward beliefs because you have to have a belief kind of tied to every one of those behaviors, well, that gets to be pretty exhausting.

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And that is not what being a Christian about.

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On the flip side, as a culture, we have tended to swing to the other end of that, to the other extreme of that.

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What do we have?

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Well, as long as you have this small set of beliefs that you hold to and you have this small list of external behaviors, that is enough to be a Christian.

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And you might hear somebody and that category is saying something like, well, I believe in Jesus, I believe Jesus was good.

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I believe Jesus was God's son.

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I believe in Jesus, I've got a relationship with Jesus.

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And what are they saying?

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Okay, here's my very small set of inward beliefs.

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I think this is enough.

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That person is probably going to have a very small list of external behaviors.

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Everybody is going to have or to gravitate towards having a list of external behaviors.

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Now, it might be a much smaller list than someone who says, oh no, that's not enough of what you have to believe.

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You have to believe.

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And they can go down the whole list of all kinds of things that a person needs to believe accurately in order to really be a Christian.

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So what's the solution?

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If we are to avoid both of these extremes, Is it a matter that we meet in the middle?

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Do we just adopt a core set of beliefs and then a core medium sized set of external behaviors of how we live out that belief?

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And that's the solution?

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No, because you see, the entire approach is wrong.

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If I'm trying to calculate the amount of carpet that I need for a room, and I know that I need the width and the length of that room, I can have the right width and I can have the right length.

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But if my formula is I'm going to add my length and my width and that's going to tell me the amount of yardage that I need, it doesn't matter if I calculate in centimeters or feet or use the metric system or the English system, I will not calculate the right amount of carpet I need because my whole formula is wrong.

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It's not a matter of addition, it's a matter of multiplication.

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I have to multiply my length times my width, not add it.

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And when we make Christianity about having the right set of beliefs, whether it's a very small set or a very large set, and plus the right set of external behaviors, whether that's a very large set or it's a very small set, we have the wrong equation, we have the wrong formula.

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And it doesn't matter how much that we add to or take off of those lists, we're never going to get it right.

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So what is a different and right approach?

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I don't have one cute little short, pithy statement to hand to you for that.

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So bear with me and trek along with me.

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Because again, we don't want to give ourselves permission to be intellectual children to be lightweights, because maturity requires us to be more than that.

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So if it is not the right set of beliefs plus the right set of behaviors, then what is it?

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You know what it is?

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It's Christ in us equals it's not plus it equals an ongoing process of transforming what our inward desires.

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And as our desires are transformed, our beliefs will be transformed.

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And that will lead to the transformation of our character.

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And what's character?

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Character is really just how we live out our beliefs and our desires in bodily form.

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Here's what often gets left out, and that is the part about desires.

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You see, you can have a right quote, right set of beliefs, but that doesn't mean that your desires align with those.

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And Jesus called this out over and over again throughout the New Testament.

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It was saying, okay, you have the right external behaviors, you even have the quote, right set of beliefs, but your desires have not been transformed, they have not been changed.

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And because of that it is corrupting everything you do and what you teach other people to do.

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You see both side one, the large set of beliefs plus the large set of external behaviors and side two, the small set of beliefs.

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And the small set of external behaviors eventually lead to a gospel of sin management.

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And this is something that Dallas Willard wrote about.

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And the divine conspiracy.

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The net result of any gospel of sin management is selfishness.

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Because you see, we can become so self absorbed and self focused about do we have the right beliefs, do we have the right behaviors?

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We actually end up becoming very self centered people.

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Now we are called to be people of great self awareness.

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Christians should be the most self aware people on the planet.

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But self awareness is not the same thing as self focus.

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The reality is that the more self aware we are as Christians, the more aware we are of our need for God and our need for others.

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Both to serve them and to be helped by them, because we are aware of our incapacity to be everything on our own and under our own strength and under our own power.

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You know, Dallas writes in the Divine Conspiracy, and we seriously believe that God would establish a plan for us that essentially bypass them, bypasses the awesome needs of present human life and leaves human character untouched.

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Would he leave us temporarily marooned, with no help in our kind of world, with our kind of problems, psychological, emotional, social and global?

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Can we believe that the essence of Christian faith and salvation covers nothing but death and after?

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Can we believe that being saved really has nothing whatever to do with the kind of persons we are?

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And Dallas writes that many teach that being saved is a forensic or legal condition rather than a vital reality of character.

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And he continues, but we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of heaven now, the eternal kind of life, as the target.

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The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation with discipleship, forgiveness in heaven to come as natural parts.

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You know, in Genesis 15:6, and then later in Hebrews chapter 11, that hall of faith chapter in the New Testament, we are told that Abraham was righteous not just because he had a right set of core beliefs, but he trusted God, but it was for things involved in his current existence.

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And Dallas writes that the the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today is that we is this idea that we have this right set of core beliefs, but that's about it.

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And so what is this flaw?

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They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ's merit account to ours and to wipe out our sin debt.

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Upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of atonement to be true, even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us, it is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so.

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For this one, trust him for one's eternal destiny without trusting him for the things that relate the Christian life.

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You see, when we have a Christianity that focus focuses only on beliefs and behavior, we ignore the most powerful part of our humanity, and that is desire.

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You see, the first type of the gospel of sin management, this large set of beliefs plus this large list of external behaviors leads to hiding from our desires.

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And trying to hide them, we try to extinguish them.

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But just like the candles on a Birthday cake that keep relighting.

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We find ourselves in a losing battle to permanently extinguish our desires.

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And that's not the goal of the Christian life.

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It is not to become desire less people.

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It is rather that our desires align with God's and they are fulfilled in a way that align with how God has designed us.

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But the second type of the gospel of sin management, which is where we have this small set of beliefs plus the small list of external behaviors that we're supposed to adhere to, tends to indulge our desires, not so much hiding them, but indulging them without first examining whether they truly align with God.

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One of the things that Dallas writes about is that desire becomes sacred.

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And whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin.

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Do we not see that in our world today?

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I want this, I desire this.

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I desire to do this, I desire to think this, I desire to be this.

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And if you're going to stand in my way and you're going to put up any kind of a hindrance, well, you are wrong.

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That's eventually where the gospel of sin management, when it comes packaged with that small set of beliefs and that small list of external behaviors tends to lead to.

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So how do we move away entirely from this gospel of sin management?

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How do we step away from us and, and how do we show up then in our everyday life, in our work, our families, our holidays, our communities?

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Well, one of the things that Jesus wrote is, or that Dallas wrote is we do not seriously consider Jesus as our teacher on how to live.

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Hence we cannot think of ourselves in our moment to moment existence as his students or disciples.

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So here's what I want to leave you with today.

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So how can we escape this?

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Both parts of this gospel of sin management, whether it's the large set of beliefs you're supposed to have and the large set of external behaviors, or the small set of beliefs and the small set of external behaviors.

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How do we embrace the truth that Christianity is about both rules and relationship?

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Because again, every relationship has rules.

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That's how we are designed to function.

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No relationship will ever flourish of any kind.

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If someone tries to live as if there are absolutely no rules whatsoever, that is a setup for failure.

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But it's not only about rules, right?

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So what can we do?

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Well, number one, find out what God desires.

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A lot of us know what God commands, but that is not the same thing as knowing what he desires.

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It was like, maybe you can work for a company and you can know all their policies, but you can also work there for a long time and know all the policies, know all the rules, and still not have any idea what your company's, the management of your company, what are their goals, what are their priorities.

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And companies who operate like that, and there are many that do, eventually will fail.

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They might last for a long time.

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But any company that eventually becomes run by policies rather than by desires, by goals, will eventually fail.

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That's also true for schools, that's true for nonprofits.

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That's true for churches.

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It's not about just the policies, it's about the desires that lead to those policies.

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And so many people can know God only by what he instructs, but really have no idea about what he wants.

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And that kind of relationship never leads to intimacy.

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And at some point it will hit a cap and it cannot continue to grow beyond that point.

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You can't just know what somebody's policies are, what the rules are, what the commands are.

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You have to know what the desires are, and you have to know what your desires are and are those aligned.

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The second thing that you can do to make this actionable is to practice the presence of God.

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Now that does not mean I walk around with my head in the clouds all the time, because that doesn't work.

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I mean, that's just not going to work in, in real life.

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So how can we do that?

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In a very practical way, we can do that.

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We invite him into our everyday life.

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You know, God, I'm.

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I'm going to go shopping today and I am looking for a birthday gift for a friend that I just want this gift to be really meaningful to them.

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Would you just help me with this?

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You know, maybe guide my steps to the right story, give me some creative insights, bring something back to my remembrance that, that this friend has mentioned before that, that she really likes.

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I don't mean by that that every single time that you pray that, that all of a sudden your car is going to magically drive into a certain store and you're going to.

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On the shelf right in front of you is going to be the perfect gift.

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But you know what?

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If you never invite God into your everyday life, you don't even give him the opportunity to do those kinds of things.

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Practice the presence of God in everyday, ordinary life.

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Invite him in.

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Number three, Dallas writes this.

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It is a great and important task to come to terms with what we really think we think of God with what we really think we think of God.

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We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life and that he is full of joy.

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Undoubtedly he is the most joyous, joyous being in the universe.

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We're going to pick up with this next week, so I want you to give some thought to that.

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What are the adjectives that you really would use when you think of God?

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And when you think of Jesus?

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Do you think of God as leading an interesting life?

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Do you think of Jesus not just as powerful and loving and kind, but do you think of him as being smart?

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Do you think of him as being funny?

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What do you really think about God?

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Give that some thought.

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Do you think he's filled with joy and not just in some untangible kind of way, but in a way that you can really picture, just like you would picture an incredibly joyful human being?

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So we're going to pick up with that next week as we continue looking at some of the key teachings in Dallas's book.

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All right, my friend, that's going to wrap us up.

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Hey, if you haven't already, what you do, two things.

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Number one, subscribe to the podcast.

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Number two, leave a rating and a review that really helps me to understand what's resonating.

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And it helps other people to find this podcast and know, hey, this is actually worth my time.

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All right, my friend, if you're new around here, you're going to hear this for the first time.

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And if you're a longtime listener, don't let the familiarity of this statement lose its reality for you.

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You have an impact that is immeasurable, eternal, and irreplaceable.

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See you next time.

Stephanie Smith: 00:28:34

Thank you for listening.

Stephanie Smith: 00:28:36

Visit the website stephaniepresents.com and sign up for High Impact to join the mission of building spiritually strong, emotionally healthy, and relationally smart women and families.

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