Losing My Religion.

Keeping my faith.

This summer I found myself constantly overwhelmed with information in the Christian community: from sermons on YouTube to TikToks on that addicting little app. Everyone has an answer for how to be a “good” Christian and what our faith should look like. I found myself trying to keep up with these standards more than I kept up with God.

I even had to take a step back from how I approached the Bible. I started to feel like the more biblical knowledge I had, the more pressure there was to be a “good” Christian. You know, because “the bible says…” That was exhausting, though. I felt like the more knowledge I had when it came to the Bible, the less faith I seemed to have–the less I relied on faith and the more I relied on works. (“Works” is another way of saying behavior, more or less).

I don’t feel like “bad” Christian when I don’t read my Bible every day. I want to read my Bible every day, but I also don’t want to become arrogant about my knowledge of the Bible. This internal conflict made me change the way I read. I don’t read to learn what I should and shouldn’t do. I read to discover the character of God over and over again.

I think when it comes to reading the Bible, it’s easier to understand scripture that says “do this and don’t do that” than it is to understand the identity of God, and so we feel close to God because of our behavior and following the rules rather than feeling close to God because of our understanding of God. That’s how we end up with elitism, legalism, and performative Christianity…because we feel good when we can at least say that we “follow what God says,” even if we don’t truly understand His character or His love for us.

I don’t want to get so caught up in doing right or wrong, though, because when I do that, I easily let myself down…and so then I feel like my relationship with God is up and down because my “good” behavior is. Whereas, if I just focus on trying to get to know God, through reading, prayer, or whatever else, I can have a stable relationship with Him because unlike my behavior, God never changes.

And I don’t say any of this to say that we aren’t encouraged to live in certain ways as followers of Christ, but when we shift our focus from what we can do to who God is, that is how He changes us. Him. He does the heavy lifting. And then through His changing us, we don’t act arrogant or better than anyone because changing wasn’t something we consciously did. It’s like the only conscious decisions we make are to accept Christ, get to know Him, and keep drawing near to Him, and He does the rest as far as helping us evolve and follow certain convictions.

But what we do is we try to do everything ourselves, so we don’t leave room for God, and then we feel ashamed when we mess up…when the whole time God is just asking us to draw near to him and stop trying to take on a load that Christ already carried and died with in our place. …It’s me. I’m “we” lol. I’m tired of that, though. I don’t intend to change myself for religion. I’ll let God change me through our relationship…

Because the truth is, I’m a Christian with “bad” behavior and a good God.