Legalism With A Backward Wave

A friend was telling me today about this ridiculous phenomenon he had recently stumbled onto: Christian workout videos. He described with some humor the idea of “sweating to the Spirit” and “getting the temple in shape.” He held almost as much distaste in his voice as I had running through my mind as he spoke of it.

Where does this crap come from? Do we seriously think that we’re doing God some kind of favor by engaging in this horrendous type of marketing scheme? Do we really think that He’s proud of us? Do we really think that He needs marketed?

I’m not going to go on and on about the workout videos, because I haven’t actually seen them. But the issue goes way beyond that. My stomach turns when I see the huge publishing fiasco that fills Christian bookstores. Honestly, I hate going into Christian bookstores. This concept of captializing on God to create an over-spiritualized series of self-help books is just derogatory. We’re caught up in the idea of making Christianity a publicity stunt. We think it’s cute to have slogans like “Do the Jew” or “Jesus is my Homeboy” on T-shirts. What’s worse, we think that God thinks that it’s cute.

Not only have we degraded Him in the eyes of the public, and reduced Christianity to the appearance of one more cultic religious preference, but we’ve also taken the trip into legalism through the back door. We’ve left seekers with the impression that they can come to know God if they go through a devotional book, or follow all the steps in a “Christian self-help” book that are in fact the author’s opinions, and not God’s.

We’ve also left Believers thinking that they will draw closer to God by doing their workouts for Jesus.

The bottom line is that our highly-marketed version of Christianity is resulting in a perpetuation of the idea that you can know God through what you do, instead of what Jesus did.

Oh well. As long as it’s a cash cow, He’ll understand.