Religion is simply whatever you put your faith in and give your life to. Everyone has faith. When you get in your car each morning you have faith that it will start because that's what it's designed to do and it has done so in the past; while you're driving to work each day you have faith that your company hasn't hired someone to replace you, and you have faith that after doing your work you're going to get a paycheck. Faith is not about believing in something that you hope is real or some fairytale, it's about trusting what you know to be true. When you read something in a history book or hear something in class, you have faith that the author or the speaker knows what they're talking about and has verified the truth of what they claim (which is often not the case).
From the time we're born we learn the difference between what's true and what's fiction. The problem is that not everyone learns this in the same way, so we have different ways of defining what's true, a kind of mental grid that shapes our thinking. Every piece of information we take in is filtered through this "truth grid" and determined to be true or false based on how we learned to determine truth, which formed from our core values (things we have always known since birth), our personal experience, our social group, experts (such as teachers) and society. We will not easily change our core values, our personal experience has a strong influence, we usually trust experts who know a subject, our social group may or may not change our minds, and society is constantly changing. All these influence what we believe and how we live our lives, but in different ways.
The way that we were intended to live, however, was to live by everything that God speaks, according to His design, being influenced by His perfect will alone. Everything and every person was created and specifically designed by God for His purposes. When everything functions as it was designed by God then everything works together and all is right with the world.
All problems come from someone disagreeing with God. He made His will known to the first humans and they failed to live according to His words, they chose to disagree and rebel. Ever since then we have all made up our own words to live by, ignoring the words of God until we can hardly even recognize them anymore. There is so much misinformation and deception out there that it can be difficult to find the truth, because so many false ideas look so true. All religions are actually man-made belief systems that we come up with to explain things we don't understand, and they all fail to save us.
God does not intend for us to join a religion, He intends for us to turn from our self-centered rebellious lives and come to Him in humility and faith, seeking to know Him. We were designed by God to follow His words and put our complete trust in Him and who He is, with perfect faith. The Bible contains everything we need to know about God and His plans, all that we need to live by faith. We can put our complete trust in what He has revealed to us, even if our friends and most of society ignore it. We need to determine truth with a biblical truth grid instead of a worldly truth grid. Instead of hearing or experiencing something and reacting like most people would, we need to handle the situation in a godly way, and that can only happen when we know His Word and put our complete faith in it, no matter what the situation.
That is how we were designed to operate and live our lives, by every word of God.
"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."
2 Timothy 3:16
To learn more about how God intends for us to live our lives visit
Things Above Ministries
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