Reading at Face Value.

What you read at face value, (including the Bible), is not what should determine why you believe what you believe.

It is how you read what you read that will determine what you believe. That is why the Bible is the book that is hailed as the foundation of the different belief systems of different denominations.  When you interpret the Bible through the eyes of what you believe rather than what Jesus reveals and letting its contextual and historical setting formulate what you believe, you open yourself to misinterpreting the meaning of the context and believing the myriad of religious deceptions that abound. 

This attitude of sit up...shut up...and put up...predominate in most religious denominations discourage the questioning of religious traditions and practices and establishes religious strongholds that are barriers to spiritual growth.

On the other hand,  questioning why we do what we do...why we say what we say...why we practice what we practice...and why we believe what we believe is illuminating, liberating and revelatory to the tearing down of the religious strongholds that are erected by believing the deceptions of the religious lies spawned by misinterpretation and misapplication of Bible scriptures. 

It is a obvious fact that the religious world promotes religious jargon, spiritual buzzwords, ritualistic practices and man-made doctrines that has nothing to do with the Gospel that Jesus died to establish and initiated to the Community of the Redeemed to bring to the Community of Humanity. In fact it misses totality the point if a relational relationship with God and disregards the work Jesus accomplished on the cross.

Religious life is about people being a filthy sinning failure and how God who is so holy that He cannot look upon sin thus, our sin separates us from Father God. Religious life is about people trying harder to get sin out of their life by praying more, going to church more, reading the Bible more, so relationship with God will be restored. 

Though those things may have an appearance of spirituality they nullify the work of grace in that it puts the responsibility on people to perform to become spiritual and discredits the fact that Christ has done ALL that is needed for us to be spiritual. To the religious mind this may sound like spiritual idiocy but here goes...in Christ we already have EVERYTHING we are going to get from God...Christ is the fulness of the Godhead,  Christ is in us therefore, ALL that God is, is in us! So there is nothing more to get from God by religious performing BUT, there is a lot more to discover about WHO He has given us and what the WHO He has give is all about. Jesus is WHO He has given to us, the better we know Him and the more revelatory understanding we have about Him the more we will experience Him, and the more we will know and experience God and what He has ALREADY given us.

The more we understand that we are to rest in Him the more we will rest from our own working to establish our spiritual relationship with Him who is our spiritually...the more we will accept that it is all Him and none of our own self-righteousness.