Christians believe that the main reason for practicing religion is to ensure that they will go to heaven to live with God for eternity after they die. For Jews, the reason for practicing religion is obedience to God’s written laws. God, however, has a much different point of view about faith. For God, the reason for faith is to lead other people to faith. That means teaching.
That means that religion is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. It also means that everyone who aspires to have faith — and they should because without faith it is impossible to please God — must first go through a period of being religious. We see this principle played out throughout the Bible from Adam, to Abraham, the patriarchs, Jesus and the apostle Paul. They were all religious before they matured to faith. God is not specific about what religion they must practice, he only tells us that we must go through a period of religiosity where we practice religious works that can be seen before we come to faith that cannot be seen.
At the end of the period of religiosity, after God gives them spiritual eyes to see and ears to hear, and speaks his words/laws into their hearts. When God’s word resides in the heart of a New Covenant believer, it is not idle or passive. Because it is God’s word it has the power to give life to others. But it only gives life when it is spoken through the mouths of true prophets who teach.
True prophets have the same attitude as Jesus regarding opening the blind eyes of those who are still captives so they can be set free from slavery to religion. Even though true prophets do not promote themselves as prophets who go around saying “hear the word of the lord“, their attitude is the same as all of the prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus. In other words, rather than just being content with the belief that they have their own, personal, salvation from religion, they are discontent with the fact that the world is full of religious people who are still enslaved to religion. They are eager to teach others the truths about religion and share the good news that religious people can be set free from the sin of religion.
If these are not the motives that direct our lives from that point forward, we are not yet fully free from religion and are not yet conformed to the likeness of Jesus. How do we know this? We know because Jesus was a teacher and he was also a prophet.