GET READY TO WORK
Becoming a New Covenant disciple is not for people who follow a casual approach to learning about God. It is not as simple as going to church, reading a book, reading postings on social media, going to a Bible study, doing daily devotions, or even reading your way through the Bible in a year. These are all casual, legalistic, religious approaches to learning about God. Indeed you may learn a little bit if you do these things, but those approaches will never take you to the unsearchable depths of knowing God that serious, discipleship study enables.

STUDY TIP: See TWO KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE for more about how to know God.

The way we see it, religionists are consumers of commercial, religious enterprises (i.e. businesses) that cater to spiritual wannabees who, instead of studying to show themselves approved by God, are willing to listen to a religious leader, read a religious book, listen to religious music, or attend a religious conference and then accept and adopt as gospel what someone else has imagined in their own minds and packaged up as a religious commodity to sell to gullible religious consumers. Such people have been deceived into believing that faithful participation in this commercial religious system is all that God expects from them.

This model of passive (i.e. lazy) spirituality does not line up with what God says about seeking him. It is the result of generations of people listening to false prophets who want people to keep coming to them for Bible insights instead of doing their own study. In truth, it is not even spirituality. It is just religious activity.

Religious people have been so constrained from serious study by religious institutions (past and present) that they remain spiritual babies accustomed to eating warmed over, regurgitated, spiritual food (i.e. milk). What they call spiritual food is barely milk, and is surely not the solid spiritual food available to mature New Covenant disciples.

STUDY TIP: Only New Covenant disciples eat solid, spiritual food found in the mysteries and secrets hidden in the symbolic language of the Bible. They are able to interpret the many Symbols, Signs, Types, Parables, Copies, and Shadows found in the Bible because God has written his laws on their hearts.

Hearing God’s spoken voice is the Bible language that indicates when God has written his laws on the hearts of people. It can be said, therefore, that people who deny the ability to hear God’s voice also deny that God’s laws are written on their hearts. That denial confirms that those people are Old/First Covenant religionists who interpret the Bible literally — not symbolically.

The ability to hear God’s spoken voice is evidence that someone has been born again. Only people who have been born by the spirit are able to hear the words of the spirit of God spoken to the heart. All others are born of the flesh. They only understand human wisdom and are unable to understand spiritual words.

Religious leaders try to explain Bible mysteries with  intellectual explanations embellished with clever human knowledge and no small amount of imaginative speculation. Religious people who are hungry to know more about God, but unable to hear his voice, eat up this unclean food thinking that their leaders are anointed with special knowledge and insights that are not available to them. Religious people consume the words (i.e. teachings and writings) of false prophets thinking that doing so makes them righteous. They wrongly believe that taking human words into the human mind is the same as hearing God’s spoken voice in the heart. Therefore, they do not realize that they are actually sinning by eating the unclean food served to them by trees of knowledge of good and evil.

Building spiritual muscle (so to speak) is like building any other muscle. It takes effort. It takes resistance, and it requires solid spiritual food that comes from the spoken word of God. Religion, on the other hand, tries to make spiritual growth easy and culturally acceptable. Religious people have not been taught or encouraged, to feed themselves by listening to God’s voice. Thus they barely survive on a starvation diet of sermons, books, religious music and conferences. Because of their failure to feed themselves and their children on the spoken word of God, they are famished spiritual infants.

This condition is the opposite of the spiritual maturity of New Covenant disciples who dig for and eat solid food (i.e. God’s spoken word) that is spiritually nourishing and tastes sweet like honey. They dig deep spiritual wells that produce satisfying, life-giving, spiritual water. They are serious learners (i.e. disciples) who go places in the Bible that they have never visited before and connect scriptures for which they never saw connections. And even if they had been there before, they now listen for God’s voice to reveal mysteries that they never understood. They have learned to hear and obey God’s spoken word while reading the written words of the Bible. Little by little, the written law is leading them to faith.

New Covenant  disciples are learners and teachers. True disciples know that they must be diligent, hard working learners. Going to church or synagogue weekly does not make someone a learner. Reading a daily devotional or the weekly Torah parasha does not make someone a learner. Diligent study, followed by serious personal application of what you have learned, makes you a learner and a disciple.

Religionists do not learn according to God’s standards. By taking their instruction from men who presume to speak as prophets of God who insist on interpreting the Bible literally, they have acquired a dim, faint view of God and reduced him into something less than he really is. The same is true for Jesus who is much more complex than the sentimental, iconic images typically used to portray him in Christian literature and pictures. Lacking real depth, God and Jesus become Sunday School characters, icons, or golden calves, made by men who want to reduce God and Jesus to images of themselves rather than study and listen to God’s spirit which will teach them all things.

The Religion Detox Network exists to encourage people to listen to God’s voice while studying his written words. We have purposely avoided the temptation to make it simple and easy to digest. We have not fluffed it up, nor dumbed it down. We have used this approach because God and the Bible are not simple. They are very complex, deep and full of mystery and dark language.  Bible readers who have encountered any difficulty understanding the Bible and some of its apparent contradictions know this to be true.