Why Christianity Doesn’t Work

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I can’t wait for you to hear my next podcast. It’s why Christianity doesn’t work. And you know what? It doesn’t work very well for most of us, and I want to help fix it on the next podcast. Hello, everybody. So glad you joined us today. We joined together for more faith, more life podcast, and I want to help you get more life in your life, and it’s going to take some faith to get you into that. But today I’m going to talk to you about why Christianity doesn’t work.

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Wouldn’t that be great? Because that’s going to produce more life if I can get it working for you. So we have to kind of just clear the table of this idea that religion is working for people. Because most people, it’s not. And a lot of people, they don’t ever go to church. They don’t get involved with Christianity because it hasn’t worked for them or they haven’t seen it work for somebody else. And that’s kind of the way we’re set up and there’s a reason for that.

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So if we look back in the scriptures, in the Bible, and we go wherever we want to go, we could go to the book of acts, or we could go to the Ephesian church or whatever, all of those churches in the book of acts, Christianity was working. Okay. It worked for them in helping each other. It worked for them in connecting with God. It worked for them when they needed some miracles or they needed a breakthrough or they wanted to reach people about Jesus. Whatever it was, it was working for them. They had powerful services and miraculous things were happening.

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And so then we get over to our side now in this year in our culture, and we find out none of that is happening. We’re not being able to reach people like we’d like to. Some people just don’t want to go to church. They don’t see the reason for it. And on and on the list goes. And for you personally, then I’m just going to guess, you believe in God. Okay, so you believe in God, great. But it’s sort of like that’s as far as it goes.

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We feel like we should believe in God. It’s the right thing to do. We try to believe in Jesus, right, as a savior. A lot of people, hopefully, because we want to know we get to go to the good place if we were to die. We get to go to heaven if we die. Some people, they’re involved in that. But as far as the day to day working of Christianity, it doesn’t work for most people. And so if you’ll notice, even when people pray or pastors pray, or evangelists pray, when they pray, teachers, other podcasts, they either go backwards and try to get you to believe what happened then, which is good.

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He died on the cross and he died for your sins. And you know how it goes. But we look backwards, then the church or the religion or the pastors or the leaders or whatever, Christians, they’re good at looking forward, so they’ll tell you or they’ll believe, well, Jesus is coming back, he’s going to return. And so we can talk about being ready for him to come. We don’t want to miss Him, we don’t want to miss out. And so we have a future.

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But if you’ll notice, then there’s few prayers or few sermons about what we can do today in connecting with God. Now, there are some sermons that will make you a better person or a better dad, a better mom. Try to figure yourself out. A lot of people go to church in therapy, right? Because they went, what’s wrong with me? What can I do to make a better me? Okay? And that doesn’t work very well either, because Christianity is not in the business of making a better you.

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It’s in the business of making another you. And that’s being transformed and being a new creation. Being changed is hard for people. They just want to improve. They want to be a better them. They don’t want to become another person, a new creation. So why is it that Christianity doesn’t work for most people? Well, let me tell you, when the Bible was written and when it was presented to people, it was then read those scriptures, Bible scriptures that maybe you have a Bible laying around somewhere. Hopefully those scriptures were then read out loud to a group of people. So when Paul in the Bible, wrote one of the books of the Bible and sent it to those people, those people would gather around and somebody would read it to them. And it was a public reading on how we’re supposed to live, what we’re supposed to do, what the will of God is, all those things.

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And even the gospels were public readings because people didn’t have Bibles, they didn’t have things written down, and so they were read to. And so the first thing that changes there is we’re getting the scriptures presented to a group of people, okay? And that’s where it started. And that’s where it started working. Now, our problem is we are individuals. We like individualism, all right? And in our culture, person, they go, they graduate from high school this one person decides where they’re going to go to college. They decide who they’re going to marry, they decide who they’re going to work, and it’s not really anybody else’s business. Right? We may talk to parents a little bit, but if parents disagree with us, we’re going to do what we want because we’re individuals and I got to do what’s best for me, what’s best for me.

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All right? So that’s kind of who we are and how we’ve gotten where we are, what’s best for me. I know what’s best for me, and I don’t want other people telling me what’s best for me, and I don’t want to involve with that. Okay? But the problem is that’s not how the Bible culture works. The Bible culture is not individualism. Now, in our family, my earthly family, not my heavenly family or my church family, my regular family, like you have one, we have a very interesting family because we work so closely together.

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And when we make decisions, we do make decisions on our own, obviously, but we also make decisions that cause us to reflect. What’s this going to do to the rest of the family? Because we’re so close. We work together, we work in the kingdom together. And so we wouldn’t make some decision where all of a sudden we just say, well, I’m out of here. I’m going to go do what’s right for me because what about the rest of us? So we have a sense of group.

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We have a sense of a collective family. And the Bible family was an extended family also. So in those days, they were very close where the parents were involved in marriage and what was going to be done, because they were going to probably live close to each other or maybe even dwell in the same house or the same connected, or they’d add another room for the son or daughter to live in after they got married.

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And so they had kids, mom and dad, grandparents, and oftentimes even great grandparents, and they were all together like a small little tribe. And so when in their culture, when they would hear the scriptures, they would hear the teachings of Jesus, or they’d hear the apostle Paul teaching whatever it is, and they say, well, this is what you’re supposed to do. This is how Christians live. They wouldn’t in their culture just say, okay, well, I’ll just do that then.

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No, they would have, okay, if I’m going to do this, my whole family needs to do it. We’re a family. We’re a unit. We’re a collective. So early, when people were trying to evangelize in Africa, let’s say, and they wanted to evangelize the whole tribe, all right, the whole group, they didn’t go to everybody in the group. And this is what’s so unusual. We try to get people saved and born again and go to church and live for God, and we do it person by person by person.

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Right. And it’s slow going if you got to go to everybody. But that’s because we’re an individualistic culture. And in that culture, oftentimes in past in Africa, they would have a tribe, and they would live together as a tribe in their own area. And so if you wanted to get them to believe in Jesus, you didn’t have to go to everybody. All you had to do was go to the leader of the tribe. And when that leader considered what you were saying, they would consider not just what it meant for them, but what does this mean for the entire tribe?

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And if they liked it, which it did, lots of times they did, then the leader of the tribe would then decide, accepting Jesus and making Jesus our savior is the right thing to do for us. And so you didn’t have to go to everybody. In every little part of where everybody lived together, they had their huts or whatever. You just had to go to the leader because they were a collection. And the leader would analyze, this would be good for all of us, and then out of the relationship that we trust our tribe leader or we trust our father, our mother, our family so much that if they think it’s a good idea, then we’re not answering all the questions ourselves, like an individual.

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What’s this mean for me? How’s my life going to change? I don’t know if I want to do this. They did it because they were a collective group. The best way that we can describe what happens to people in a collective group and not make it sound od to westerners who live individually, right. You may live miles away from your parents or your relatives or whatever. And when you make a decision, you just make a decision. You don’t include them because they’re not in our world.

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We’re separate. We’re individuals. But not so in the early days of Bible and not so in some cultures. We know, for instance, the Japanese, when they were getting evangelized and trying to turn to Christianity, it didn’t work very well for them, for this very reason, is because they were a collective family, and we were trying to evangelize the individual, and the individual wouldn’t budge. Now, there is christians over there, but it’s like 5% of the population or something like that. And I’ve been there many times to minister, but the person would be put in conflict because I’m trying to get you to make a spiritual decision of your future, of who you’re going to serve. You’re going to serve Jesus now, and the Japanese at that time.

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It would be difficult for them because you’re trying to get me to make a decision on my own. But this affects my whole family. I’ve got to go back to my family. I got to go back to the extended family. And we have to decide, are we going to do this? Because we’re not individuals, we are a group. So one of the best ways to understand it in our culture and how it’s so life changing is to think of a sports team.

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Okay? Obviously, I’m in Kansas City. We have the Kansas City Chiefs. We have the Kansas City Royals. We’ve got soccer, but we follow these teams. Now, when the team wins, especially if it’s a big win, everybody’s screaming and yelling and they’re going, we won, we won, we won. But none of us actually played, did we? Somehow we have associated ourselves with a team, so we feel what the team feels. We push for the team to succeed, or we have high school teams and friendly teams and church teams that you may want to get on to play a sport.

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And when you play that sport, why is it invigorating? Why does it work? If we work as a team, then it’s a real experience, isn’t it? And let’s say the team goes for the championship or whatever, and they win the championship, and it really does something for the team members and the families of the team members. They are all apart. We’re all winners in this. But I didn’t play. I watched you play and you won. But because I’m associated with you, I don’t see myself as an individual.

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I see myself as part of this team. Right? We have a private school, k through twelve, and every year we put on a pretty sharp musical for the size of our school and the kids. It’s pretty sharp. And I’ve compared it to many, many schools, big schools in our area. And it’s just an experience for us because we put such excellence into it and teamwork. We work as a team and a lot of the kids come in early on and they’re new to our school and they hear about this musical. I’m not interested. I don’t like musicals, but we give them a chance to be in it when they’re 8th grade or whatever, 9th grade, and then on up and it changes their life because it’s a team thing.

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It’s a feeling we’ve done something together. We did it right, we did our best, we did it well, and it’s invigorating. And they take that. They have a boost in confidence that they can do things they didn’t think they could do, and they did it at this group. So why does Christianity not work for most of us? Well, you probably getting the idea of what I’m going to say is we approach the Bible completely from an individual viewpoint.

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How’s this work for me? How can I make it happen? How’s this going to change my life? But then when we read the scriptures, we have what’s called the body of Christ, right? And so Jesus is the head and we’re the body, if you’re a believer. And that’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Accepting that, like, okay, the head’s up there and the body’s down here, and how does that work? But the whole point is we are not alone.

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We don’t think alone. And when you begin to get on the team of God’s team and you get into a church or a group of some sort, and you decide we’re going to have the same values, we’re going to have the same challenges, we’re going to have the same goals, and we’re going to think of each other and work together to make this work. It’ll start working for you. It’ll start working. Now, one interesting thing that most people miss is some scriptures that actually are, well, all of them are plural. They mean group, right?

0:14:29

And you’ll hear people teach on tithing out of Malachi, the book of Malachi, and then they’ll do a sermon on tithing. But in the book of Malachi, it was everybody was supposed to tithe everybody. And God said, I’ll open the windows of heaven, so you’ll get a blessing that you can’t hardly even contain it, right? And then we try to make that work as individual and say, where’s the window opening? For me, I don’t think that window opened stuck.

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And it’s because it was meant for everybody in the church to be a tither, to be a giver, to be a contributor. And when we did this together, it miraculously opened what God called a window of heaven, that blessings begin to happen in our lives. And so we don’t care for that. We want to be an individual. We want to make it work for us. And we just feel like us and God, me and God, me and God, you and I, God, we can do this.

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We’re going to make it work. I don’t need anybody else. I just go my prayer closet, I’ll pray, I’ll talk to God, I’ll read the Bible, and we’ll work this thing out. And so we’ve lost the power of the group and we don’t realize why. We don’t realize why today we have such individualism and at the same time we have such loneliness. And it’s because we just think as individuals, we do not think in a group.

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And so my family, my regular family is so blessed to have that extension of when we think of each other, we do things together. We realize if one gets blessed, we all get blessed. And we try to get God to work for the whole family. The whole family is blessed. If you’re in this family, you’re blessed. If you could do that if you want. So here’s the point. I guess I need to get to the point of this.

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If you want Christianity to really work for you, you’ve got to make some changes in how you view yourself as an individual and realize that this is not about an individual. The glory of it and the joy of it is this works for everybody and it’ll work for everybody. And we want to get everybody together into some kind of a group and start making it Christianity, work for the group. So it’s a fearful thing in our culture to kind of lose your individualism because that’s how we’ve been drilled into it.

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Everybody does what’s right in their own eyes and what works for them. And so it feels weird, like you’re getting to a weird group. I’m in a weird group because we do things. We think of the group, we think of the extended, and like, oh, no, this is getting kind of weird. But if you realize that’s how the Bible is written, it’s written to work for a group and not for an individual. It can work for an individual, obviously, because it’s the word of God, but that’s not its highest working.

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The highest working is you get into a group and then altogether the group has everything that it needs to succeed. And we have many, many scriptures about how God’s going to bless and you’ll not lack anything and he’ll meet all of your needs. Well, that your is not you personally. The Your means you’re in a group, and between all of you God will work in all of us. And between all of us, we’re always going to have what we need.

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We’re going to be blessed. We’re going to have all of our needs met and taken care of by God. But it’s because we’re not an individual. We can’t get every individual. Imagine that, trying to get everything of the kingdom of God to work just for you, and it’s this huge, wonderful kingdom that it’s just too big for an individual. And so the group, then we put our strengths together, we put our talents together, we put our love together and our concerns together.

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And then one of us will get something and the other one will get something. And together we got all our bases covered. And we’re all blessed because we’ve covered everything together through our own strengths and combining our strengths and our weaknesses until we are all strong together. Because we have no loopholes, we have no gaps because we’re a unit. So that’s the best I can do with this to help you understand why it doesn’t work and give you the example of being on a team or a baseball team, and you’re winning and you won, and everybody feels you may have not even hit the ball, some other guy hit the ball out of the park, but you know what? You’re on the team, so you’re considered a winner, right?

0:19:06

The football Super bowl comes up, you might be on the team and not even get to play. You sat on the bench the whole thing. But if you win the Super bowl, you still get a ring. You get a Super bowl ring. And just because you’re on the team. And that’s kind of how you start thinking, if I’m on a team, this would work for me because I don’t have to cover all the bases myself. All our strengths are putting together.

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So revive church. We try to build that. It’s hard because the individualism comes out and people still think like individuals, but we try. When we sing, we sing together, we worship together. We’re trying to do everything together as we can and get the power of the togetherness and the power of the body of Christ. And when it says, my God shall meet all your needs, okay, that’s what it says in the Bible, God will meet all your needs according to his riches and glory, all right?

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But that your is not you. That your is not you. If you’re trying to pull it off as an individual and be blessed by God and have everything taken care of and think of everything as big as God is and never mess up and all that so that your life goes like it should. It’s hard because it wasn’t meant to be that way. You’re meant to be in a group. And I don’t know if anybody is going to think, oh, yeah, this really makes sense to me because the individual wants to still be an individual and be the center of our own world.

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But that’s not how it works. If you want Christianity to really work for you, find a group. Find a group. Surely there’s somebody out there you can trust. Surely not everybody out there is trying to trick you. Not everybody out there is some cult leader or some weirdo that going to get you to do strange religious things. There’s got to be men and women around that are solid, true, and could be a blessing to your life and you could be a blessing to their life. So go find a church or a group where you can search and seek God together and know that you’re not alone. You don’t have to cover all the bases by yourself.

0:21:14

We do it together. And that’s how it worked with the tribe. That’s how it worked in the extended family of Jesus day. And that’s who the Bible was written to, a church and that church got blessed and promises were given to the group because between all of the blessings on that group, everybody’s going to be well taken care of. Does that make sense to you today? I hope so. Because that’s why Christianity doesn’t work. We’re trying to make it a group setting work on individuals.

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It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at all. But we’re handicapped. We’re not getting all the blessings until you. I hear it all the time. People say, well, why don’t we see the miracles today that we saw in the Bible? Or why don’t we not get the blessings or win this or that? And they compare it to Bible days. And the reason is because we’re not a group. We’re not a group. We get into the group and we’ll see those things restored.

0:22:07

All right, well, let me remind you again about the many books, the books I have there, and if you only knew. Excuse me for coughing. Is now for sale. You can get it. You can still download it. There’s other books there you can get. So do that. Get caught up. You got to get this book because it speaks about where we are in America and what we need to do to fix. Will you do that? I hope so. Till next time. Bye.