On my way back from a road trip I decided to listen to some sermons by Kyle Idleman, who is a pastor in Kentucky. In this sermon, Idleman talks about a dude in the bible named Nicodemus and how he was super religious. Halfway through the sermon I started to think about my past experience with religion and the only thought I could put together in my head was how much I dislike it. I dislike it to the point where it makes my stomach turn when I hear those letters spill out of a person’s mouth.

When people ask me if I’m religious I always tell them no. I tell them that I actually hate everything about religion. I tell them that I hate how it whispers in your ear that your works matter more than your heart.

I hate how it twist your mind into thinking that holding up a “God hates the gays” sign is acceptable.

I hate that it tells you lies like “You’ll never be used by God if you have tattoos and drink”, or that racial issues shouldn’t be addressed in the church.

I hate that in religion it’s more important to keep up your appearance of holiness than actually be transparent.

I could never understand why it gives you permission to feel good about yourself because you can keep up with a legalistic checklist

You see, I hate religion because it’s everything I use to be and dislike about my formal self. For so long I thought that if I could keep up all the rules and not cuss then God would love me more. That if I didn’t like beer and wouldn’t get a nose piercing then I would get my “Get out of Hell free” card. I thought that if I was religious enough that everything would be okay. It made me feel secure.

It made me feel tired.

And one day I couldn’t keep up with religion's demands. One day my religious world crumbled away and all I was left with was a checklist of holy credentials that didn’t mean a thing. I was left not knowing who I was because I had based my whole identity on religion. Soon after I came to a realization.

I realized that I had mistakenly traded religion for the true gospel.

In the rest of Idelman’s sermon, he talks about how Nicodemus had this list of religious things he did that he thought would matter to Jesus. He thought that he could work his way to Jesus, but that’s not how the system was designed. Jesus didn’t want Nicodemus’s religious spreadsheet, he just wanted Nicodemus.

He wanted his heart.

He wanted to give Nicodemus the gospel, not religion.

And in that moment of everything falling apart, I realized He wanted the same for me too.

He wanted my scars and flaws. He wasn’t impressed with my list of religious achievements or how long I had been going to church. He was interested in me and growing me.

Religion has been mistaken as the characteristics of what the gospel is. It tricked me into thinking, like Nicodemus, that I had to achieve something in order to receive God’s love. I put religion and God in the same category and thought they were both the same. For a very long time, I got religion and the gospel mixed up. I tried to achieve something that had already been given to me, I just had to pick it up.

So yes, I still hate religion, but it’s because I know that God isn’t defined by it. He’s defined by the love of the gospel. I hate religion because I know the truth.

The day I traded religion for the gospel is the day I became free.