Growing up on religion

Hey Masterpiece Family,

As a Christian, I’ve been pondering how growing up on religion has shaped the way I perceive ‘God‘. As I’ve been relishing adulthood I have learnt a lot about God and have come to understand just how growing up on religion has impacted me.

Before anyone reads any further I want people to understand that I am not looking down on religious people in any way, I am just trying to share what God has put in my heart.

Growing up my parents taught me there was a God in the sky and if you did well then you would go heaven but if you did bad then you would go to hell and growing up that’s all I knew up until the age of 15 when I went to a school which had people who believed in different things. When people would ask me the question which everyone has been asked at least once in their lifetime ‘How do you know God is real? all I could say is because I just do everyone’s typical answer right? but what I meant is that my parents told me that God is real.

Because I didn’t have a relationship with God personally, it was easy for me to be influenced by peers which led to me going down a path of sexual immorality and encountering issues that I shouldn’t have encountered. Growing up religiously made life seem soo depressing I tried to live a moral code of being good but as I was in high school I quickly realized this wasn’t possible so I did what every teenager does and forgot about the existence of God and tried to just live my life and just hope that one day that I would be okay.

Then I went to college and matured slightly but I still was living two separate lives, one going to church whilst the other was spent indulging in things that would pleasure me in the moment but would cause me to be up at 12 AM contemplating the purpose of life, but I had no answer because all I got taught was to be good and that was it, but I always wondered what it meant to be a good person and what it meant to be bad person and by what standards was I supposed to measure up to? because if it was God then I would be doomed.

The last year of college was interesting because I ended up doing the best thing of my life which was giving my life to God and since then life has been great despite my struggles. Some people may be wondering why am I writing this now?

keep reading the fun bit is coming up>>>>

so fast forward 4 years and I am now finally understanding God through the bible and personal relationship with him, in getting to understand God I understand ‘Matthew 7:23: And then I will declare to them I never knew you; depart from me you who practice lawlessness verse, even though I had given my life to Christ in my heart I was still being influenced by religion which stopped me from seeking him and finding out how magnificent he was instead of running away from him when I have problems I run towards him to seek shelter because he’s my savior, all that I am saying isn’t to show that I am a perfect being because I am far from it and still seek the grace of God on my shortcomings.

So just how did religion affect me?|

· Stopped me from having a personal relationship with christ

· made me feel a sense of burden rather than joy

· made me limit God and not rely on the holy spirit

· Made me only want to be around people who experienced christ the way I did

· made me look holy rather than living holy

The list could go on and on but I want to expand on the main points of how religion affected me^ not having a relationship with christ caused me to feel hopeless when I kept making mistakes because I was more focused on looking good for God than coming to him how I was so he could transform me.

Feeling burdened is something most Christians can say they’ve felt on their journey of growth in Christ because most people see Christianity as being boring. After all, you aren’t able to do things that people in the ‘world’ would consider fun, but having a relationship with God allows you to enjoy new things and makes you understand that things that people in the world consider fun only lead to destruction. The more I learned about God this year the more I realized that religion limits God because you can only see him through one lens, people think that they can pray 5 times a day or go to a church service weekly and get the full revelation of God, this year as I realized that was far from the truth because the concept of God is not a thing that the human mind cannot even begin to imagine how great God truly is ‘His ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts'

With my parents being religious leaving the church to go to a new church caused problems that I didn’t think even existed because people get wrapped up in claiming denominations, which is sad. After all, the world is uniting whilst Christians are still having arguments about little differences that aren’t heaven and hell issues. (Sound doctrine is important whilst going to a church)

But I realised that I started dismissing fellow Christians just because God didn’t reveal himself the way he revealed himself to me, even though I could see that God was still moving through the individual life, that’s when I started to realize how much religion was limiting my understanding of God.

Final thoughts...

Religion can give you an understanding of God but only a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit can truly give you the revelation of Jesus Christ our Lord and savior. This year has taught me that God can’t be put in a box, because his glory is something that can’t be fully comprehended through the human mind, scientists, philosophers and people who are considered to have great influence in the world still can’t understand the mystery of God but us believers through the Holy Spirit are able to come to the great revelation of God thanks to his only begotten son laying his life down for our sins.

Thank you for reading.