God Wants to Give you a New Life

 Religious duty can be a slavery. Religious guilt can lead to madness.

Fifty years ago I was a student. In my summer holidays I worked for a few weeks as an unqualified assistant in an old-fashioned psychiatric hospital. In those days, many patients were in permanent care in large hospitals.

One day I accompanied a group of chronically ill patients on a walk with a nurse. I struck up a conversation with a man who would probably stay in the institution for the rest of his life.

He told me how, as a devout Catholic, he felt obliged to pray almost all the time. This devotion to prayer had become an addiction for him. He was good for nothing other than repeatedly falling to his knees and praying in all kinds of situations.

Religious duty can be a slavery. Religious guilt can lead to madness.

There are feelings of guilt that lead to insanity, but there are also real feelings of guilt that come because of our sin. They don't need to destroy you, because God gave his only eternal Son as an atoning sacrifice for you on the cross.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Jn 3:16 NIV

What does it mean to believe? Fulfilling religious duties like slaves? Jesus did not die on the cross in terrible pain just to found a religion.

Buddha, Mohammed and the Hindu gurus founded religions. In these religions, their followers must strive to attain some kind of holiness, but they are constantly plagued by insecurity.

A Buddhist or a Hindu hopes to have a better destiny in his next life. A woman in these religions can hope to return as a man in her next life. A Hindu woman must serve her husband well to earn this supposed promotion.

Muslims hope to escape the flames of hell, but they are never sure if their virtue is enough to outweigh their sins.

Jesus said God's salvation is a free gift that we cannot earn. Those who surrender their lives into God's hands are forgiven and have eternal life.

Paul knew he could never make up for his offence against Jesus. He knew that Jesus had died for his sins.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 6:23 NIV

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—
not by works, so that no one can boast. Eph 2:8–9 NIV

We can't earn this new life, but that doesn't mean we don't have a purpose in life.

A well known preacher once said:

‘Jesus did not accomplish everything, so that you could accomplish nothing.’

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Eph 2:10 NIV

When we receive the New Life from Jesus, prayer is no longer a religious duty, but a communication with the kind God who loves you from the heart.