(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

Hello everybody, it's MrKtal23 back in our video. Before we get into this video I just want to do a quick sound check first to make sure that the sound is working. Alright so the sound is working. So in this video I want to talk about a phrase which is really popular among Christians for some odd reason and that's something which you've probably heard if you search the internet or maybe you've heard it somewhere else. That is, it's not about a religion, it's about a relationship and another way that some people will put it is Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship with Christ. If you just look up that phrase or some variant of it on Google you'll probably just find thousands of Google images and articles and things like that from many different popular churches and popular ministries because that's just the attitude, the mentality that a lot of Christians have today. It doesn't really matter what denomination it is, in the last few decades this has become very popular. There's a lot of non-denominational churches and evangelicals who will say something like this but it's even getting popular among Baptists who will say this. I've heard this preached at my own church, they'll say that Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship and a lot of people take it so far that they treat the word religion as if it's bad, as if religion is a bad word somehow because they have a skewed definition of what the word religion means. So when somebody says, yeah I'm religious, then the modern day evangelicals they scoff at them because they think that religion is supposedly bad and that relationship with Christ is the right way to go but I'm here to tell you that no, Christianity is a religion. Anybody who says otherwise is not getting their doctrine from the Bible, they're listening to man and they're incorporating that into their belief systems. The Bible does not in a single place say anything of the sort, anything of this, it's not a religion, it's a relationship kind of idea. I want to point out first of all, when it comes to salvation, it's neither religion nor relationship, okay? I think this is the reason why some Baptists have begun to use phrases like this because they see how people are caught up in organized religion and organized churches of this world and denominationalism and all the rituals and ordinances and things like that. They see that people are just trying to obey commandments and do good in their churches and things like that and think that that will save them when in reality the Bible teaches that if we were to be saved, we must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and we must put all of our trust in Him in order to be justified. So a relationship with God also is not how we get saved, it's the result of our salvation. The Bible teaches that when we believe, we are born again and we become the children of God. That's our relationship unto the Lord, we become His children, we are the people of God. So when talking about salvation, it's neither religion nor relationship. What about in the Christian life? What about when we become born again? What about when we are a Christian? After we're born again, if we want to do the will of God, if we want to serve the Lord, is what we do a religion or is it a relationship? Well here's what the Bible says in James chapter 1 verse 26 to 27. If any man among you seem to be religious and bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is in vain. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world. Was religion bad? No, the Bible tells us that religion is a good thing. Religion is keeping oneself unspotted from the world. It's bridling the tongue, visiting the fatherless and widows. So if somebody tells you I'm not religious or they say I don't have a religion, I have a relationship, that just tells me one of two things. Either they're ignorant of the Bible or they're a worldly and disobedient person. So now that we've seen what the Bible says about religion, let's see what the Bible says about the word relationship. Well I can't show you anything because the word relationship is never used in the Bible. So when a Baptist preacher gets up and claims, the Bible is my final authority and yet they preach this junk of, well it's not a religion, it's a relationship, that tells me that they're not reading their Bible, they're listening to and reading man's word instead. Because relationship is not in the Bible, but religion is, and religion is commanded. One cannot expect to even have proper fellowship with God if you are not religious, meaning again as James chapter 1 defines it, if you do not have separation from the world. The Bible says in 1 John chapter 2, 15 to 17, love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the father but is of the world. And the world passeth away and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever. Here the Bible contrasts loving the world with loving the father. If you love the world according to the Bible, you do not have the love of the father. And in verse 17, loving the world and the things of the world is contrasted with doing the will of God. Now Jesus said in John 14 verse 15, if you love me, keep my commandments. So there's your relationship with Christ. If you love him, you should keep his commandments, which includes keeping yourself from the things of the world, having no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness as the Bible says in Ephesians chapter 5, going out and preaching the gospel as he commanded us to do in Mark chapter 16 verse 15. That's visiting the fatherless and the widows. If you do those things, according to James 1 27, then you are religious. That is pure religion, visiting the fathers and the widows, bridling your tongue, keeping yourself unspotted from the world. If you love Christ and you love the father, then you're religious. Okay. The idea that religion is bad is taught absolutely nowhere in the Bible. Now there are false religions out there. Of course, they're bad. Anything that calls itself a religion, but is against the teachings of the scriptures is of course wicked, but there is such a thing according to the Bible as pure religion. Even if we just look at the dictionary definition of religion, okay, religion is just a belief system from the eyes of the world. If you go out and just ask the average person, what does religion mean? They'll say, well, it's when you believe certain things and worship God or whatever. And that fits with Christianity as well. Christianity is a system of beliefs and doctrines and worshiping God. So even in the eyes of the world, it would be a religion. I mean, it's like religion is one of those words where people just give a fictional, just made up definition onto it. Like the word sovereign for Calvinists, will they just make up their own definition for that? Or dispensation for dispensationalists? Okay. Both the dictionary definition of religion and the biblical definition of religion is given in James chapter one is what Christianity is. So if you believe the doctrines of the Bible, if you worship God in the sight of the world, you're religious. But in the sight of God, if you separate from the world, if you go out soul winning, if you walk in the spirit, then you're also religious. So stop saying religion is bad. Christianity is a religion, whether you like it or not. If you still claim it isn't, then stop lying and just admit that you don't care what the Bible says. Okay. You just care about what your favorite theologian or liberal preacher out there says, because that's really where all this is coming from. It's coming from these commentaries and non-denominational preachers and things like that. It's not coming from the word of God at all. If you just read the Bible, believe James chapter one, then you wouldn't say that kind of nonsense. Well, that's, that's it for this video. I don't think it would be this short, but yeah, I don't really have anything else to say, but I think I made my point that the relationship that we have with God is when we get saved, we become the sons of God. We can have fellowship with God, but only if we have religion, which would be keeping yourself unspotted from the world, bridling your tongue, visiting the fatherless and the widows. You say, I don't have a religion. I have a relationship. Well, no, you don't. Okay. Well, you don't have fellowship. That is, you might have a relationship. You might be a child of God, but if you don't have religion, then you don't have fellowship with God either. So that's it for this video. Thank you everybody for watching. Goodbye and God bless you.