Religious Form or Spiritual Power?

As we come to the close of another year and begin a brand new chapter of life, I want to bring a sermon that I hope will be a challenge to you to pursue a greater degree of spiritual realism. I will do so by taking up the apostle Paul's theme of “religious form or spiritual power.” Like Israel and Judah of old, the modern church has much more of a “pretense of religion” than we ought to. In so many ways we have the form, but we lack the substance. To work out my point, I ask and answer two questions. The first is this: “What does it mean to have a form of religion?” I answer that by addressing right from the Scriptures the various aspects of the “form” such as natural religion, self-righteous religion, artificial religion, and intellectual religion. The second question is, “What does it mean to have the power of religion?” I answer that by referring primarily to the words of the apostle Paul himself from various texts of Scripture. I then turn our attention to the necessary application of the sermon by emphasizing what Christians must do to avoid the error and to practice the truth. May the Lord be pleased to truly bless His word to our hearts!