Is God controlling everything? Does God do evil? Can you fully trust God?

In this series, I define religion as "your attempt to approach and be acceptable to God through your own efforts." You would never say you are righteous through good behavior, but you might say you are unrighteous through sinful behavior. Both are legalistic and TOXIC.

The challenge with overcoming Toxic Religion is the same as overcoming any addiction, if you take on the identity of the sin, you’ll repeat it, if you take on the identity of someone who doesn’t have that problem, you can walk away from it.

Toxic Religion is focused on sin, failure, guilt, and condemnation. Toxic Religion assumes that you’re evil and you can never do enough. Toxic Religion keeps you focused on the old man and never fully puts on the new man. Toxic Religion will leave you continually seeking God for forgiveness and never truly resting in the peace that salvation by grace through faith should bring. Toxic Religion is addictive and must be cleansed from your identity.

Religion is an addiction because addiction attempts to meet a need that is actually, at its root, an inner imbalance of some kind, whether it be physical or psychological. Religion seeks to meet that imbalance through rule-keeping or obsolete covenant restrictions.

To break any addiction the inner man must reach a place of healthy homeostasis so it can involuntarily regulate toward health (I cover this idea in this series). The toxicity of religion is that it says you’ll always be imbalanced, never finding homeostasis because you are flawed at your core, therefore perpetuating toxic behavior. 

In this series you’ll learn how to:

1. Break free from your addiction to self-righteousness

2. Live from inner balance

3. Trust God with your heart

4. Know God’s true character

5. Build your faith on TRUTH rather than CIRCUMSTANCE THEOLOGY

In this series I address a few examples of toxic beliefs like these:

1. God is angry with me because I messed up. How to detox from that belief - God promised that he would never again be angry with me after Christ’s sacrifice because he established and everlasting covenant of peace with me through the finished work of Christ. (remember, toxic beliefs drive toxic behavior, what behavior do you think this toxic belief will drive?) This is actually self righteousness

2. I still mess up because I’m just a sinner saved by grace. To detox from that belief you must understand your new creation identity. (what behavior do you think this belief will drive?) It’s actually

3. Matthew 23:25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

4. My life is difficult sometimes because God is teaching me a lesson. To detox from this belief you must understand the nature of God and how he treats people.

If you feel like God is angry with you or you’re always questioning circumstances through your skewed perspective of God’s sovereignty, you’ll feel like you’re doing something wrong when you begin to think a different way. Let me help you break free from Toxic Religion!! It’s time to KICK THE HABIT OF BLAMING YOUR PROBLEMS ON GOD and discover your freedom in Christ!

Articles from this series