There’s a lot of talk about the message in this video ‘Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus’ – what do you have to say about it? Grab a cup and join the conversation. Jefferson Bethke with a spoken word performance.
This video blew up on the internet a few years back. To date, it has garnered over 30 million views. At the time of the release, it was even harder to get a lot of views on YouTube. Jefferson Bethke challenged conventional views about religion. It was a call for Christians to return to the heart of Christianity – to move past all of the stale religion and rediscover Jesus. The controversial nature of the video spawned countless shares and numerous video responses. In fact, many chose to make atheist, Muslim, Catholic, and Mormon parodies of the video. Even though the topic of the YouTube sensation may have been controversial, the idea wasn’t new. It was simply forgotten by many.
This is what Jefferson Bethke wrote about his poem: This is a poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion. In the scriptures, Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At its core, Jesus’ gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can’t do your own list of rules and feel “not good enough” for God. With Jesus, though you have humble confident joy because He represents you, you don’t represent yourself and His sacrifice is perfect putting us in perfect standing with God the Father.
You can watch other thought-provoking videos from Jefferson Bethke at his YouTube channel!
I get this. I get what he is saying. He’s on target.
I think what he means by this, is that Christians don’t have to worry about getting into God’s good graces because Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice for them and released them from that duty. As he says in the video “Because when Jesus said IT IS FINISHED,Romans 8:2 – He died for our(christian) sins. Just believe that he died for sins and they are saved. That is nothing less then organized-atheism.