Religion and Good Works

One of the incredible ironies of the Gospels is the reality that the most religious people in the New Testament completely missed the Messiah. These people were doing all the right stuff of Christianity and were deeply immersed in the disciplines of faith. But the same people opposed Jesus and eventually had him killed. Religion is a crazy thing. It looks so right, and the people immersed in religion are persistent in all the right things, but the outcome is a journey that ends very far away from Jesus and the Gospel. In our story from the Gospel of Mark this morning we will look at the relationship between the Gospel, religion, and the disciplines of the Christian life.