%20(1).webp)
Religious systems can look convincing, sound intelligent, and still be completely disconnected from the living God.
Let me tell you something that might be uncomfortable: you can run the whole church operation and never actually know God.
The Sadducees in Mark 12 are a case study in exactly that. They weren’t con artists or hypocrites in the obvious sense. They genuinely believed they were serving God. They had the education. They had the credentials. They had institutional authority. But when Jesus showed up, He essentially told them: stop the cap.
They were using human logic to interrogate a divine reality they didn’t even believe in. They came up with this riddle about a woman who married seven brothers — and then asked Jesus, “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?” It sounded like a theological question. But it was really a power move.
“They’re using human logic to interrogate a divine reality they don’t even believe in.” — Pastor Terrence Sims
Every system of power does this. It takes the complexity of human experience — your marriage, your grief, your sense of belonging, your identity — and turns it into a tool to control you. It tells you how to feel, when to feel it, whether you felt it right. It decides who’s in and who’s out. It positions itself between you and God and says: you can only access what God has for you through us.
But that’s not the gospel. That’s gatekeeping dressed up in robes.
The Sadducees had a theology about God but no intimacy with God. They could discuss the power of God in a committee meeting but had never encountered it on their knees. They had a file on God. But they didn’t have fellowship with God.
And here’s the word that hits hardest: they crucified the Savior. The people who were most certain they knew God — they crucified Him. That’s what perceived truth does when it masquerades as actual truth. It looks convincing. It sounds intelligent. And it can destroy the very thing God is trying to build in your life.
Here at Eyes Wide Open, we are not interested in religiosity. We are not interested in performance. We are not interested in building an institution that gets between you and the God who already loves you. We want encounter. We want transformation. We want relationship.
Because the gap between religion and relationship is the gap between what you think and what you know. And God is calling us to the other side of that gap.
Reflect on This
Where in your life has religious performance substituted for actual relationship with God? What would it mean to lay down the performance and just show up honestly before Him?
You’re Not Alone! There’s a community that’s here for you!
