Quite often, I have come across regular Church going people say, that religion is nothing but what society has developed, so that people would listen to what is good. Now there is a negligible fraction of truth to that statement but for a regular church goer to say that, is nothing but hypocrisy. Hypocrites are precisely what people are naturally from Adam because they believe religion should do nothing more than appeal to their good nature but when religion does that they rarely take notice. However, if you speak the truth about them to their face, they will take notice but hate you for it and so it is that people are naturally hypocrites from Adam because nothing is more bitter to these fools than the truth about themselves.

Proverbs 9
8 Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you, Reprove a wise man and he will love you.
9 Give instruction to a wise man and he will be still wiser, Teach a righteous man and he will increase his learning.
10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

It is for this reason people at their best can only believe in humanity because under such a belief system they can do as they please from their unbelief and make victims of those who cannot fight back. Take Abortion for instance, those liberals fools feel secure in ascertaining that those unborn babies cannot fight back but do you think God is going to sit quiet as millions of helpless babies are murdered? This is the very nature of unbelief among those who claim to believe in humanity as over the truth about God and Christ.

Prov 15
28 The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, But the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things. 29The LORD is far from the wicked, But He hears the prayer of the righteous.

Today people think that the wicked are those who are rotting in prison for murder, rape, robbery and fraud. Then there are those who think that you can continue doing what you are doing until you get caught and then when society brands you as wicked, then you are wicked. However, this is far from the truth because the spirit of the anti-Christ has worked in men ever since the fall of Adam (Gen 3:1-6). These demonic spirits work in the hearts of all people because of Original Sin. So a wicked person is not necessarily a person who is on the police records but any and every man whose life is not in communion with God through Jesus Christ.

Romans 3
22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

27 Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith.

You see the reason people feel they are praying but their prayers are not heard is because their hearts aren’t set straight with God and they are implicitly asking God to serve their own rebellious nature. The Bible teaches God looks at our motives when we pray and though we may claim our prayer to be most philanthropic, our motives might be really messed up but no hypocrite will admit that. You see being hypocrites by nature, people are generally given to pray from a motive, which is not genuine but detestable in God’s sight (Mat7:3-5) and God will not listen such prayer because He cannot be mocked without damning repercussions. So, if you are really looking for your prayers to be answered, you’ve got to know God and His purpose.

Prov 8
34 “Blessed is the man who listens to me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting at my doorposts.
35 “For he who finds me finds life And obtains favour from the LORD.
36 “But he who sins against me injures himself; All those who hate me love death.”

James 4
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

Against much of what the world’s heretics would like you to believe, God hasn’t left this world orphaned and neither does He play a non-interfering role with humanity. The issue is, when people see things in the world not going as they please, they think God is up to no good because they believe that God exists to serve humanity. You see, this stems from the very same lies these hypocrites fool themselves with, because from the very reason they have fooled themselves to believe that society created God so people may listen to what is good, from that very same reason they undoubtedly feel God exists to serve humanity. Such is the blasphemy they breed about God in their minds and then wonder why God does not answer their prayer. Why should God answer their prayer when these fools believe that God is an invention of society? Should God answer their prayer because He exists to serve Humanity? I hope you are able to see the damning unbelief we are dealing with here because this by itself defines wickedness.

John 6
43 Jesus answered and said to them, “Do not grumble among yourselves.
44 “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.
45 “It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.
46 “Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father.
47 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.

You see, in order for you to pray, it requires you to know God, which is only possible through Jesus Christ because Jesus is the Son of God who came some 2000 years ago (Lk1:28-35), taking upon Himself the complete nature of man by being born of a virgin and thus having no part in inheriting the sin of Adam. This Jesus was the sacrifice God offered on behalf of us men who had no capacity for God’s righteousness and as the Bible teaches that life is in the blood, so it is with the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ that we have forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. It is for this reason that the Bible refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God!

1 John3
21 Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God;
22 and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.

John 1
17 For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.
18 No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

I may not know where you stand in your relationship with God but this I can say for sure that intimacy with God grows richer only with brushing shoulders with the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. His Might rubs-off on you as you learn the righteousness God requires of you as a person. It is a high unlike any other and one which only keeps you asking for more of Jesus because when you know Jesus, you want nothing more than what God wants and that greatly pleases God. It’s like a child asking for or doing something that makes his father proud.

Psalms 37
4 Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
6 He will bring forth your righteousness as the light And your judgment as the noonday.

Unlike the Christianity, our famous TV evangelist and the popular Charismatic movement is bearing witness to, asking in prayer is not about asking God as you please so as to satisfy your own appetite but it is asking from the knowledge of knowing God’s will because the true Christian’s strength is in exercising the joy of the Lord and not in satisfying his or her own appetite. I have come across and admonished many so called Bible believing Charismatics whose reason for praising God in the midst of their congregation was: I was praying for an iPhone and God answered my prayer or I was praying for a car and God blessed me with one.

Mat 6
24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

I pity the senseless direction of the Charismatic school of thought because when these people testify in the midst of their congregation about God satisfying their appetite for material things (as though it was the crux of their religion), their congregation replies by quoting scripture like Ps2:8 saying you must ask for big things, without knowing that the big things we need to ask for are concerning that which please God and not in serving our own appetite. Such is the plight of the Charismatic movement that their religion is not to stand on Jesus’ righteousness and ask for that which pleases God but to ask in prayer for that which satisfies their own appetite since they subconsciously perceive that it pleases God to serve them. This then is no different from unbelief and so it is that these Charismatics are only fooling themselves in saying they are living for God when their religion is more about satisfying themselves.

Mat 6
31 “Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’
32 “For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
33 “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Though I shall admit that there are many Charismatics who love God, the real problem is that only a small fraction of these have read their Bibles from cover to cover (Hosea4:6). With such an appalling rate of Biblical illiteracy and sloth, their congregations are left with nothing, but to do only what their pastors/leaders say. The average Charismatic therefore is very much unlike the Bereans of Acts 17:11 and though these may be given to say that they are Bible believing Christians, that is far from the truth. The reason I am citing the Charismatics in this post, as I have done in many others, is because asking in prayer is the punchline of the Prosperity Gospel, which is something I need to caution you against because money was never and shall never be the motive for true faith in God.

John 15
5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
6 “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.
7 “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

To conclude, we understand from Romans 5:17 that we are reconciled to God in the Lord Jesus Christ. In this manner our stewardship which was lost in Adam is restored to us in the Lord Jesus Christ because the image of God in which we were made (Gen 1:26) sought to reflect the God’s nature and will, in living out our Christian/Godly stewardship over the earth. So it is in prayer that we who are made in His image can only truly ask with proper purpose, when we ask for not what we want for ourselves but what we want according to God’s own righteousness.

Romans 7
7 What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.”

People believe that they don’t need religion to teach them on human morality but this is far from the truth. It is as Paul says above, that he would not know covetousness is sin had the law not taught against covetousness. Now, I have been born and brought up in Mumbai and the Roman Catholic society I was brought up in, were not among the Bible believing/practicing Christians I know today. Having sited this, I must say that one of the reasons the West is so morally sophisticated compared to the general populace of my country and among others in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, is because western culture was shaped by the Gospel (Biblical Law).

The West however has been backsliding terribly for quite some time now and the apostasy is appalling. The general mind-set is that we don’t need religion to teach us on morality but I beg to differ on that because growing up I have known what it is to be a namesake Christian like others in my society, and I have grown seeing people who lived according to the Bible be morally superior to me and any other, whom I have known from any religion. I had not seen this moral superiority in either Hindus, Muslims or Buddhist, sure they were religious… didn’t eat pork/beef, nor touched alcohol, said their prayers but they enjoyed doing crap just as much as I did, having little value for their/our neighbour.

Mat 22
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And Jesus said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 “This is the great and foremost commandment.
39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Today if a person says that he/she does not need religion to teach them on morality, they are implicitly also saying that Jesus is not the only way to live in communion with God (Jn14:6). In this manner they disregard the sacrifice of Christ because it makes no difference to them in their so called search for spirituality (self-appeasement). However, if you were to draw close and take a good look at their demeanour, you would notice these ungodly religious pretenders viz. Osho, Sadguru, Asaram Bapu and Sri Ravi Shankar, are no different from any other person in the world. These pseudo-religious hoodlums have made religion their business while in their hearts they remain adulterers, coveters, thieves, murderers and false witness bearers because in truth they serve themselves, not God.

Take the average person today, if he/she is asked why don’t you hang out with a particular person, the general response is: why should I hang out with him/her, what has he/she got that I would want? That my dear friend is covetousness for you because generally a person will only hangout with another for what he/she has got… a pretty girlfriend or lots of money or a really nice villa or a fancy car or political clout. The reason I have to spell this all out for you is because you did not know it to this extent and the fact of the matter remains that you need religion to teach you morality.

Today, people are totally ok with sexually checking another person out. Fornication is a status symbol in today’s society and abortion is a right. Such is the warped sense of morality people have, outside Biblically defined morality. When the Bible says that you ought to wear the Law on your forehead and right hand, it means practicing the law of God is not merely an action but something you originates in thought. Now for those of you who are outside Christ, this may seem impossible but for us, whose sinful nature the Lord Jesus has propitiated unto the righteousness of God, this is made possible for us by the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf (Eph 1:4, 7). Wherein we are credited by grace His righteousness while the justice we deserved for our hostility towards God was paid by Jesus for us on the cross.

Mt 19
23 And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
24 “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
25 When the disciples heard this, they were very astonished and said, “Then who can be saved?”
26 And looking at them Jesus said to them, “With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

You see it says so in the Ten Commandments that you shall not commit adultery and Jesus says that if you were to even ogle at a woman, you would guilty of committing adultery in your heart. So just as the godly as given a moral capacity to think and act according to the Law of God, the ungodly in a similar manner wear the mark of the beast on their forehead and right hand. So you see morality is merely thought materializing into action because you need to think it to do it. However, out of the shame of admitting your own incapacity for true morality you might refer to God’s Law as impractical but then I must point out that the reason you detest those who are blessed with the capacity to exercise the Law of God by the power of Christ, is because you know in the back of your mind somewhere, that living as you please is not morality but immorality, and the reason you oppose Biblical morality is because it defines a morality that opposes your immorality, which you might not care to admit.

Deut 6
6 “These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.
7 “You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.
8 “You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.

Rev 13
15 And it was given to him to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast would even speak and cause as many as do not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
16 And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead,
17 and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.

If all the religions were truly the same, teaching everybody good things, the Christian sense of morality, which is according to the Law of God would not come under such spiteful attack. The truth is, people want to live as their please, which has been naturally passed to them from fallen Adam but when the real standard of righteousness presents itself, the dark side of all these heathen fools suddenly surfaces because that is what Adam has passed to all his posterity, a counterfeit standard of righteousness. So how does a counterfeit feel when the real thing shows up and proves the counterfeit to be a counterfeit? He or she feels terrible with a sense of absolute helplessness which they are too ashamed to admit because they also happen to be liars by nature (Jn8:44) but such is the implication of Adam eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil (Gen3:1-6), thereby receiving to himself and passing to his posterity a righteousness of the antiChrist, which is contrary to the righteousness of God.

Col 2 (Identifying false outward religiosity)
20 If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as,
21 “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!”
22 (which all refer to things destined to perish with use)–in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?
23 These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

James 1 (The mark of true religion)
25 But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does.
26 If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless.
27 Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Morality has lost so much ground today that people who claim to be ministers in the Church are immoral because these fools are on the other extreme thinking that morality has nothing to do with religion. They believe their requirement to be religious is absent of any required morality but sadly it is as Hosea 4:6 says that the House of God is destroyed because they are ignorant on what God requires of his people.

Hosea 4
6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

Take Benny Hinn for instance, he claims his ministry is genuine simply because his ministry’s miracles speak for themselves… so he says. However, unlike the apostolic age, prophesies, tongues and healings today do not mark a body as the Church. In the apostolic age, these miracles were given the Church to bear witness to those unto whom the Gospel was preached, that that body was God’s Church but after the Bible was compiled in 325AD, what marks a body as God’s Church is not the miracles or tongues or revelation but in that body being faithful/lawful to the teachings of God in the Bible, which is sufficient for any person who desires to know God. I say this because the Bible’s infallibility/perfection (Ps19:7) is to the extent that nothing can be added to it nor taken away from it (Rev22:18-19).

Mat 7
22 “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’
23 “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

To conclude, morality is rooted in religion and for those who disagree, it is only because they desire to live as they please and not according to the good pleasure of God. These fools are poor stewards of the earth (Gen 1:28) and all they desire to do is crash and burn, such is the anarchy they are given to but imagine how good God is, which these fools fail to recognize because the very fact they are still alive doing what they do is because God has been patient with them (Rom9:22). Hence these deny morality is grounded in Christ/religion because they would rather have God take off his restraining hand from them so that they may live as they please and die in their self-defined bliss.