hiking2christ

Every hostile encounter Jesus has is with very “churchy” people. This spirit is the great enemy of our life with God, and it is this spirit that Jesus warned his boys about when they were whispering in the boat about the bread: “Be careful,” Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” and then he says it again, to make sure they are paying attention: “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matt. 16:6, 11).
          
If you would know Jesus, love him, experience him, you must pay very careful attention to this warning. And friends, you don’t heed this simply by making the Pharisees the bad boys of the Bible, like the villains in a melodrama. That is not what Jesus meant. You are already deceived by this stuff if you place the danger “back then, in Bible times.”
          
The religious fog uses sanctified words and activities, things that look and sound very Sunday school to distort our perceptions of God and our experience of him. If you want to know him as he really is, to experience him just as intimately as the disciples did, you are going to have to clear out the religious fog.

-John Eldredge, Beautiful Outlaw, 192, 193