This season of Lent, Concordia Lutheran Church begins a series about a world view called, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. There are five basic beliefs:

  1. God created the world and looks down on it.

  2. God wants us to be good and nice as taught by the major world religions.

  3. The goal of life is to be happy and feel good about one’s self.

  4. God doesn’t need to be in our lives unless we have a problem.

  5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Over the next five weeks, the congregation will explore each of these beliefs in our Wednesday night services, but on Ash Wednesday, we looked at the belief system as a whole. It boils down to a question: Does God work for you?

In Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, God is there to take care of me. He looks down on us from afar in heaven, and he helps us out when we need it. He wants us to be happy and successful, so he encourages us to follow our dreams and live our best life. In other words, God works for us to give us what we want.

That doesn’t work when compared to the cross. In the cross of Jesus, we don’t see a fulfilled happy life. We see the greatest human being who ever lived, God’s only son, die gruesomely. And God calls us to follow that same path to eternal life.