We live in a very religious world. Carl Marx once stated, “religion is the opium of the people.” In other words, people are going to worship something or someone, regardless of whether it is right or wrong. James 1:26-27 tells us that there are religious people that are not acceptable to God, even in protestant, evangelical churches, and there is a “pure and undefiled religion” which God approves.
There will be many that will spend their whole lives being very religious and end up wasting their time, because their efforts were not from a heart aligned with God. That is the precise point that James makes when he says, “If anyone among you thinks (or imagines) he is religious” (v. 26). He is saying that the one who lives this way is doing everything they do in self-deception, which is the easiest kind of deception, because we all tend have an inflated opinion of ourselves.
So how do we know if our religion is right and acceptable to God? That is what we will discover in James 1:26-27, in our message “Religious?”.