When materialism seems to be turned up louder than usual in your life, the faith of others can raise the volume on what is true. When life feels empty, the faith of others can help fill you.

All you need is a personal relationship with Jesus…well, sort of.

Have you ever heard someone say, “Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship”? If you are like me, you have probably heard it countless times. And every time you hear it, it probably goes unchallenged and is received with nodding heads of approval. Maybe you have even said it with good intentions. But just stop and think about it—is that true? For sure, there is a relationship with God in Christianity, but does that exclude it from being a religion? How could a belief system with rites, rituals, sacred days, and a sacred book that teaches about sacred practices not be a religion? How in the world could “Christianity is not a religion” have become a beloved slogan?

Our individualism has led us to emphasize one component of the faith at the cost of the others. Yes, our faith entails a relationship with Jesus, but that’s not all it is. Nowhere in the Bible does it even use the phrase “a personal relationship with Jesus.” Nowhere in the Bible does it say anything like, “You don’t need to go to church, you just need a personal relationship with Jesus.” Nowhere do we get a hint that the Bible would say, “Don’t worry about all the rites, rituals, and religious stuff; the only thing that matters is your personal relationship with Jesus.”

The apostle Paul wrote roughly half of the books in the New Testament. Guess how many times Paul uses the phrase “my Lord.” Now guess how many times Paul uses the phrase “our Lord.” Not a big difference in meaning between the two; one is singular, one is plural. But there is a big difference in usage. Here are the actual results:

My Lord = 1
Our Lord = 53

Pretty shocking. The first-person singular is worlds apart from the first-person plural. Is this simply a matter of grammatical preference? Or is there something much deeper going on? Do we see anything else in Paul that might help us get to the bottom of this? Listen to what Paul says to some of the very first Christians in the city of Ephesus:

“There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4‑6).

Obviously, there is a clear emphasis on the word one. And much of that makes sense—there is one God the Father, there is one Lord Jesus, and there is one Spirit. But one faith? One baptism? One body? How can that be? Clearly, there are millions of people who have their own faith, countless people who have different baptisms, a multitude of bodies that are Christian.

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