“Oh, to grace how great a debtor, Daily I'm constrained to be, Let Thy goodness like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to Thee” (Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, Robert Robinson). The word religion comes from the Latin religare, which basically means to re-tie or to bind back. There are many of us who recognize the need to live spiritual lives but we end up drawing the line at organized religion. We might feel that we can worship God on our own terms and that religion is at best superfluous and at worst suffocating, overly constrictive, or downright sinister. Even that central idea of religion binding us conjures up images of shackles and chains. But if we think of binding less in terms of tying down a prisoner with ropes and cords and more in terms of binding pages into a book, then we can start to understand the power that comes from religion. Trying to live our lives without religion, without anything to bind it all together, is like trying to write a story on hundreds of loose sheets of paper and then having gusts of wind blow in routinely to scatter them all together. Yes, it is possible to try to make some coherent sense of all that clutter, but it requires a lot of constant effort and it doesn’t have to be that hard. Every time that we fully participate in true religion, we are adding another stitch to the binding of our book of life. This binding gives us a sense of order and coherence and progression. When we are fully bound together through religion and the grace of Christ, then even when the adversary sens all of his storms and hail and the shafts in the whirlwind, it will not scatter all of the pages of our life and we will be able to hold together thanks to religion’s binding power.
