Fasting: Day 2

Sup guys,

It has been wonderfully encouraging reading each of your respective stories, keep it up everyone! haha - to be honest, the fasting experience has been a slow start for me this time around and it wasn't until last night that I started hearing something that was tangibly God. I was reading how jesus was throwing money changers out of the temple. I've always assumed that this was because they were doing business in the house of God, and seeing as how i'm not selling cds of my awesome guitar playing in church - this passage doesn't seem to apply to me.

I learnt that he wasn't kicking them out because they were conducting business or even cheating their customers. He was pissed because this was all their worship had degenerated into - a sinful life punctuated with the occasional sacrifice that was the moral equivalent of a half-hearted scrub at the stains that sin leaves behind. He was angered at this religious institution that the temple had come to represent and how God was not a part of it. THIS is something that applies to me, i have so many religious habits that i wrap around myself thinking that these are what would draw me closer to God when in reality they've become hindrances - just as the temple/laws became to the jewish people. In the same way that jesus said he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, I find that I need to take apart everything that I think of as my "spiritual life" and rebuild whenever I feel like im not getting closer to God. The nature of our faith is to grow, if im NOT getting closer to God then i am either backsliding, or stagnating.