The Grace Awakening
Page 8
Squaring Off Against Legalism
most serious problems facing the church in Paul's day was the problem of legalism. In every day it is the same. Legalism wrenches the joy of the Lord from the Christian believer, and with the joy of the Lord goes his power for vital worship and vibrant service. Nothing is left but cramped, somber, dull, and listless profession. The truth is betrayed, and the glorious name of the Lord becomes a synonym for a gloomy kill-joy. The Christian under law is a miserable parody of the real thing. 3
Though he wrote decades ago, Dr. Johnson described the church of the 1990s and on into the twenty-first century. If you want to find a group of "cramped, somber, dull, and listless" individuals, just visit many (I'm trying hard not to write most) evangelical churches today. It is with a deep heartache and great disappointment that I write these words. If I were asked to name the major enemies of vital Christianity today, I'm not sure but what I wouldn't name legalism first! As I have stated from the beginning of this book, it is a killer. It kills congregations when a pastor is a legalist. It kills pastors when congregations are legalistic. Legalistic people with their rigid do's and don'ts kill the spirit of joy and spontaneity of those who wish to enjoy their liberty. Strict legalistic people in leadership drain the very life out of a church, even though they may claim they are doing God a service.
If you have never been under the thumb of legalism, you are rare . . . you don't know how blessed you have been. If you have been under bondage and have broken free (as I have), you know better than most what a treasured privilege freedom really is. It's worth fighting for!
I have my Bible beside me opened to the fifth chapter of the letter to the Galatians. Galatians is what some have correctly called the Magna Charta of Christian liberty. In fact, the first verse in this chapter contains the single command that, if believed and obeyed, would go a long way in putting a stop to legalism.
Squaring Off Against Legalism
It is for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery, (v. 1)
Nothing disturbs the legalist like the liberating truth of grace. Paul, far back in the first century, is writing to Christians who knew better than to let it happen, but they had allowed themselves to fall under the paralyzing spell of grace killers. J. B. Phillips, in a paraphrase of Galatians 5:1, renders it:
Do not lose your freedom by giving in. . . . Plant your feet firmly therefore within the freedom that Christ has won for us, and do not let yourselves be caught again in the shackles of slavery.
If Patrick Henry had the courage to say, "Give me liberty or give me death," then the Christian ought to have the courage to say, "Give me freedom because of Christ." Bondage is bondage, whether it be political or spiritual. Give me the liberty that He won at Calvary or I am still enslaved. Death is to be preferred to bondage ... so grant me the liberty He won or I should die! To live in slavery is to nullify the grace of God.
DEFINING TWO SIGNIFICANT TERMS
Without becoming needlessly academic, I want to define a couple of the terms that I've been tossing around. First of all, What do I mean when I declare that the Christian has liberty? And second, What does it mean to say that legalism puts people under bondage?
Liberty
Essentially, liberty is freedom . . . freedom from something and freedom to do something.
Squaring Off Against Legalism
Liberty is freedom from slavery or bondage. It is initially freedom from sin's power and guilt. Freedom from God's wrath. Freedom from satanic and demonic authority. And equally important, it is freedom from shame that could easily bind me as well as freedom from the tyranny of others' opinions, obligations, and expectations.
There was a time in my life without Christ when I had no freedom from the urges and impulses within me. I was at the mercy of my master Satan and sin was my lifestyle. When the urges grew within me, I had nothing to hold me in check, nothing to restrain me. It was an awful bondage.
For example, in my personal life I was driven by jealousy for many miserable years. It was consuming. I served it not unlike a slave serves a master. Then there came a day when I was spiritually awakened to the charming grace of God and allowed it to take full control and almost before I knew it the jealousy died. And I sensed for the first time, perhaps in my whole life, true love; the joy, the romance, the spontaneity, the free flowing creativity brought about by the grace of a faithful wife, who would love me no matter what, who was committed to me in faithfulness for all her life. That love and that commitment motivated me to love in return more freely than ever. I no longer loved out of fear that I would lose her, but I loved out of the joy and the blessing connected with being loved unconditionally and without restraint.
Now that Christ has come into my life and I have been awakened to His grace, He has provided a freedom from that kind of slavery to sin. And along with that comes a freedom that brings a fearlessness, almost a sense of invincibility in the presence of the adversity. This power, keep in mind, is because of Christ, who lives within me.
In addition, He has also brought a glorious freedom from the curse of the Law. By that I mean freedom from the constancy of its demands to perform in order to please God and/or others. It is a freedom from the fear of condemnation before God as well as from an accusing conscience. Freedom from
Squaring Off Against Legalism
the demands of other people, from all the shoulds and oughts of the general public.
Such freedom is motivated —motivated by unconditional love. When the grace of Christ is fully awake in your life, you find you're no longer doing something due to fear or out of shame or because of guilt, but you're doing it through love. The dreadful tyranny of performing in order to please someone is over . . . forever.
Grace also brings a freedom to do something else—a freedom to enjoy the rights and the privileges of being out from under slavery and allowing others such freedom. It's freedom to experience and enjoy a new kind of power that only Christ could bring. It is a freedom to become all that He meant me to be, regardless of how He leads others. I can be me—fully and freely. It is a freedom to know Him in an independent and personal way. And that freedom is then released to others so they can be who they are meant to be—different from me!
You see, God isn't stamping out little cookie-cutter Christians across the world so that we all think alike and look alike and sound alike and act alike. The body has variety. We were never meant to have the same temperaments and use the same vocabulary and wear the same syrupy smile and dress the same way and carry on the same ministry. I repeat: God is pleased with variety. This freedom to be who we are is nothing short of magnificent. It is freedom to make choices, freedom to know His will, freedom to walk in it, freedom to obey His leading me in my life and you in your life. Once you've tasted such freedom, nothing else satisfies.
Perhaps I should reemphasize that it is a liberty you will have to fight for. Why? Because the ranks of Christianity are full of those who compare and would love to control and manipulate you so you will become as miserable as they are. After all, if they are determined to be "cramped, somber, dull, and listless," then they expect you to be that way, too. "Misery loves company" is the legalists' unspoken motto, though they never admit it.
Squaring Off Against Legalism
Legalism
Now is a good time for us to become better acquainted with the staunch enemy of liberty. Legalism is an attitude, a mentality based on pride. It is an obsessive conformity to an artificial standard for the purpose of exalting oneself. A legalist assumes the place of authority and pushes it to unwarranted extremes. As Daniel Taylor states so well, it results in illegitimate control, requiring unanimity, not unity.
The great weapon of authoritarianism, secular or religious, is legalism: the manufacturing and manipulation of rules for the purpose of illegitimate control. Perhaps the most damaging of all the perversions of God's will and Christ's work, legalism clings to law at the
expense of grace, to the letter in place of the spirit.
Legalism is one more expression of the human compulsion for security. If we can vigorously enforce an exhaustive list of do's and don'ts (with an emphasis on external behavior), we not only can control unpredictable human beings but have God's favor as well. . . .
Legalistic authoritarianism shows itself in the confusion of the Christian principle of unity with a human insistence on unanimity. Unity is a profound, even mystical quality. It takes great effort to achieve, yet mere effort will never produce it; it is a source of great security, yet demands great risk.
Unanimity, on the other hand, is very tidy. It can be measured, monitored, and enforced. It is largely external, whereas unity is essentially internal. Its primary goal is corrected behavior, while unity's is a right spirit. Unanimity insists on many orthodoxies in addition to those of belief and behavior, including orthodoxy of experience and vocabulary. That is, believers are expected to come to God in similar ways, to have similar experiences with God, and to use accepted phrases in describing those experiences. 4
In so many words, legalism says, "I do this or I don't do that, and therefore I am pleasing God." Or "If only I could do this or
Squaring Off Against Legalism
not do that, I would be pleasing to God." Or perhaps, "These things that I'm doing or not doing are the things I perform to win God's favor." They aren't spelled out in Scripture, you understand. They've been passed down or they have been dictated to the legalist and have become an obsession to him or her. Legalism is rigid, grim, exacting, and lawlike in nature. Pride, which is at the heart of legalism, works in sync with other motivating factors. Like guilt. And fear. And shame. It leads to an emphasis on what should not be, and what one should not do. It flourishes in a drab context of negativism.
Few people have ever described legalism better than Eugene Peterson does in his fine book Traveling Light, where he contrasts the healthy walk of faith with legalism.
The word Christian means different things to different people. To one person it means a stiff, uptight, inflexible way of life, colorless and unbending. To another it means a risky, surprise-filled venture, lived tiptoe at the edge of expectation.
Either of these pictures can be supported with evidence. There are numberless illustrations for either position in congregations all over the world. But if we restrict ourselves to biblical evidence, only the second image can be supported: the image of the person living zestfully, exploring every experience—pain and joy, enigma and insight, fulfillment and frustration—as a dimension of human freedom, searching through each for sense and grace. If we get our information from the biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.
How then does this other picture get painted in so many imaginations? How does anyone get the life of faith associated with dullness, with caution, with inhibition, with stodginess? We might fairly suppose that a congregation of Christians, well stocked with freedom stories—stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Samson, Deborah, Daniel—would not for a moment countenance any teaching that would suppress freedom. We might reasonably expect that a group of people who from infancy have been told stories of Jesus setting people free and who keep this Jesus at the center of their attention in weekly
Squaring Off Against Legalism
worship, would be sensitive to any encroachment on their freedom. We might think that a people that has at the very heart of its common experience release from sin's guilt into the Spirit's freedom, a people who no longer lives under the tyranny of emotions or public opinion or bad memories, but freely in hope and in faith and in love—that these people would be critically alert to anyone or anything that would suppress their newly acquired spontaneity.
But in fact the community of faith, the very place where we are most likely to experience the free life, is also the very place where we are in most danger of losing it. 5
Be honest, how many congregations do you know who are "dancing, leaping, daring" congregations—congregations whose individual grace awakenings are motivating people to live out their freedom in Christ? I'm afraid the number is much fewer than we might guess. Let's get specific. How many Christians do you know who exercise the joy and freedom to be a person full of life, living on tiptoe, enjoying spontaneous living—as opposed to the numberless hundreds of thousands who take their cues from the legalists and live life accordingly? Isn't it surprising to anyone who has been set free that anybody would ever want to return to bondage? I suggest that you ponder the final sentence in Peterson's quote once more. As usual, he is right on target. The one place on earth where we would most expect to be set free is, in fact, the very place we are most likely to be placed into slavery: the church. Surely, that must grieve our God.
What happened in the first century can surely happen in the twentieth. Paul writes the Galatians of his surprise: "You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth?" (5:7).
Allow me to amplify his thought—"When I was with you, some of you were into the 100-meter dash, others were doing the 440 with ease. Still others were into much longer distances . . . you were marathoners. The truth freed you and I distinctly recall how well you were running as well as how much
Squaring Off Against Legalism
joy you demonstrated. Who cut in on your stride? Who took away your track shoes? Who told you that you shouldn't be running or enjoying the race? Some of you have stopped running altogether" (Swindoll paraphrase).
That isn't all. Back in chapter 3, verses 1-3, Paul is even more assertive. His opening salutation is borderline insulting: "You foolish Galatians." (You won't like to read this, but J. B. Phillips calls them "idiots.") He writes:
O you dear idiots of Galatia, who saw Jesus Christ the crucified so plainly, who has been casting a spell over you? I shall ask you one simple question: Did you receive the Spirit of God by trying to keep the Law or by believing the message of the Gospel? Surely you can't be so idiotic as to think that a man begins his spiritual life in the Spirit and then completes it by reverting to outward observances?
The apostle says, in effect, "When I was there, teaching you the truth, I presented a Savior who paid the full penalty for your sins. The death that He died and His subsequent resurrection from the grave was God's final payment for sin. Paid in full! All you have to do is believe that He died and rose again from the dead for you. He was publicly displayed for all to see and now the truth can be declared for all to believe. You believed that once upon a time, and you were gloriously free. Not now. Who bewitched you? Who caused you to transfer allegiance from the glory of God to the opinions of man, from the work of the Spirit to the deeds of the flesh? When did you start running scared?" It's that idea.
The Living Bible renders this first verse: "Oh, foolish Galatians! What magician has hypnotized you and cast an evil spell upon you?" In other, words, Have you gone completely crazy? Who stole your mind? Paul is beside himself. Who had hypnotized the once fully "awake" Galatians?
Earlier in Galatians 1:6, he admits his amazement: "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who
Squaring Off Against Legalism
called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel" (niv).
It could be compared to your rearing your children in a healthy environment. They grow up in your home and because it is a good home, they develop a security and a stability as they pick up your authenticity and unguarded lifestyle. They communicate openly and freely. They learn how to confront and handle problems. In short, they learn the basics of real living .. . which includes knowing Christ and loving God and walking with Him and relating well to one another—all those things that represent integrity, vulnerability, authenticity.
Once they grow up, they move far away. Time passes and you begin to miss them, so after three or four years you go visit them. You're shocked! You find them living cramped, closed, dirty, and emotionally crippled lives. You're amazed to find t
hem struggling with problems, evidencing negative attitudes; they're even suicidal. Naturally you ask, "Who got to you? Who twisted your mind? What's happened over these past few years." It is with that same kind of passion that Paul writes his concern to his Galatian friends.
Think, now . . . what's he fighting for? Liberty! "You were once freed. But now, my friends in Galatia, you are enslaved. I want to know what's gone wrong." The answer is not complicated; the grace killers had invaded and conquered.
IDENTIFYING THREE TOOLS OF LEGALISM
Let's get down to brass tacks. What are the inroads most legalists make on a life, on a church, on a missionary outreach, or on a denomination? How do legalists get in? Who are they? Furthermore, why are they effective? As a result of studying the first and second chapters of Galatians, I'm prepared to identify at least three different tools used by century-one legalists: those of doctrinal heresy, ecclesiastical harassment, and personal hypocrisy.
Squaring Off Against Legalism
First, let's consider those who disturb and distort by interjecting doctrinal heresy. Scripture says it plain and simple; legalists were twisting truth among the Galatian assembly.
I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel; which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you, and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ. (Gal. 1:6-10)