8 Quotes About Legalism

When there's something in the Bible that churches don't like, they call it 'legalism.'

You want to mess up the minds of your children? Here's how - guaranteed! Rear them in a legalistic, tight context of external religion, where performance is more important than reality. Fake your faith. Sneak around and pretend your spirituality . Train your children to do the same. Embrace a long list of do's and don'ts publicly but hypocritically practice them privately... yet never own up to the fact that its hypocrisy. Act one way but live another. And you can count on it - emotional and spiritual damage will occur.

You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.

To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism.

Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism?

If you feel that you can follow a few little rules or some clever gimmicks to make you a mature Christian, then you have fallen into a subtle trap of legalism.

God saves us from the reductionism of such legalism which enshrines spirituality as a series of wooden laws and then says, "If you can do these six, sixteen or sixty-six things, you will godly." Christianity, godliness, is far more than a checklist. Being "in Christ" is a relationship, and like all relationships it deserves disciplined maintenance, but never legalistic reductionism.

There is something childish and legalistic about churches in which all of the saints observe precisely the same standards. When all lives begin to sink into the same mould of denial and exercise of liberty, something is amiss.