Standing Firm in Grace by Avoiding Legalism

We are in a series called This Grace In Which We Stand and we’ve been looking at the foundations of the Christian faith. Please turn with me to Galatians 5 as we consider one of the greatest threats to the grace in which we stand – the threat of legalism.

A couple of weeks ago it was in the news that three young people on a church field trip to Yosemite National Park ignored guardrails and warning signs and climbed out onto the rocks by the Merced River in order to get a good picture of them at the top of the Vernal Falls. Losing their footing on the slippery rocks, they were carried by the raging waters over the 317 foot falls to their death.

There are places where losing your footing is just an embarrassing mishap. We’ve all lost our footing and slipped and most of the time it just means picking up and going on, maybe a little embarrassed. But there are places where losing your footing can mean sudden death. In the book of Galatians, we have a picture of a church that is being urged by Jewish teachers called Judaizers to ignore biblical guardrails and warnings, and to climb onto the rocks of adding the law to their faith in Christ, in particular adding the requirement of being circumcised in order to please God. Galatians is not a tender book, not a warm book, it’s an urgent book – throughout Galatians you can almost hear Paul shouting “come back!” to a church ready to climb over the guardrails of grace for the treacherous footing of legalism. He writes:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— Galatians 1:6

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.  2Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?  3Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?  Galatians 3:1-3

Let’s read chapter 5:1-7 

We cannot stand on grace and on the law at the same time. We cannot depend on grace and the law to save us. It’s impossible. If you add any law to grace, you nullify grace. That’s clear in verses 2-4

…If you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you (in other words, of no benefit to you). I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law (moved from grace to raging waters of the law). You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.

The three teenagers who tragically lost their lives no doubt thought that going out a little would be safe, in spite of the warnings otherwise. Paul is telling the believers in Galatia and us that there is no safe ground when it comes to legalism – to move toward legalism is to be severed from Christ and fall from grace. The way to ensure we don’t fall away from grace is to make sure we are standing firm in grace. Let’s check our footing this morning and make sure it’s firmly planted on the grace of God through Jesus Christ and that we heed every warning about the dangers of legalism. Let’s begin with this question:

I.              What is legalism?

Paul says that for freedom Christ has set us free, but freedom from what? What does it mean to be free? In the chapter before Paul uses the metaphor of a slave woman representing the law and a free woman representing life in the Spirit. So by grace we are free from the law, but what does that really mean?

Dumb laws still on the books

Almost every state in the US has some arcane (and often really dumb) laws that aren’t enforced but are still on the books. For instance, did you know that in Indiana citizens are not allowed to attend a movie within four hours after eating garlic?

• In Nebraska a parent can be arrested if their child can’t hold back a burp during a church service. The question that comes to mind, what’s the law if a parent can’t hold back a burp? Could a church that served soda before a service be interrupted by a police raid?
• In NY it is illegal for a person to transport an ice cream cone in their pockets on Sunday. Six days a week it’s just stupid to do that, but on Sunday’s it’s illegal.
• NY also has an old law that specifically prohibits men from turning around on a city street to look(as it puts it) “at a woman in that way”. Any man convicted twice for this crime is to be mandated to wear a pair of horse-blinders whenever he goes outside for a stroll. That’s awkward. “Hey, Bill, can’t help noticing the horseblinders. They look good. Barely noticable.”

We can think that the OT law is kinda like these laws: outdated, useless, “old” (that’s why they are in the Old Testament) and Jesus has set us free from these arcane laws. That may be somewhat true of some of the ceremonial laws, like not being able to eat lobster, but it’s not true of the moral law. Jesus didn’t come to abolish the law because they are old and useless, he came to fulfill the law because they are good and right. In fact, Jesus raised the bar on the law when he said things like, the law says not to commit adultery – but I say to you that if you even look at a woman to lust after her you have committed adultery in your heart. He raised the bar to the heart of what God intended all along.

And it was always out of our reach. The problem with the OT law was that it had no more power to change our hearts than wearing a pair of horse-blinders has to change the heart. Jesus set us free from the law first of all by setting us free from the punishment we deserved by dying in our place as if he who kept the law perfectly were a law breaker. Secondly Jesus set us free from the impossible task of getting our righteousness by keeping the law perfectly – something we never could do. In Christ a righteousness has been revealed that is a gift of God through faith.  Thirdly he set us free from the power of sin, not only by forgiving us for sin but by giving us the Holy Spirit who changes our hearts and writes the laws on our hearts, motivating us from within to desire to keep the law.

What is legalism? In a nutshell it is going back to the law – or any man-made standard -to earn God’s acceptance through our own efforts at righteousness. Grace is receiving by faith the righteousness of Christ as a gift and then seeking to obey God because we’re saved and accepted, not to be saved and accepted.

Before we go to the next point, one more way that Jesus set us free from the law is by setting us freefrom the non-biblical rules and convictions of other people. Paul speaks of this quite in a bit in Romans 14. So a grace-centered church isn’t a rules-filled church. We’ll talk more about that in a few minutes.

II.            Signs of legalism

Here are a couple common signs that we may be walking on the slippery ground of legalism.

1.    The performance treadmill

Jerry Bridge’s uses this term in his book Transforming Grace. With a treadmill you never arrive, there is no destination point, you expend your energy to keep going but never get anywhere.  Legalism can cause us to relate to God as if He is rating us on the basis of our performance, but we never know if our performance was good enough. Never arrive. Sure, you read your Bible for 30 minutes this morning, but really, couldn’t you have read for an hour? Sure you prayed, but your mind drifted for over half the time.   It’s a performance treadmill, and the Bible says our performance is never anywhere near good enough.

People on the performance treadmill often pendulum from self-righteousness to condemnation. Sometimes we feel like we’re nailing it and sometimes we feel like total flops. Pride snags us on one end, condemnation on the other. Sometimes we feel like God is so proud of us because of our performance, other times we feel He is ashamed of us because of our performance. Our acceptance by God isn’t based on our performance at all– our performance is not the ground of our acceptance. Christ is the ground. Grace is the ground of our acceptance.

Let me give a very practical example: there are times when my kids do things that really bless and please me. Other times they do things that might displease me quite a bit. But I never want their confidence to approach me or their assurance of my love be based on their performance, but rather on my love for them. If they really mess up, that’s when I want them to come to me most of all.

Our relationship with God is based on His crazy love for us and the performance of His beautiful Son Jesus, so there are times when we please the Father, and times when we displease Him with our sin. Our assurance of His love for us and confidence in approaching Him is based on Christ and grace, not our performance, so it can’t be shaken. And when we mess up, we can come into the presence of our heavenly Father and confess our sin and repent and ask (and receive) forgiveness from our loving Father and know we have it. That is grace. So the performance treadmill is a sign of legalism.

2.    The pressure to reduce principle to one practice

ILL: Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounts an fascinating story in his book The Gulag Archipelago: In the year 1938  the Communist Party was holding a conference in Moscow. The communist leader who was presiding over the conference  had recently replaced a man who had been arrested. At the end of the conference a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for, and everyone leaped to their feet with thunderous applause. The applause went on and on and suddenly everyone wondered, who was going to be the first to stop applauding? NKVD agents stood in the hall watching to see who would indicate his lack of enthusiasm for Stalin by stopping. 3 minutes, 4 minutes, 5 minutes. Arms grew tired, palms grew sore, but still they applauded. With phony enthusiasm pasted on their faces, they applauded for 7 minutes, 8 minutes. It was getting ridiculous even to the most faithful party zealots. 9 minutes, 10 minutes, still it went on. Who will be the first to stop? 11 minutes it went on until finally the director of a local paper factory just stopped applauding and sat down, and immediately every single other person in the auditorium stopped clapping and sat down. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and received 10 years for various charges. But as he signed the last document of his arrest, the interrogator reminded him, “don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

When legalism is present there can be a pressure to act a certain way, think a certain way, and look a certain way. Keep clapping, not because you want to, but because it’s expected. One of the ways that can happen is that good, biblical principles are reduced to one practice and those practices then take on biblical weight that they don’t really have.

• Date night. It’s a good principle that husbands and wives should consistently invest in their relationship, but how they do that can differ from couple to couple. Date night is a good practice for setting aside time with your spouse, but it isn’t in the Bible, and if a church elevates it to biblical status, people feel a pressure to conform to that non-biblical practice.
• Homeschooling (or public school or private school). It’s a necessary principle that parents take the lead to instruct and guide their children in the fear of the Lord. But if we reduce that principle to parents should homeschool, then there is an unspoken pressure to conform to a non-biblical practice. And there are other churches that might apply the same pressure on parents to send their kids to public school and homeschoolers might feel like the odd man out.
• Honestly, those are two areas where I think over the years some SG churches probably got good things out of balance. For other churches it might be alcohol, what version of Bible is used, how to dress, what songs are sung, and so on.

When a church reduces principle to one practice, it results in an unhealthy conformity – not to Jesus, but to an artificial standard. We’re clapping but not from a biblically informed conviction, but from an external pressure. And anyone who steps out of line “disappears” (not because they’re imprisoned usually but because they feel uncomfortable and leave). 

Instead we want to teach the principles and encourage people to humbly and wisely wrestle out how to apply those biblical principles for themselves and give room for people to differ. Applying biblical principles is very important, but we must not reduce application of those principles to one practice or we enter the slippery ground of legalism.

III.           The dangerous opportunity of grace (Gal. 5: 13)

When a church preaches grace rightly, it is vulnerable to be abused. Someone can say, “hey, someone could take that teaching and decide they don’t need to change anything in their lives to be saved, just receive grace.” Yeah, someone could. People can swing the pendulum too far into licentiousness – as they realize there is freedom from adopting one practice over another, they go too far and just don’t adopt any practices, essentially throwing out the biblical principles too. That’s the danger of preaching grace. We don’t have the luxury of setting up a list of do’s and don’ts that enable us to control how people live out their faith in Christ. Some churches are safe that way: they have a list that tells you exactly what it takes to be a member in good standing. Their preaching can end with 10 black and white rules that need to be followed to be a good Christian. We don’t have that luxury unless it’s a biblical command. It’s dangerous, but that’s the freedom of grace. The answer isn’t to substitute laws for grace; the answer is to examine how we use our freedom in Christ. So Paul says in verse 13:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

That’s the dangerous opportunity of grace. It can be abused. But we can’t take away the danger without taking away the opportunity too. God calls us to use His grace in our lives for His glory and for the good of other’s. There will be some who take that message and use it as a license to disobey clear biblical command and dishonor God and flaunt their freedom. Those who do that need to examine the reality of their faith. But the danger is there. But there is an amazing opportunity too: as grace is preached, the Holy Spirit takes that message and burns in the hearts of His people a sincere desire and motivation to honor God and love and serve people. To make a difference with our lives for the glory of Jesus. To live in the power of the Spirit rather than the power of the flesh. That’s the dangerous opportunity of grace.

And it’s in that dangerous opportunity of grace that we need to stand firm. It’s for that freedom that Christ set us free. Let’s stand firm in that freedom by standing firm in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and rejecting all calls to abandon the gospel of grace for legalism. He is the solid ground we stand on.

Let’s pray.