The Ironic Thing About Legalism

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More Lessons from the Book of Galatians — short video clips.

Highlights from the message 

Preachers are so afraid that somehow preaching too much grace will lead to licentiousness and loose living.  The opposite is actually true.

When all we get is a “try harder and do more for God” message, it leads to the realization that I can’t do it, so I quit trying.

I have never met one person whose heart has been so gripped and so grasped by God’s love, forgiveness, and Grace toward them that they then determine that they’re going to go out and live for themselves.

The more I hear about what God has done for me and how it is finished the more I want to follow him, the more I want to love God and love my neighbor. It doesn’t make me want to sin more. It actually makes me want to sin less.

The ironic thing about legalism, which is nothing more and nothing less than a fixation on rules, is that it not only doesn’t make people work harder, it makes them give up.

I’ve had a lot of friends over the years walk away from God because their understanding of God based on what they were taught is that there is a long laundry list of things you need to do to ensure that God will like you. They come to the sobering realization that they can’t do these things, and so they walk away altogether.

A fixation on the rules and painting a picture of God that is primarily concerned about you keeping the rules makes people give up.  It doesn’t soften their heart and make them want to follow God.

The only way that licentious people are changed is when they get a taste of God’s radical unconditional love for them.  It’s the love of God that melts our hearts, molds our hearts, and makes us want to follow Him.

We tend to think that God stands at some antiseptic distance from our sin and our failures and waits for us to clean up our act before we can approach Him. But that’s not who He is. If the arrival of Jesus 2,000 years ago tells us anything, it tells us that God meets us in our sin, in our failure. He curls up on the bathroom floor with us and reminds us that he will never leave or forsake us.  There’s nothing we can do or fail to do that will ever get Him to walk away, reject us, and unjustify us.  It’s the unconditionality of God’s love. It’s his grace. It’s his Mercy, which is new every morning. It’s his forgiveness, which is final and full for us. That, over time, softens our hearts, woos us, and makes us want to go with Him.

Unconditional love from God doesn’t make us want to leave Him and sin more. It melts our hearts and makes us want to go with Him, follow Him, and keep Him close.

Paul here says you know the law can’t do any of that stuff.  It may modify your behavior temporarily, but if behavior modification were what God was after, He would have praised the Pharisees. He didn’t. He called them whitewashed tombs — dead on the inside.  He said, with your lips, you worship Me, but your hearts are far from Me. And the heart is always what God is after.

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About Tullian Tchividjian

Tullian is the pastor at The Sanctuary church in Jupiter, Florida. He is the grandson of the late evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth Graham. Tullian pastored two churches in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, before planting The Sanctuary in Jupiter.  The Sanctuary is a non-denominational church proclaiming the boundless love of Jesus to a broken world.  Because of what Jesus has accomplished for us, The Sanctuary is a place to find love and laughter, hope and healing, acceptance and forgiveness, and mercy and help. Watch more of Pastor Tullian's messages on The Sanctuary's YouTube.channel.  Connect with the church on Facebook or online. Find Tulllian's books on Amazon.