Quotes About Legalism

This God expects people to be perfect and to be in perpetual control of their feelings and thoughts. When broken people with this concept of God fail—as inevitably they must—they usually expect punishment. So they persevere in religious practices as they struggle to maintain a hollow image of a perfect self. The struggle itself is exhausting. The legalists can never live up to the expectations they project on God.

Based on the stories present here, I believe that the church needs to decide how long it is going to coddle legalism in its ranks. By legalism I mean people who preach grace but practice works. People who inflict guilt on others for being human, let alone sinful. People who say, "Well, we don't want to go overboard on this grace thing because people will take advantage of it.

If you have seen your God through the lens of legalistic religion, you most likely have believed that God was warning them [Adam and Eve] that He would punsih them if they ate from the tree. Nothing could be further from the heart or intent of God. He wouldn't kill them - sin would kill them. God wasn't warning them about what He would do but about what sin would do to them.

Religious people love to hide behind religion. They love the rules of religion more than they love Jesus. With practice, Condemners let rules become more important than the spiritual life.

Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from GOD and acceptance by GOD through my obedience to GOD

Its important to understand that a legalist isn't just someone with higher standards or more rules than you. A lot of us wrongly stereotype a legalistic person as one who doesn't go to the movies, or who thinks that any music with a beat is evil. Legalism is much more subtle and serious than that. Here's a simple definition that I use: Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God.

It is this strict side of the ascetic's life that is perhaps the least understood, not only by our culture, but also by other Christians. Especially among evangelicals, who champion salvation by grace through faith, a strict faith can seem perilously close to legalism; and in some cases, it might be. For healthy ascetics, however, strictness is a cherished method of expressing love for God.

Legalism lacks the supreme sense of worship. It obeys but it does not adore.

We live in an age so legalistic, we find it hard to imagine someone wanting to obey their Lord simply because they love their God.

Cuántos creyentes conoce usted que experimentan el gozo y la libertad de ser personas llenas de vida, exuberantes de entusiasmo, que disfrutan viviendo con espontaneidad, en oposición a los cientos de miles que se basan en las pautas fijadas por los legalistas y viven de acuerdo con ellas?

La moralización y la legalización del evangelio de la gracia de Dios es una pobre herejía que se trata de diseminar entre personas desilusionadas que se sienten defraudadas porque no han recibido lo que tampoco tienen razón de esperar.

Being in Christ is both gift and task, privilege and responsibility. Exaggerate the gift, and you risk antinomian complacency; exaggerate the responsibility, and you risk legalistic anxiety.

At its heart, legalism is a desire to appear holy. It is trying to be justified before men and not God.

Legalism is alive and well in many of our churches.

Legalism at one extreme (keep all the rules) and license at the other (reject any rules) are both completely wrong answers to the question of how Christians should live.

Sed lex dura lex," said Jace automatically. "The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

Jesus does what legalism can never do: he gives us a new heart and a new spirit. Without

Pharisees were the upstanding "conservative evangelical pastors" of their day, strongly convinced of the inerrancy of Scripture and its sufficiency for guidance in every area of life, if only it could be properly interpreted.69 Yet it is precisely such an environment in which a healthy perspective on the Bible can easily give way to legalism.

The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn't produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.

Legalism is not just a reduction of the gospel, it is another gospel altogether (see Galatians), where salvation is earned by keeping the rules we have established.

legalists and theological experts with "lips close to God and hearts far away from him" (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.

The Beatitudes simply cannot be "good news" if they are understood as a set of "how-tos" for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new legalism. They would not serve to throw open the kingdom—anything but. They would impose a new brand of Phariseeism, a new way of closing the door—as well as some very gratifying new possibilities for the human engineering of righteousness.

There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.

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