Quotes About Legalism

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Rather than experiencing the richness of a dynamic, intimate relationship with the righteous One, you put God in a little box that you can check off your to-do list each week. By settling for rules and religion and feeling pretty good about how much you're doing for the church and those less fortunate, you become blinded to legalism and self-righteousness.

By striving to prove how much they deserve God's love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don't deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

Moralism apart from grace solves little.

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.

Legalism may "work" in an institution such as a Bible college or the Marine Corps. In a world of ungrace, structured shame has considerable power. But there is a cost, an incalculable cost: ungrace does not work in a relationship with God. I have come to see legalism in its pursuit of false purity as an elaborate scheme of grace avoidance. You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist. My own rules seem necessary; other people's rules seem excessively strict.

Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away.

The difference is one of motivation: legalism is self-centered; discipline is God-centered. The legalistic heart says, "I will do this thing to gain merit with God." The disciplined heart says, "I will do this thing because I love God and want to please Him.

If we confuse legalism and discipline, we do so to our soul's peril.

The knowledge of God's Word without love is a destructive force because it puffs us up with pride and legalism (1 Cor. 8:1-3). This causes us to justify ourselves rather than repent of the unforgiveness.

The knowledge of God's Word without love is a destructive force because it puffs us up with pride and legalism.

El conocimiento de la Palabra de Dios sin amor es una fuerza destructora, porque nos llena de orgullo y legalismo (1 Corintios 8:1-3), lo cual hace que nos justifiquemos en lugar de arrepentirnos por la falta de perdón.

Believers have just as much to fear from legalism as from waywardness. The first detracts from the beauty of the message, while the second mars it content.

The Christian stands, not under the dictatorship of a legalistic 'you ought,' but in the magnetic field of Christian Freedom, under the empowering of the 'You may.'

The secret impetus behind legalism is its competitiveness. The point is not just to win: it's to beat everyone else.

A Pharisee is one who wants to get the right formula and do it right and fix everything and feel very wonderful.

fanatics. Every teacher of work-righteousness is a trouble-maker.

Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally

This might be, after all, a way of smuggling in 'works' by the back door, into Paul's soteriology (something we Paulinists are trained to watch out for, like sniffer dogs at an airport ready to detect the slightest whiff of hard drugs).

Strict legalism is a myth. Laws have a knack for ambiguity, and it only takes a moment of reflection to see that they have to be interpreted, which isn't exactly breaking news. The entire history of Judaism and Christianity bears witness to people of faith doing just that.