Best 69 quotes in «legalism quotes» category

Opportunities have often felt like obligations to me.

Our cultural conditioning is so ingrained in us that we often see these customs and taboos as inherent to the fabric of the cosmos. We spiritualize them. Legalize them. And when someone else doesn't follow them, it can feel to us like an attack on our very personhood. This kind of cultural blindness affects how we order creation.

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

(Pastor Chuck) Smith told his elders in no uncertain terms that if the church had to turn away young people because of bare feet and clothes that they would be better off ripping up the carpet and replacing the pews with steel folding chairs.

Perhaps it is true that, by some definitions, Satan is more religious than God. Many of the particularly proud sinners are deceived into thinking that Satan is anti-religious, that he likes seeing people do immoral things simply because he likes immoral things. Doubtful; Satan likes for people to do immoral things so that he can blame them for doing immoral things. The Father of Lies laughs not with his teammates, but at them.

Past and Present have different customs; new and old adopt different measures. To try to use the ways of a generous and lenient government to rule the people of a critical age is like trying to drive a runaway horse without using reins or whip.

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

She was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn’t fit into a rigid frame.

She was just too curious to stay in a self-imposed mental straight-jacket for very long.

Religions find lasting utility in terms of prescription or parameter, rules for the conduct of human affairs.

So many of those who take Christ into the world, whether it be it's missionaries or artists, are tied by those who look over their shoulders. There is a lot of peer pressure within churches and Christian movements to dot all the i's and cross all the t's of a precise and perfect faith.

The law repels, the gospel attracts. The law shows the distance which there is between God and man; the gospel bridges that awful chasm, and brings the sinner across it.

The onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.

There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.

The road itself tells us far more than signs do.

Religion to me almost like when God leaves – and people devise a set of rules to fill in the space.

Some days you feel like you're the worst of sinners; others like you're the most righteous person on earth. I am convinced that the former is when you're closest to God.

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

There seems to be something in our human nature that draws us away from a life-giving relationship with Jesus because it feels more comfortable to focus on what to do and not do. That tendency robs us of real joy and peace.

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.

Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.

To me, many of what seemed to be Bible contradictions only pointed to the grace of Christ. It is not so much a rule book on how to be holy as it is a prophecy of the One who can make you holy. In this, I see God as the least bigoted of all in existence: While men always, in their hearts, delight in vengeance for being wronged, God is the only Being who wants to free you from the penalty of His own laws.

Too often, we fall into the trap of preach­ing the gospel to adults and the law to chil­dren: “God wants you to be good boys and girls.” It is not that there is no truth in that state­ment, but with­out the right con­text and qual­i­fi­ca­tions it is a recipe for hope­less­ness.

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other but what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred for the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity's to the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who never lived at all.

We live Law to ourselves. Our reason is our Law.

Trying to know God and serve Him before we come to love Him is exhausting.

We suggest our new brothers and sisters who are somewhat freaky in dress, hair, and general appearance to ask the Lord in prayer for a balance. We do feel that beads, bells, and various astrological signs, along with the "no bra" philosophy of the Hip scene should be forsaken. We do not believe that a shave and haircut make a Christian any more than long hair and sandals.

We're very comfortable thinking, good parenting in, good children out.

What are Christians known for? Outsiders think our moralizing, our condemnations, and our attempts to draw boundaries around everything. Even if these standards are accurate and biblical, they seem to be all we have to offer. And our lives are a poor advertisement for the standards. We have set the gameboard to register lifestyle points; then we are surprised to be trapped by our mistakes. The truth is we have invited the hypocrite image.

Whether you live or die, whether you're bad or good, whether you're born or not, it's all arbitrary… but what can I say? I don’t like fate or chance, and I don’t always play by the rules, legalist as I am.

When everything is a law, nothing is a law.

What we fail to realize is we often become like Pharisees in our ruthless attempts to identify Pharisees (and impostors). While indeed some people use the old laws of religious pride to tear down men of God, others use the new laws of anti-religious anger to tear down men of God.

Without Christ a people may always have the freedom to do, but never the power to complete.

Commandments are the railroad tracks on which the life empowered by the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit runs. Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.

A legalist is not someone who places divine law above all else. A legalist is someone who places human law above all else.

An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws

A sure way to have someone crushed by their doubt is to preach a sermon on how to remove your doubt.

Christianity is at its purest a philosophy about a person, Jesus Christ, and at its dirtiest a philosophy about requirements and law.

Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it.

with the police doing all the killing, who do we call when our hero's are the villain

Working diligently to straighten up our actions without understanding either what it means to deeply repent or what it is that needs to be scrubbed away by repentance will make us more smug than penetrating. We'll pressure others to do right rather than draw them to want to do right. P195

According to Aquinas, effort may not be the best measure of our virtue.

Christ didn't join in. He saw which direction the rocks were being thrown, and became a shield.

C.S. Lewis had come to demand of his nightly prayers a "realization," "a certain vividness of the imagination and the affectations" – a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery.

Do we use the Word of God only as a cue card to commandeer our external behavior?

How do we stay on the narrow path of following God's will in every sphere of life? How do we maintain sure footing and not fall into the temptation of rebellion on one side, or the temptation of legalism on the other? God has not sent us out across a tightrope! Yes, the path is narrow, but on both sides of the path is a solid handrail, driven down deep into the rock. What has God given to us that we might not rebel against Him? He has given us His sufficient Word. What has God given us that we might not become legalists and elevate our words above His? He has given us His sufficient word.

God is not a God of confusion, although at times one's judgment, for a period, may become clouded in the mi(d)st of one's growth process. I stopped fooling myself into thinking that Christ is always for the cool kids and never for those upright and uptight religious people everybody hates.

He fetishized limits.

I believe that secularism is not the enemy of spirituality. Our spirits are in fact secular and free. But the enemy of your spirit is materialism which produces legalism. People scramble for the "perfect law" in order fix everything, while failing to see that law only points towards what is material. And so, people find themselves going around in a circle that will never end. The key is to break away from that circle. You have to begin focusing your attention onto what is inside you and what is inside everybody else. This will in turn produce common sense, intuition, and understanding. Then comes strength.

I had escaped the snare of certitude that I welcomed so avidly at first and entered, via the name of Jesus, the wide and comprehensive company of Jesus.