Best 69 quotes in «legalism quotes» category

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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 can turn every "is" into "ought ".

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.

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.

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.

If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

If thy meditation tends to fill thy note-book with notions, and good sayings, concerning God, and not thy heart with longing after him, and delight in him, for aught I know thy book is as much a Christian as thou (553).

I had the faith of a sermon, but not the faith of his son. – John Wesley

In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.

...it is a mistake to reduce every decision about Christian living to a "Heaven-or-Hell issue." For example, some ask if the Bible specifically says a certain action is a "sin" or will send them to "Hell." If not, they feel free to indulge in that action unreservedly and ignore any scriptural principles involved. But this approach is legalistic, which means living by rules or basing salvation on works. It treats the Bible as a law book, focusing on the letter and looking for loopholes. By contrast, the Bible tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, not by our works (Ephesians 2:8-9). Grace teaches us how to live righteously, and faith leads us into obedience. (See Titus 2:11-12; Romans1:5; Hebrews 11:7-8.)

Is one being a legalist if he works hard unto the Lord? Or can a Christian cruise and coast through this life?

Lord, please protect me from Your people.

Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day.

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.

Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?

I listened to make sure I was meeting the minimum requirement to stay out of jail, so to speak.

Men promise freedom while establishing laws; God promises laws while establishing freedom.

Moral obligations verses Legal obligations. Legally, you must abide by the laws of the land or face the consequences of being fined, imprisoned or both. Moral obligations tend to lean more towards a spiritual nature of a person. Some people perform immoral acts because legally there are no consequences. Morals birth in the heart of the individual. Moral characteristics are developed at an early age and continue into adulthood. It's a disgrace to neglect having good moral character.

Most martyr stories – sacred and profane – contain an element of superiority. This self-denying hero or heroine is "rewarded," at the very least, by capturing the admiring focus of the narrative, while everyone else recedes into the background.

Most moms and dads think they are either the best or the worst parents in the world. Both are wrong.

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

Opportunities have often felt like obligations to me.

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.

Now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant him during "the fussy, time-wasting, botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing," and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.

one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”).

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.

(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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

The road itself tells us far more than signs do.