Please don’t stop reading after my next statement, because I believe God has called all of us to something better . . . Wow, I hate to admit it, but I find myself being legalistic. I certainly don’t want to think that of myself. I don’t think I am most of the time because I compare myself to others who have very overt legalistic tendencies and I say to myself, “I am certainly not like that.” However, when examining the core of my opinions, perspectives, and thoughts, I have to come to some clear admissions, I have legalistic tendencies and they aren’t producing freedom in Christ either for myself or for those around me.
I began to realize this tendency while reading, The Rest of God, by Mark Buchanan. I dare to face it because he makes a statement that arrested my attention and shed light on any dormant admissions about my legalism. Referring to legalism he writes:
It need draw nothing from your heart, your mind, your strength, your soul. It’s like a paint-by-numbers: it requires no artistry, no imagination, no discipline, just dumb, methodical obedience.
This is not how God created us to function. Being made in His image we are to be creative, invested, engaged, and full of life. I loved doing paint by numbers as a child, but there are aspects of the process that always frustrated me. For instance, painting a light color over those directive numbers was always infuriating. I could never seem to get the paint mixture right so that the numbers didn’t show through. So there was this irony and flaw in the system. That which was supposed to direct me in artistry (more truthfully what I perceived as artistry) was also that which conveyed to the observer that it was a paint-by-numbers. The subtlety that provides beauty to paintings, the soft colors, shading, produced by small variations in the color were never there. The color-by-number approached never really assisted the novice artist in the finer techniques of true artistry. That is what legalism does to relationships. It constricts us to the “numbers” and reduces the color of life as we work, serve, laugh, love, and cry together in the midst of life. Buchanan writes:
Legalism feels good, in a perverse sort of way. It strokes our egos, fills us with the pleasure of achievement, knowing we spelled all the words correctly, and in such a nice, tidy script to boot. And it’s even better if we accomplish this where others have failed. It’s like winning a race: it wouldn’t mean half as much – indeed, it wouldn’t mean anything – if our triumph didn’t imply others’ losses. The secret impetus behind legalism in its competitiveness.
When I think about my paint-by-number days I recognize that it was about completing the painting, more than it was the artistry. It was about the “tidy script” not the “artistic pleasure” and creativity. Like winning a race the triumph wasn’t about the journey, only filling in the numbered sections.
So what is the answer to legalism? Isaiah addresses this as noted by Buchanan:
If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the LORD’s holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.” The mouth of the LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 58:13-14) . . . We keep Sabbath by both a refusal and a pursuit: we refuse to go our own way, and yet we pursue our own joy.
In order for us to find Sabbath rest we must negotiate the space between going our own way – getting our own desires and finding our true joy. Sabbath rest is found when we lay aside our selfish desires and find satisfaction in the Lord. So my legalistic tendencies (yes, yours too) are merely an attempt to satisfy my own selfishness and they rob me of joy. It is that selfishness that must be crucified and in that moment the delight in the Lord is what brings satisfaction. So let us together refuse to succumb to the legalistic tendencies that rob one another of God’s best and His joy. Practically this begins by a change of perspective. Humility in prayer is that starting point.
Spiritual love will thus speak to Christ about the other Christian more than to the other Christian about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ and that love of the other is completely tied to the truth found in Christ. Self-centered love results in human enslavement, bondage, rigidity; spiritual love creates the freedom of Christians under the Word. D. Bonhoeffer.
I trust that we will be people who pray heartily for one another, freeing one another from the bondage, rigidity and enslavement that sin and criticism so easily exploits. Being new people in Christ means freedom that is unlike any other. Legalism will root us in suspicion, binding us to pretense, false security, and unfounded hope. Christ binds us to himself and His Father, full of grace, mercy, and truth.