Legalistic Grace

If you had asked me a year ago what it takes for someone to be saved, I would have answered with one word: “grace.” Today I would give you that same answer, but that word means much more to me. Perhaps re-understanding grace is something with which I needed to cope. However, I think it's a more significant issue than just myself. Despite my consistent preaching of grace, I realized I was a high-functioning legalist. I realized that true grace terrified me, and I was repulsed by it. I recognized that many Christians I have encountered were the same, repulsed by grace and bound to legalism. This isn’t a testimony of my salvation; nothing changed in my recognition of Jesus as Lord. Instead, this is a story of a reconstruction of grace that has made me more empathetic, spiritually intimate, and vulnerable.

I knew legalism to be an incorrect interpretation of the scripture. I was taught and repeated that, but I didn’t understand it. The truth is I began to turn my grace into legalism. I knew I was free from the law, but I began to believe that my non-spiritual convictions were law imposed on others. So, for example, I thought that people who didn’t have my political views had to have some sort of misunderstanding of the Bible. While I had the freedom to have different views through grace, I didn’t grant that freedom to my brothers and sisters in Christ. In fact, when I stopped reading my political views into the Bible, I began to see the Bible change my political views quite sharply.

This was just one byproduct of believing in legalistic grace, but truthfully there were so many more. I began to notice that my actions erred on the side of judgment. I would say things like, “why even drink? nothing good can come of it,” or “I’m surprised to see them attending that church. Do they know what they believe?” I began to view the rules I created in my life as the truth, and anyone who didn’t follow those rules had some lesser understanding of grace. Perhaps the opposite was true.

Legalistic grace develops other patterns in you too. I started to create a routine of retribution. If someone didn’t invite me to an event, they wouldn’t get an invite to my next hangout. If they gave me a snarky comment, I would return another snarky comment. If someone said something nasty behind my back, I would find a way to do the same thing back to them. I even found ways to retribute that seemed less problematic. If someone I had authority over made a mistake or even committed an act of gross negligence, I would take it my responsibility to punish them “accordingly.” Not to teach them a lesson but to “give them what they deserved.” That is retribution and nothing else.

The truth is, legalistic grace is even taught at some churches. Christians use it in their language everyday. For example, pastors will tell you to give money because “God will see that you’re using his resources well, and then he will give you more.” They may even share an anecdote about a congregant who gave money and got a pay raise the next day. That’s a great story, but that’s not how God works. I know what parable they are teaching from, but that’s not what that means. If you give money to your church, here is what will happen. You are going to have less money. But we don’t give because we want to get. We give because this is God’s resource, and we want to use it however we can to invest in His kingdom.

People will say, “When the praises go up, the blessings come down!” While that sounds nice, it’s as legalistic as it gets. We don’t praise God, so his blessings come down. We praise God because He is God. We praise God because He created everything, and despite our rebellion, he lovingly rescued us and accepted us as refugees into His Kingdom. So if God gives you a blessing, you better use that blessing to further his kingdom. If you don’t, it's not a blessing but a mismanaged resource.

Let me tell you what it means to understand grace. Understanding grace is recognizing that nothing you have done or will do can save you. You created a rift between you and God, and there is nothing you can do to fix that. I will go as far as to say that your faith in Jesus Christ does not save you. If you are saved, you are saved by grace alone. Your faith is purely a response to that grace, and you are saved through it (alone). It is easy to misunderstand that and believe that your faith is salvific. But that would be your action leading to your salvation, and you don’t have that kind of power. Only Jesus does. Being saved through your faith does not imply that you had any part in the saving; it only implies that you recognized the true nature of saving grace. I was repulsed by this grace because I wanted something to do with my own salvation. I wanted to buy it, behaviorally earn it, evangelize towards it, but humanity is incapable of that. There is nothing we can offer God, but instead, he offers us everything.

Understanding grace means that you understand what it means to be free. You are free to have different political views, you are free to drink (or not to drink), you are free to believe in a pre or post-millennial reign of Christ. Most of all, you are free from sin. Paul says it best:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free[b] from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.

Sin no longer reigns over you. When I lived under legalistic grace, my most significant concern was whether or not every word or action I had was a sin. Instead of living in the freedom of grace, I kept looking back at the grave I walked out of and wondered if I would be back there. Now I live in the freedom of grace. I don’t retribute those who wronged me. Instead, I show them the grace that changed me. I don’t expect anything out of my obedience. I obey because I love our graceful God so much it wouldn’t make sense not to. There’s nothing I could have done to bridge the gap I created, but He did it anyway. There is nothing that you or I need to add to grace. Not rule-following, not abstaining, not baptizing. Grace alone is sufficient, and it has to be because we offer the creator of everything nothing. So I invite you to reflect on where legalism pokes its head in your life, reunderstand grace, and live in its freedom. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.