Legalism Quotes

Law will take over because law always carries with it a sense of security and manipulative power.

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.

Legal action is but warfare disguised.

I can turn every "is" into "ought ".

My belief is that, morally, God and Satan are vaguely on the same page. According to the common understanding of Satan's origins, holiness must be in his blood: but a corrupted formula. The vital difference is that God is willing to offer grace for our sins; he delights in grace. God is the one and only holy and just punisher of sin, yes, but that is partly so because punishment for the sake of punishment is not something he loves. Whereas Satan, as the accuser, and as it is written, actually seeks God's permission to punish; he, being a seasoned legalist, delights in finding wrongs and will defy his own morality just to expose immorality. This is why both the anti-religious soul and the violently religious soul are, whether consciously or unconsciously, and sadly enough, glorifying their biggest hater: Satan is not only a lawless lover of punishing lawlessness, but also the greatest theologian of us all. He loves wickedness, but only because he loves punishing wickedness.

Law without reason is criminal.

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

If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: man's lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness.

To dream in doctrines, how tidy!

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

He fetishized limits.

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

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

When everything is a law, nothing is a law.

Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law...

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

Although he didn't care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).

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.

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

...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.)

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

You win over people just like you win over a dog. You see a dog passing down the street with an old bone in his mouth. You don't grab the bone from him and tell him it's not good for him. He'll growl at you. It's the only thing he has. But you throw a big fat lamb chop in front of him, and he's going to drop that bone and pick up the lamb chop, his tail wagging to beat the band. And you've got a friend. Instead of going around grabbing bones from people... I'm going to throw them some lamb chops. Something with real meat and life in it. I'm going to tell them about New Beginnings.

The road itself tells us far more than signs do.

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.

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.

The Christian God seemed the most offensive to people precisely because he was the most godlike. He was too perfect even to be coaxed by human efforts, and therefore sent his son to do the job.

To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. In our eagerness to get rid of the legalistic doctrine of works we have thrown out the baby with the bath and gotten rid of obedience as well.

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

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?

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

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.

We have invented a moral sense which is rotting now that we can't give it employment, and when a moral sense begins to rot, it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my precious civilization was, contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.

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

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

Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.

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.

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.

It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies.

These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.

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.

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).

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

(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.

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.

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

The conscious attempt to be a good person without Christ is as legalistic as an attempt to make it into Heaven through empty religiosity.

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”).

Lord, please protect me from Your people.

Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

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

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

People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honor.

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

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.

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.

This is so whether the said body of citizens or its prevailing part does this directly of itself, or commits the task to another or others who are not and cannot be the legislator in an unqualified sense but only in a certain respect and at a certain time and in accordance with the authority of the primary legislator. And in consequence of this I say that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive their necessary approval from the same primary authority and no other: whatever may be the situation concerning various ceremonies or solemnities, which are not required for the results of an election to stand but for their good standing, and even without which the election would be no less valid. I say further that it is by the same authority that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive any addition or subtraction or even total overhaul, any interpretation and any suspension: depending on the demands of time and place and other circumstances that might make one of these measures opportune for the sake of the common advantage in such matters.

In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.

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.

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.