personal development on Legalism

Gracious Father, too often we base our worth on our performance. We believe if we do well, your love grows, and if we falter, your love lessens. Our God, how far this is from the truth. We confess our...

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromis...

If you are a pastor…this one’s for you. Sabbath. So many things have been written. Most of us have taught our people or preached about Sabbath, and underscored how busy people in our churches re...

Gracious God, for many of us, the notion of Sabbath-keeping is foreign. It suggests old-fashioned traditionalism or constrictive legalism. Yet, your example in Genesis 2, not to mention other portions...

If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without l...

Erik Thoennes, professor at Biola University and elder at Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, California, sees the authenticity trend in the undergrads he teaches. At the beginning of each cla...

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Religion says, "I obey; therefore I am accepted." Christianity says, "I’m accepted, therefore I obey."

Postmodernism (the thinking of our age) is fiercely antinomian (without law). It is admitted that people make mistakes, but the word ‘sin’ is seldom mentioned and the idea that we all sin against God ...

While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

“Spirituality” wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

Pastor: See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways,...

Science investigates - religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power. Religion gives man wisdom which is control.

A great burst of proselytizing among slaves followed the Nat Turner revolt. Whereas previously many slaveholders had feared slaves with religion—and the example of Turner himself confirmed their fears...

All moral obligation resolves itself into the obligation of conformity to the will of God.

Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.

A theology of response does not need to be Pelagian; it need only be a theology in which the reality of the human is taken seriously.

Fear and control are the basis for all human religions. From this common beginning the paths diverge dramatically, splinter, multiply, and finally terminate in different places. But each one is an att...

Christian morality has fallen on hard times these days. No one seems to believe in it, least of all Christians. Even the word “morality” is dropping out of our vocabulary—and I do mean the vocabulary ...

Because of Christ, our Father and Judge does not look upon us with wrath, but he still parents us with justice. . . . God’s discipline is his justice without wrath.

True freedom is not found by seeking to develop the powers of the self without limits, for the human person is not made for autonomy but for true relatedness in love and obedience; and this also entai...

Solitude is the most radical of the disciplines for life in the spirit. In penal institutions, solitary confinement is used to break the strongest of wills. It is capable of this because it excludes i...

As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.

Discipline yourself and others won't need to.

Critics of Christianity correctly point out that the church has proved an unreliable carrier of moral values. The church has indeed made mistakes, launching Crusades, censuring scientists, burning wit...

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.

We must do our business faithfully; without trouble or disquiet, recalling our mind to GOD mildly, and with tranquility, as often as we find it wandering from Him.

Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever...

No one is mandated by God to be a heresy hunter. When we are walking in judgement and a critical spirit, we can stumble into an unhealthy infatuation with looking for the enemy, instead of seeking the...