Legalism

Adrian asked:

>Can you share some of the "legalism" you're talking about from your past?

I have avoided identifying the particular teacher we were connected with because I know that he has many supporters and I would like to minister to them. Typically, any time someone speaks against him, that person is cut off and dismissed. Those who are loyal to his ministry are usually unwilling to hear any criticism or concern.

However, your question is good. So, here I go…

In many ways we were like the vast majority of evangelical Christians, perhaps more serious about our faith in some ways, but we believed and wanted to do right. We learned the reality of Jesus in our lives fairly early and believed that He was with us and loved us. However, the background of our faith, the way we learned to be Christians, was the typical “cause and effect spirituality.” If you do well, God will bless you; if you do not well, God will cause trouble to come. Basically that meant I was in control of whether good or bad came into my life.

I define this system as legalism, even though it is widely popular among believers, because the logical extension of that thinking is that my actions determine my eternal fate. You should be able to find an article on the website in a week or so called, “What is Legalism?” In that article I will give more of why I think this is an appropriate definition.

We really didn’t understand any of this until we had to deal with people who pushed the cause and effect thinking beyond what normal Christians are comfortable with. They drew all kinds of connections between behavior and results. If you watch TV, for example, you are welcoming the values of Satan into your home and will suffer. If your wife wears slacks or jeans rather than skirts, she exhibits rebellion which will destroy the love of your marriage. If you eat the wrong kind of bread you will become constipated and have relationship problems. I kid you not! These were real concerns for these folks.

We were never drawn in as far as some, but we found it difficult to ignore all of it because it was just the natural progression of the cause and effect thinking. If my spiritual life is affected by some of the things I do, why not by all of the things I do? If my spiritual life is affected by being lessened in some degree, when do I lose it? I might agree that if I murder my neighbor I affect my spiritual life, but Jesus said that murder isn’t really all that different from hating, or even calling someone a derogatory name. (But Jesus never said that these actions damaged my spiritual life – more later).

So, maybe watching TV will cause harm and wearing the wrong clothing and having the wrong hairstyle and on and on. These folks taught that we should live according to a certain pattern taught by this teacher I mentioned earlier. He was an expert at twisting Scripture to make it say what he wanted it to say. For example: David danced and it cost him the joy of his marriage. Therefore we should not dance. The list was incredible.

Again, we didn’t buy into a lot of this. We joined up with this teacher because his firm stance on Scripture was refreshing and many of the things he taught were good. The legalism slipped in more and more as you progressed in the system, however. It became difficult to see which teaching was good and which was not. We really didn’t like the Scripture-twisting, but the “mantra” was that the teacher was always proved right in the long run.

Eventually, we began to realize that we were seeing things that were just plain wrong. People were hurting each other with their judgmental attitudes and many lived in fear of being discovered as compromisers. The teaching seemed to become increasingly strange, although it may be just that we were beginning to see more clearly. We stopped participating in the “program” and began to share some of our concerns. That’s when we found out where the true loyalty was.

Remember that we were in a church and I was the pastor. These were our friends and our kids’ friends. When we began to share our concerns, we became the enemies. To make a long story short, the group that belonged to this teacher tried to take over the church and decided instead to leave. Our congregation lost 80% in just a few months. People we thought were friends not only left but said incredibly hurtful things on the way out. Our circle of friends was gone, my job was gone, my reputation damaged both because of my association with these folks and because of the losses in the church. Yes, my whole family was hurt.

But there’s good news! In the next post I’ll share the answer to Adrian’s next question.