I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little bit of a natural-born legalist. I’m a firstborn child, a high achieving type. I like rules. Rules make things clear and I like things to be clear. There are some areas of life where this is a really good thing. I rarely got in trouble as a child and I did well in school because I showed up for every class and I always did my homework.
However, this rule follower thing can get you into a bit of trouble when it comes to faith. We can start to think that the rules we follow are more important than the relationships with God and others they were meant to preserve. I had some rules for myself back in high school: no dating and no kissing. I was trying to maintain sexual purity and keep myself from heartbreak. However, the rules didn’t work. They didn’t keep me from relational problems or from making mistakes with boys. I could technically keep the rules I had made for myself while still managing to do things that led to the heartache and harm those same rules were supposed to prevent.
The Religious Rule Followers
The Jewish religious leaders in Jesus’ days were masters at this. In the middle of Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, and Jesus’ trial before Pilate, there’s this little interesting verse: “to avoid ceremonial uncleanness the Jews did not enter [Pilate’s] palace; they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.” (verse 28)
The Jews are trying to kill Jesus, albeit legally. They are working to put to death someone who wasn’t guilty of any crime . . . and they’re worried about becoming unclean because they didn’t want to miss the Passover. Their religious systems and traditions were more important than the life of another human.
We shouldn’t be too hard on the religious leaders though. We’re more like them than we want to recognize (or maybe it’s just me). Many of them were trying to do the right thing. They thought what God had established among them as a nation needed to be protected (John 11:47-48). They assumed they were right and all others were wrong. This led them to care less about a human being than a Passover celebration and their other religious traditions. We can easily fall into similar traps. How can we keep from being like these religious leaders?
Don’t put God in a box.
The religious leaders in Jesus’ day thought they understood God. They were confident they knew how God worked in the world and what God looked like. They found out the hard way that they were wrong.
If we think that we totally understand God or we know how he would and would not work in the world, we need to be careful. God is always working in unexpected ways and through unexpected people. We should never say, “God would never work through this [person, place, situation, political party, or any other factor].” God can and does work in the most unlikely ways. We should always be alert to new ways that God can be working in our world.
Stay humble before God and people.
Part of not putting God in a box is holding our ideas about God with open hands. God wants us to know him and reveals himself to us. He also calls us to be humble in how we understand his self-disclosure. We are never going to know or understand everything about God. In Scripture, we see God continually correcting misconceptions about himself. We should be more than willing to admit that we need such guidance as well.
God’s ways are not our ways. We should always be willing to admit that when we’re wrong about him. I know in my own life my views about God have changed and developed over the years. I had to be able to admit that I was wrong in my thinking to accept new ideas about God. This is a process that never ends. We have to hold our opinions and thoughts about God loosely, always willing to let him correct us and show us new ways that he is working in our world.
Realize that rules won’t keep you from sinning.
The religious leaders in Jesus’ day had constructed a whole system of rules to keep the Jewish people from breaking the commandments that God had given them in the Old Testament. However, all of their rules didn’t keep people from sinning. Their rules didn’t keep them from wanting to kill a man. Rules may curb the outward expression of sin but they are never the answer to its deadly effects. The Holy Spirit is.
While rules have a place in our lives and can help keep on the right path, they only work if we actually want the outcome the rules are supposedly driving us to. A speed limit sign is only helpful if we want to be a good, law-abiding driver. If we don’t care about being a good driver, we won’t obey the rule.
It’s a work of the Spirit to change our desires so that we want to be the kind of person God wants us to be. If we have the desire to be like Jesus, God’s commandments and “rules” become helpful guides to help us get there. Rules will never make us a better person on their own. They must always be motivated by God-given desires.
Stay grounded in the Word.
I like listening to the Dave Ramsey show. Dave helps people get out of debt and get their finances in order. People who call in to celebrate that they’re debt-free often say that one of the most helpful things for them in their journey is listening to Dave’s show. Hearing other people talk about their new debt-free status and hearing Dave’s daily encouragement reminds them of why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s not about following the “rules” to get out of debt (though that’s helpful) it’s about knowing “the why” behind what they’re doing.
The same is true in our journey of becoming like Jesus. If we want to keep from becoming a legalistic nightmare, we have to be constantly reminded of what we’re aiming for. The reason why is more important than the method of how. We want to be like Jesus. We want to fulfill God’s original design for humanity. Our goal to be the Kingdom of God here on earth. That’s our ultimate goal and we need to be reminded of that over and over again. To do that we need to constantly be in the Scriptures reading about God and what he’s called us to.
There’s hope for legalists like me. If we can keep our eyes on the why, stay humble, not put God in a box, we can realize rules aren’t our Savior, Jesus is. It’s through him alone that we can do anything.
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash