CHAPTER NINE

CALLED TO BE FREE

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. . . . You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.

GALATIANS 5:1, 13

In the year 1215, English barons forced King John to sign a historic document, the Magna Carta, giving his assent to a charter of civil liberties for the English people. He did not do this freely and voluntarily, but actually under duress from the English nobles who had confronted him about his totalitarian and unjust rule.

The apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians has been called the great charter of religious freedom, the Christian Declaration of Independence, and the Magna Carta of the church. The freedom set forth in Galatians is not freedom from God, but from those who insist on some form of legalism in the life of a believer.

The legalism the Galatian believers were in danger of succumbing to was, as we saw in chapter 7, the teaching that believers must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses in order to be saved. Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians to refute that heresy. Yes, it was heresy, and Paul felt so strongly about it he called down a divine curse on those who were teaching it: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!” (1:8).

Paul took a strong stand for the cause of freedom against this form of legalism when he wrote, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (5:1). And he was calling them from this form of legalism when he said, “You, my brothers, were called to be free” (5:13).

We’ve gotten beyond the Galatian brand of legalism today. We haven’t resurrected circumcision as a requirement for salvation, and we’re clear that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ apart from keeping the law. Instead, we have developed another brand of legalism, a brand that is concerned, not with salvation, but with how we live the Christian life. I call this “evangelical legalism” (a contradiction in terms, I realize —nevertheless the phrase fits the problem). Here is how I describe our form of legalism.

Legalism is, first of all, anything we do or don’t do in order to earn favor with God. It is concerned with rewards to be gained or penalties to be avoided. This is a legalism we force on ourselves.

Second, legalism insists on conformity to man-made religious rules and requirements, which are often unspoken but are nevertheless very real. To use a more common expression, it requires conformity to the “dos and don’ts” of our particular Christian circle. We force this legalism on others or allow others to force it on us. It is conformity to how other people think we should live instead of how the Bible tells us to live. More often than not, these rules have no valid biblical basis. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, we have tried to “help” God by adding our man-made rules to His commands. Jesus’ charge against the Pharisees, recorded in Mark 7:6-8, is still valid today:

“These people honor me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain;

their teachings are but rules taught by men.”

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.

This may seem like a rather severe charge to bring against contemporary Christianity, but it is true today. There are far too many instances within Christendom where our traditions and rules are, in practice, more important than God’s commands.

These two descriptions of legalism are closely related. More often than not, we try to earn favor with God in the area of man-made rules, or we feel guilty because we have failed in keeping them. We do or don’t do a particular thing because someone or some group or our cultural background tells us we ought or ought not to do it. And these “oughts” or “ought nots” are usually communicated by people in such a way that the favor or frown of God is tied to our compliance.

I have been addressing the first type of legalism all through this book up to now. I hope we at least understand that we can do nothing to earn favor with God, that His favor is given solely by His grace through Christ. I realize our practice may lag behind our understanding, but we cannot begin to practice the truth until we understand it.

In this chapter, I want to address the second type of legalism: the observance of man-made rules. Paul’s call to stand firm in our freedom in Christ and not let ourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery is just as valid today with our rules as it was in the Galatians’ day with the Mosaic law.

I noted in this chapter’s opening paragraph that King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. But God gave us our spiritual Magna Carta. Through Paul, He called us to be free: “You, my brothers, were called to be free.” In fact, God doesn’t just call us to freedom, He actually exhorts us to stand firm in our freedom —to resist all efforts to abridge or destroy it.

Despite God’s call to be free and His earnest admonition to resist all efforts to curtail it, there is very little emphasis in Christian circles today on the importance of Christian freedom. Just the opposite seems to be true. Instead of promoting freedom, we stress our rules of conformity. Instead of preaching living by grace, we preach living by performance. Instead of encouraging new believers to be conformed to Christ, we subtly insist that they be conformed to our particular style of Christian culture. We don’t intend to do this and would earnestly deny we are. Yet that’s the “bottom line” effect of most of our emphases in Christian circles today.

For example, many people would react negatively to my quoting only part of Galatians 5:13, “You, my brothers, were called to be free.” Despite the fact that this statement is a complete sentence, they would say, “But that’s not all of the verse. Go on to quote the remainder: ‘But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.’” (We seem to forget that verse divisions were not inspired.)

The person who reacts that way has made my point. We are much more concerned about someone abusing his freedom than we are about his guarding it. We are more afraid of indulging the sinful nature than we are of falling into legalism. Yet legalism does indulge the sinful nature because it fosters self-righteousness and religious pride. It also diverts us from the real issues of the Christian life by focusing on external and sometimes trivial rules.

FENCES

The legalism of man-made rules goes back at least to New Testament times, if not before, but it is still with us today. In his book The Pharisees’ Guide to Total Holiness, William L. Coleman described the Pharisees’ concept of moral fences. He said,

The Pharisees were desperately determined to not break the laws of God. Consequently they devised a system to keep them from even coming close to angering God. They contrived a “fence” of Pharisaic rules that, if man would keep them, would guarantee a safe distance between himself and the laws of God. . . .

The “fence” or “hedge” laws accumulated into hundreds over the years and were passed around orally. Soon it became apparent that they were far from optional. These laws became every inch as important as the scriptural laws and in some instances far more crucial.[42]

We still practice this today. We build fences to keep ourselves from committing certain sins. Soon these fences —instead of the sins they were designed to guard against —become the issue. We elevate our rules to the level of God’s commandments.

When my children were barely teenagers, our family went on vacation to a different part of the country to enjoy the beach and the ocean. Since my Navy days, I have had a fascination for the ocean and its waves, so I was eager to take the family to the beach. When we got there, however, I discovered the beach was swarming with scantily clad young women. (I’m not talking about ordinary swimsuits. When I say scanty, I mean scanty.)

Now like Job, I had “made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl” (Job 31:1). I know I have not been as diligent as Job to stay faithful to that covenant, but at least I work at it. After about twenty minutes of continuously diverting my eyes, I said to my wife, “You and the kids stay as long as you like. I’m going to the car.”

Why did I do that? Because I knew myself well enough to know that after a while my commitment to visual purity would wear thin. I knew that —given the continual temptations passing before me —in due time, I would succumb to the temptation to indulge a lustful look “just once” (which, of course, it never is). So I built a “fence” for myself that day. I left the beach.

Now suppose, because of my experience, I concluded that going to the beach would always lead to sin. I could have said to my son, “You are not to go to the beach anymore.” I could have begun to look down my religious nose at others who went to the beach. I would have built a permanent fence: “Thou shalt not go to the beach.” In due time that fence would have had almost the same force in my thinking as the Ten Commandments, especially as I would use it to judge or influence others.

That is the way a lot of man-made “dos and don’ts” originate. They begin as a sincere effort to deal with real sin issues. But very often we begin to focus on the fence we’ve built instead of the sin it was designed to guard against. We fight our battles in the wrong places; we deal with externals instead of the heart.

If I had said to my son, “You may not go to the beach,” I would have failed him. He could have concluded that it was a sin to go to the beach (though he wouldn’t understand why), and nothing would have been said about looking lustfully at the girls at school, or a dozen other places for that matter. Now that fence I could have built for my son (though I’m happy I didn’t) may sound ridiculous to you, but I have seen almost the same fence built with the exact same neglect of the real issue.

Incidentally, the next time my wife and I went to the beach, it was in another part of the country. We stayed almost a week and had a thoroughly enjoyable time. So please don’t draw the conclusion: “Thou shalt not go to the beach.”

When I was growing up, I was not allowed to go to the local pool halls. As I look back, I’m sure my parents did not want me to come under the influence of the unsavory characters who frequented those halls. So they built a fence to keep that from happening: “Don’t go into those pool halls.” The problem was I didn’t understand why, so I grew up thinking it was a sin to play pool (don’t laugh, I really did). Imagine my consternation when I moved to a Christian conference center and saw a beautiful antique pool table in the recreation room and godly men playing pool.

Should we scrap our fences, then? Not necessarily. Often they are helpful; sometimes they are necessary. Some years ago I realized I was craving ice cream to the point where I was not exercising responsible self-control. I had some every night at dinner and another dish at bedtime. So I built a fence. I asked my wife to no longer keep a regular supply of ice cream on hand. Only after my craving had been dealt with did we begin to have ice cream occasionally.

I think my parents’ pool hall fence was appropriate. But there is a lesson in my experience for all parents: Don’t focus on the fence. If you erect a fence for your children —for example, in regard to certain movies or television programs —be sure to focus on the real issues, not the fence. Take time to explain and re-explain the reason for the fence.

If you decide, as my parents did, that you don’t want your children going to the local pool hall, explain why. Distinguish between playing the game itself —which has neither negative nor positive moral value —and the atmosphere you are trying to protect them from.

For all of us, it may be good to have some fences, but we have to work at keeping them as just that —fences, helpful to us but not necessarily applicable to others. We also have to work at guarding our freedom from other people’s fences.

Some of the fences in our respective Christian circles have been around a long time. No one quite knows their origin, but by now they are “embedded in concrete.” Although it may cause conflict if you violate one, you must guard your freedom. To paraphrase Paul, “Stand firm in your freedom, and don’t let anyone bring you into bondage with their fences.”

I’m not suggesting you jump over fences just to thumb your nose at the people who hold to them so dearly. We are to “make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification” (Romans 14:19). Use discretion in embracing or rejecting a particular fence. But don’t let others coerce you with man-made rules. And ask God to help you see if you are subtly coercing or judging others with your own fences.

DIFFERING OPINIONS

A second area of legalism arises from believers holding differing opinions about certain practices. If “fences” have been around since the days of the Pharisees, the issue of differing opinions has been around at least since the days of the apostle Paul. He devoted an entire chapter of the book of Romans to this brand of legalism. In Romans 14:1, Paul called this problem “disputable matters” or, as I have called it, differing opinions.

The crux of the problem is stated well by Paul in verse 5: “One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.” People simply have different opinions about various issues. One person sees no problem in a certain practice; another person considers that practice to be sinful.

Most often these differing opinions arise from our family, or geographical, or perhaps, church cultures. I know that a certain practice that was offensive to the church I grew up in was not even an issue in a church I attended in California, whereas the California Christians would have been scandalized by one prominent practice back in Texas. Yet neither practice is addressed in the Bible.

Where do these cultural convictions come from? They develop in various ways. Some have their origin in a “fence” someone erected a long time ago, and no one knows what the original problem was. Others originated in the individual experience of some Christian who began to lay his personal convictions on others.

Charles Swindoll told of a missionary family who literally were forced off the mission field over peanut butter.[43] They were sent to a location where peanut butter was not available, so they asked friends back in the States to occasionally send them some. The problem was that the other missionaries considered it a mark of spirituality not to have peanut butter. The newer missionary family considered this a matter of differing opinions, so they continued to receive and enjoy their peanut butter. But the pressure from the other missionaries to conform became so intense, the newer family finally gave up and left the mission field.

How could something like this —that probably seems petty and foolish to us —have happened? I imagine it developed something like this: A missionary family who greatly enjoyed peanut butter went to this particular mission field. Upon discovering there was no peanut butter available locally, they faced a choice of doing without it or asking friends or relatives in the States to send it to them. As they considered their options before the Lord, they came to the conclusion that doing without peanut butter was a small sacrifice to make for being on the mission field. Though, like the apostle Paul, they had a “right” to peanut butter, they chose not to use that right (see 1 Corinthians 9:1-12). They did it as “to the Lord” (Romans 14:6).

If my theory of this issue’s origin is correct, I personally find their thinking quite acceptable, perhaps even applaudable, in that circumstance. That’s Paul’s whole point in Romans 14. If they decided to give up peanut butter as to the Lord, who am I to belittle or ridicule them? Paul said the man whose faith allows him to eat peanut butter must not look down on him who does not (Romans 14:3).

So what went wrong? If the original missionary family made a sincere decision to give up peanut butter as to the Lord, how did it eventually become a divisive issue among missionaries? Again, I’m speculating. It probably happened because one family elevated the particular leading of God for them to the level of a spiritual principle, which they then applied to everyone: “If God has ‘led’ us to give up peanut butter on the mission field, surely that is His will for everyone else.”

Whether I have speculated correctly on the reasons behind this story or not makes no difference. Even if they are not true in this particular instance, they have been true in scores of others. As Christians we can’t seem to accept the clear biblical teaching in Romans 14 that God allows equally godly people to have differing opinions on certain matters. We universalize what we think is God’s particular leading in our lives and apply it to everyone else.

When we think like that we are, so to speak, “putting God in a box.” We are insisting that He must surely lead everyone as we believe He has led us. We refuse to allow God the freedom to deal with each of us as individuals. When we think like that, we are legalists.

We must not seek to bind the consciences of other believers with the private convictions that arise out of our personal walk with God. Even if you believe God has led you in developing those convictions, you still must not elevate them to the level of spiritual principles for everyone else to follow. The respected Puritan theologian John Owen taught that “only what God has commanded in his word should be regarded as binding; in all else there may be liberty of actions.”[44] If we are going to enjoy the freedom we have in Christ, we must be alert to convictions that fall into the category of differing opinions. We must not seek to bind the consciences of others or allow them to bind ours. We must stand firm in the freedom we have in Christ.

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES

Earlier I mentioned our various lists of “dos and don’ts.” We’ve looked at some typical “don’ts”: don’t go to the beach, don’t play pool, don’t eat peanut butter. If this list seems humorous to you, and you’re wondering how anyone could have such foolish notions, consider that your own list could look just as foolish to someone else. But foolish or not is not the issue. The issue is that God has not appointed any of us to be the “moral policeman” of other believers.

But what about the “dos”? By the “dos” I’m thinking particularly of activities I call spiritual disciplines: having regular private devotions, studying the Bible, memorizing Scripture, meeting with a group Bible study, or faithfully attending a weekly prayer meeting.

Let me clearly say that I’m not out to disparage these disciplines at all. They are all good and helpful, and I seek to practice many of them myself. But spiritual disciplines are provided for our good, not for our bondage. They are privileges to be used, not duties to be performed. To take off on a familiar quotation from Jesus, “Spiritual disciplines were made for man, not man for spiritual disciplines” (see Mark 2:27).

We can become just as legalistic about our “dos” as we can about the “don’ts.” In fact, newer believers coming into our fellowship from totally unchristian backgrounds usually don’t have many cultural “don’ts.” But the spiritual disciplines are fertile ground for legalistic thinking.

They can easily become a performance measurement by which we gauge whether to expect God’s blessing or not. If I’ve been doing pretty well, having a regular quiet time, studying my Bible, and so on, then I’m hopeful about God’s blessing. But if I’ve not been doing so well —haven’t “been faithful” as we say —then I might as well go back to bed.

We get even more legalistic about spiritual disciplines with others. We try subtle (or maybe not so subtle) coercion by communicating ever so slightly that a person who isn’t practicing the same disciplines we are isn’t “committed.” Or we don’t allow a person into our “in” group if he or she is not doing what we do. Again we think God should lead everyone else in spiritual growth as He does us.

I do think we should actively promote spiritual disciplines. They are absolutely necessary for growth in our Christian lives. And since ours is a largely undisciplined age, many believers are losing out on the benefits of those disciplines that could help them grow to maturity in Christ. But we should promote them as benefits, not as duties. Perhaps we should stop talking about being “faithful” to have a quiet time with God each day, as if we were doing something to earn a reward. It would be better to talk about the privilege of spending time with the God of the universe and the importance for our own sake of being consistent in that practice.

If we are involved in a one-to-one discipling relationship, we must remember Paul’s attitude when he wrote, “Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy, because it is by faith you stand firm” (2 Corinthians 1:24). In a one-to-one discipling relationship, we are there to serve, not to lord it over the other person. We should encourage the use of spiritual disciplines and do all we can to help the person succeed in them, but we should never require them as a condition of acceptance —either by God or by us. We must remember that the methods of spiritual disciplines are a means to the end, not the end themselves.

We need to teach grace before commitment because, as we saw in chapter 6, grace understood and embraced will always lead to commitment. But commitment required will always lead to legalism.

WHAT OTHERS THINK

Often we do not enjoy our freedom in Christ because we are afraid of what others will think. We do or don’t do certain things because of a fear that we will be judged or gossiped about by others. But standing firm in our freedom in Christ means we resist the urge to live by the fear of what others think.

It is very instructive to me that, in Galatians, the Magna Carta of Christian freedom, Paul also said, “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ” (1:10).

I had to learn this lesson the hard way.

As I said in chapter 4, surprisingly soon after the death of my first wife, God brought into my life another godly lady —a single woman who had been a family friend for many years. As our friendship began to deepen into a romantic relationship, I became quite concerned about what people would think. I knew I would be violating the culturally accepted maxim of “don’t make any major decisions the first year.” At the same time, I sensed an inner compulsion in my spirit, which I felt was from God, to move ahead. My journal during those days records numerous times when I struggled with God over this issue. One day I wrote, “I wonder if God is pushing me along faster in this relationship than I want to go because of fear of what people will think.”

I had put God in the box of our culturally accepted norm. Surely God wouldn’t do anything in my life that would be unacceptable to my friends. God was actually doing a wonderful thing, but instead of fully enjoying His work of grace, I was struggling with Him because of what people might think.

If you are going to experience the joy of your freedom in Christ, you have to decide whether you will please God or people. I saw a cartoon one day that was a takeoff on one of Campus Crusade’s Four Spiritual Laws. A wife, speaking to her husband, who was obviously a minister, said, “God loves you, and people have a wonderful plan for your life.” That cartoonist captured a spirit that is widespread in evangelicalism. Other people want to tell you how you should live the Christian life, what you shouldn’t do and what you should do. Often their ideas will not match how you feel God is guiding you.

I’m not advocating that we run roughshod over other people’s convictions. We are called to a body, and we all need to live and minister as members of the body. But ultimately we are responsible to God, not other people. He is the One who puts us in the body as He pleases. He deals with each of us individually, putting each of us in circumstances tailored especially for our growth and ministry.

A friend of mine ministers to international students from a very different cultural and political background. For some reason, the best time of the entire week to meet with them in an evangelistic Bible study is during the Sunday morning worship service. My friend went to his pastor, explained the situation, committed himself to attending the Sunday evening service, but asked to be excused from the morning service with the pastor’s approval and blessing. Fortunately, the pastor understood and heartily granted his approval of my friend’s plan.

But what if some people in the congregation didn’t understand? What if the Sunday school superintendent didn’t understand why my friend was unavailable to teach the college-age class? What are we to do in those situations? We are to exercise our freedom in Christ. If we believe God is guiding us in a certain direction, we have to obey God, not other people.

I learned something else through my romance experience. I realized I often had my own opinions of what other people should or should not do. I wouldn’t try to influence their actions, but in my mind I would judge them —either approving or disapproving. So God “put the shoe on the other foot”; He exposed me to the possibility of other people not understanding what He was doing in my life. I learned the hard way to experience my own freedom in Christ and let other people experience theirs. We need to learn to let each other be free.

CONTROLLERS

We’ve talked about some of the areas in which we practice legalism with each other and with ourselves: fences, differing opinions, spiritual disciplines, and fear of what others think. There are others. Expected attendance at all church meetings, or at the activities of our various parachurch organizations, is another fertile area for legalism. Another old bogey is “worldliness,” which in the minds of some people can be seen in the amount of cosmetics a woman wears or the length of a man’s hair.

Aggravating all of these areas is a class of people who have come to be known as “controllers.” These are people who are not willing to let you live your life before God as you believe He is leading you. They have all the issues buttoned down and have cast-iron opinions about all of them. These people only know black and white. There are no gray areas to them.

They insist you live your Christian life according to their rules and their opinions. If you insist on being free to live as God wants you to live, they will try to intimidate you and manipulate you one way or another. Their primary weapons are “guilt trips,” rejection, or gossip.

These people must be resisted. We must not allow them to subvert the freedom we have in Christ. Paul treated the legalism in the Galatian church as heresy, and he called down a curse on its perpetrators. I am not prepared to go that far with our present-day legalists/controllers, but I want to tell you their actions are no incidental matter. Their presence in our evangelical ranks is much more than a minor irritant, such as a fly buzzing around our heads. There are spiritual casualties all over our nation today because of the effects of legalistic controllers in their lives.

Controllers have been around a long time. Over three hundred years ago —in 1645 —the Puritan Samuel Bolton wrote these very instructive words on the issue of Christian freedom:

Let us never surrender our judgments or our consciences to be at the disposal and opinions of others, and to be subjected to the sentences and determinations of men. . . .

It is my exhortation therefore to all Christians to maintain their Christian freedom by constant watchfulness. You must not be tempted or threatened out of it; you must not be bribed or frightened from it; you must not let either force or fraud rob you of it. . . . We must not give up ourselves to the opinion of other men, though they be never so learned, never so holy, merely because it is their opinion. The apostle directs us to try all things and to hold fast that which is good (1 Thess. 5.21). It often happens that a high esteem of others in respect of their learning and piety makes men take up all upon trust from such, and to submit their judgments to their opinions, and their consciences to their precepts. This should not be so.[45]

Years ago someone said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” That is just as true in the spiritual as in the political realm. Freedom and grace are two sides of the same coin. We cannot enjoy one without the other. If we are to truly live by grace, we must stand firm in the freedom that is ours in Christ Jesus.

SERVE ONE ANOTHER IN LOVE

Now that we have explored the issue of freedom as an expression of grace, we can quote the remainder of Galatians 5:13, “But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.”

In a sense I have already dealt with Paul’s cautionary note, in chapters 6 through 8. I deliberately delayed addressing the issue of Christian freedom until I had first dealt with the relationship of grace to the moral law of God. I wanted to show that the moral law, rightly understood, does not squelch grace or abridge our freedom in Christ.

We saw in chapter 6 that God’s grace provides the only proper motive, as well as the only powerful motivation, to obey His commands. Our obedience, to be true obedience, must arise out of love for God and gratitude for His grace. We saw in chapter 7 that the moral law of God gives direction to our love. If I truly desire to express my love to Him, I need to know how to do that appropriately. Jesus gave us very simple directions (simple to understand, if not to practice): “If you love me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15).

Then we saw in chapter 8 that, though the law gives direction, it provides no power to enable us to obey it. But God, by delivering us from the reign of sin and the law, and bringing us into His realm of grace, has provided the power in Christ and through His Spirit. So God by His grace has given us the right motive, the right rule or direction, and the needed power to live a life of love.

Only when we understand these basic truths are we in a position to respond to Paul’s exhortation not to abuse our freedom, but instead, to serve one another in love. Here is a spiritual principle: We cannot exercise love unless we are experiencing grace. You cannot truly love others unless you are convinced that God’s love for you is unconditional, based solely on the merit of Christ, not on your performance. John said, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our love, either to God or to others, can only be a response to His love for us.

There are five words all beginning with the letter L that we need to keep in right relationship to one another. All five are either used or implied in Galatians 5:13-14. They are law, liberty, love, license, and legalism. (I have not used license up to now, and by that word I mean an abuse of our freedom in order to indulge our sinful nature.) We need to learn to live within the right relationships of law and love, law and liberty, and liberty and love. Only when we have those relationships in proper order will we avoid the traps of license on the one hand and legalism on the other. Grace keeps the law, love, and liberty in right relationship to one another.

In one southern state, a narrow two-lane highway has been built through a swampland by building up the road bed above the swamp. You must be extra alert not to drift off the road because there is no margin for error. If you go off the road, you do not end up on a grassy shoulder but rather submerged in a swamp.

As shown in the following illustration, the built-up roadbed represents grace that allows you to drive safely through the swampland of legalism and license.

When you focus on grace in the fullness of its meaning, you will keep the law, liberty, and love in their proper relationship to one another. But if you focus on any one of them instead of on grace, you will invariably end up in the swamp of legalism or license.

What do I mean by the phrase, “grace in the fullness of its meaning”? An expression often used in a pejorative sense is cheap grace. The term denotes an attitude that, since God’s grace is unconditional, I may live as I please; I may sin as much as I want because God will still love me and forgive me. That is the attitude of license. It results from focusing exclusively on liberty and denigrating God’s law. To counteract this sinful attitude, some of us in Christian ministry have fallen into legalism. We have taught, either directly or implicitly, that God’s grace is conditional, that there is a degree to which it is based on our performance. We have unduly focused on God’s law and disparaged liberty.

But the reality is that there is no such thing as cheap grace. To us, the recipients, grace is not cheap; it is unconditionally free. But grace is not cheap to God either. Although grace is part of the essential nature of God, the extending of His grace to us cost Him the most expensive price ever paid, the death of His own dear Son.

So grace is never cheap. It is absolutely free to us, but infinitely expensive to God. That is what I mean by grace in the fullness of its meaning. Anyone who is prone to use grace as a license for irresponsible, sinful behavior surely does not appreciate the infinite price God paid to give us His grace. But anyone who tends to use legalism as a hedge against license just as surely forgets that grace cannot be earned by our behavior.

All of us need to diligently apply ourselves to learning to live under the reign of God’s transforming grace. Then love, liberty, and the law will take their proper places in our lives, and we will avoid the swamplands of both legalism and license.