Grace over guilt: Dead to condemnation, free to live in Christ

As I read through Acts with my Ladies Bible Study group last year, and especially as I have been reading through Galatians for my blog, it has been both saddening and comforting to see that those Gentile believers were plagued with some of the exact same problems that new Testament Christians face today.

Chief among those being, a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of the law and its role in our lives.

Through the law, the gentiles had come to realize their sin, and through the disciples’ preaching of Christ, they had believed unto salvation. However, certain Jews, who themselves had no understanding of the gospel of grace through faith, felt these gentile believers needed to add works of the law to their faith in order to be saved. They felt they should be circumcised.

They confused these new believers.

Paul rightly condemns these Jews and rebukes the Galatian believers for being so easily swayed by them after he had very clearly presented to them that salvation is through faith in Christ alone.

His entire letter to the Galatians is his attempt, even though exasperated by their foolishness, to patiently and lovingly reteach them that salvation is by grace, not works – through faith, not the law.

Still Confused About the Law

Who would’ve thought that almost 2000 years later, believers would still be so confused about the law.

Perhaps it is because so many of our well-meaning preachers and other church leaders are confused about it themselves.

Unlike the Judaizers of Paul’s day, they do not try to attach the law to salvation, at least not directly, but they certainly try to make outward adherence to it a requirement for our sanctification.

Let me say from that the start that God’s law is a glorious thing. We see it highly revered and exalted throughout the Old Testament, and that sentiment is carried over into the New Testament by men like the disciples and Paul and Jesus himself.

The problem came when a number of the Jews began elevating the law so much that they made it almost an idol, and in many cases were worshipping the law more than the God who wrote the law.

John MacArhtur states, “the Jews, then, had developed a theology that said men can make themselves right before God by the exercise of the law, by keeping the law.”

Much of Paul’s writing dealt with helping these Jews properly understand the new covenant that came to pass when Jesus made the ultimate and final sacrifice for our sins. He tried to help them understand that although the law was certainly important, it could not redeem them. Only Jesus could do that.

While I’d say the majority of protestant Christian preachers and evangelists seem to have a firm grasp on this teaching today regarding salvation, there are still many who try to keep us in bondage to the law regarding our sanctification.

Let me explain.

Salvation and Sanctification

I have grown up in and been part of Independent Fundamental Baptist churches for most of my life, and I will never regret that Godly heritage. It is the reason I know the Bible as well as I do. The denomination as a whole is uncompromising in its stance on the scriptures.

I was clearly taught there is only one way to salvation and that is by grace, through faith in Christ, without works. A fact for which I will be eternally grateful.

However, the problem has always been, and still is, that some leaders in the movement have tried to apply that same uncompromising, one-way only stance to the way we live our lives.

Is the plan of salvation the same for all of us? Yes, absolutely!

However, the path to sanctification is not. It is as different as each soul God created that walks it.

Yet, there are those in church leadership who have mishandled the law in order to justify their own personal opinion about how we each soul should grow closer to Christ. This is not only unBiblical, it is harmful.

It has turned off a whole generation of people not only from Christianity, but from Christ himself.

While they all seem to have a firm grasp on the fact that the law cannot redeem us, there is a key part of Paul’s teaching on the law that they seem to have missed, or perhaps just ignored.

Not only can the law not redeem us, after we have trusted Christ, it can no longer condemn us.

It was meant to show us our need for Jesus. It was never meant to transform us into being more like him. That’s the Holy Spirit’s job.

Yet, week after week, in churches all across America, people are still taught that if they obey this certain set of rules, they are godly, or at least more godly than those who don’t.

And if they don’t obey, well then it’s hellfire and brimstone for them.

What’s worse, over time, preachers adopted the ways of the New Testament Pharisees and began to add their own set of rules and opinions.

They began doling out commands on what we should wear, how to style our hair and even how we should spend our free time. These all stem from statements that are either never mentioned in the Bible, or if they are, have been taken grossly out of context.

The end result has become this never-ending, overwhelming set of laws that are impossible to keep and directly opposed to everything the Bible ever teaches on the law.

It is the epitome of the enslavement Paul rails against over and over in his epistles.

Dead to the law; Free to Serve

As Paul says throughout his writings, we are to die to the law. (Romans 7:4-6; Galatians 2:19)

The passage in Romans compares our relationship to the law to a woman’s relationship to her husband. Paul says just as a woman whose husband dies is no longer bound to him, and is free to marry another, so when Jesus died, he freed us from the law. We are no longer bound to it, but are free to form a relationship with Him, thus becoming “the bride of Christ.”

What is the purpose of this new relationship? The end of verse 4 says, “that we should bring forth fruit unto God.”

Now that we have a relationship with Christ, we no longer need the law to be our “taskmaster.”

It is not that the law is no longer useful, just not in the same way it was in the past.

John Piper does an excellent job of explaining the law under the new covenant using 2 Corinthians 3 . The gist of his teaching is this, with the new covenant came a new way of using the law. He says, “We have died to the law as a means of law keeping that the veil might be lifted and we might use the law as a means of Christ-seeing and Christ-loving.”

This is the great transition that God always had planned.

With the help of our new partner in life, we are to bring forth good fruit unto God – new desires, new choices, new actions – all of which are pleasing to God and all stemming from our new relationship with Christ.

Notice, this fruit does not grow from the outside in, but from the inside out. Why? Because not only are we now joined with Jesus, we have been given the Holy Spirit of God to live within us.

That is the point of verse 6 which says, “But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.”

Another translation puts it this way: “In the past the law held us as prisoners, but our old selves died, and we were made free from the law. So now we serve God in a new way, not in the old way, with the written rules. Now we serve God in the new way, with the Spirit.”

Did you  catch that? We no longer need rules written in a law book, for now the Holy Spirit is our guide for living. He not only shows us, but helps us produce those good fruits of love, joy, peace, etc. So essentially, we are now obeying the law, even though we’ve been set free from it.

John MacArthur explains it this way, “When you become a Christian, you are set free from the law.  You’re set free in the sense that the law can no longer condemn you.  But you’re set free to serve that same law – listen now – to serve that same law, not in a perfunctory, external manner, but from deep within your heart.

We still serve the law.  In fact, we serve it better than we could before we were redeemed.  Because we serve not the letter of the law but the spirit.  We no longer are slaves to a legal set of values and rules in order to gain favor with God, but we now serve God out of love because He’s granted us salvation.”

The law by itself could never do that. Yes, it could show us what not to do, but it could never help us love, or show joy or bring us peace. In short, it could never give us what only Jesus can – God’s love and God’s grace.

Free to Offer Grace

That is what is missing in so many of our churches today, and unfortunately, in so many Christians today. I used Baptists as an example, simply because that’s what I know, but I have enough friends from other denominations to know that it is a common problem throughout all Christianity.

Even though the law can no longer condemn us, we insist on condemning others.

It’s not my intention to point fingers. It’s not just pastors and evangelists who have this problem. They got it from somewhere, and it has just trickled down through the line. I have been just as guilty of having a Pharisaical attitude about other people’s sin as anyone else.

I was fortunate to have parents who taught me to respect the pastor, but never to blindly obey him. They taught me that he was every bit as human and sinful as I was, and if I had a question about something he said or did, I needed to go to my Bible to find the answer.

Yet, even with their wise upbringing, it’s amazing how being in that kind of church atmosphere affects you.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore the church I grew up in, especially the people, but that sometimes condemning attitude that came from the leadership was hard not to pick up.

I can’t tell you how many times in my past I have caught myself judging someone because her skirt was a little too short or his hair was a little too long.

It sickened me to think that same self-righteous attitude that had turned me off of certain speakers that came through the churches I’ve been in, was present within me.

I hated it, but I have tried to learn from it, and that’s all any of us can do.

And I’m not saying that these men were all bad. The great majority of the preachers I’ve sat under were good men who loved God, and I learned much from them.

However, none of us are perfect. We all have our baggage, but God’s grace is sufficient. When his Holy Spirit sheds a light on our failures, His grace is sufficient to strengthen our weakness.

Oh, how we need His grace.

Majoring on the Minors

That is the whole point of this blog. It’s not to cast blame on a whole generation of preachers and evangelists or complain about how their sometimes pharisaical tendencies caused a lot of people a lot of grief.

That is in our past. Yes, there were some great men in our past, and through God’s power, they did some great things, but they were just men. They made mistakes and this is one of them. There’s no shame in admitting that.

The shame would be if we allowed it to continue and stayed shackled by the law.

The point of this blog is to point out, what we need to do from here. We need to get back to the basics.

This whole website is based on keeping our minds on Christ, and this is one area that has distracted Christians from Jesus for far too long.

We have spent generations majoring on the minors.

What did Jesus say when asked what was the greatest command? What was the most important thing to Him?

He didn’t spout one of the rules from the law book he had come to replace, but brought forth a new way filled with grace. “Love the lord thy God with all they heart with all thy soul and with all they strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself.”

That’s not a duty you can check off a list and be done with. That’s a lifetime goal that takes a daily yielding to the Holy Spirit and a powerful dose of God’s grace to live out.

And that is the whole point. God took away the rule book and made it inconsequential in salvation because He doesn’t want us thinking there is anything we can do to earn it. It has nothing to do with us. It is all about His grace.

Guilt over Grace

I’m not sure where so many good men got off track on this, but I wonder if it didn’t come from the best of intentions that got muddied by our human flesh. I wonder if they were so desirous to see souls saved and  lives changed that they became impatient waiting on the Holy Spirit to do his work, and thought maybe they’d help him out a bit.

Instead of waiting on God’s grace, they tried to speed up the process with condemnation and human guilt.

Here’s a personal account that helps illustrate this point and some of the consequences that have come from using guilt over grace.

For most of my childhood and the early part of my adult life I struggled with assurance of my salvation. Now part of that, I confess has to do with my tendency to worry and the perfectionist part of my personality; however another part of it, I am convinced, came from this concept of guilt over grace.

I was saved at about five years old. Another reason I can thank the Lord for my anxiety I guess, because at the time, I was scared to death of bigfoot.

My mom came into my bedroom and told me that I didn’t have to constantly be afraid of things, that Jesus loved me and I could trust Him to take care of me.

She explained the plan of salvation and that night I accepted Christ.

I have no doubt, now, that it was at that moment that I became a Christian. I know me. I know how deeply I always felt things and thought things, and understood things, even as a young child. But I wasn’t always so sure…

Although it’s rare to have a revival service that lasts the entire week these days, it was commonplace back in the 70s. Our church must have had at least two or three a year, and we were there pretty much every night.

During those years, I heard lots of amazing music, learned a lot about the Bible and enjoyed more than one good puppet show. But there was always one part of the service I dreaded – the invitation.

Looking back now, it seems it was almost the speakers’ intention to get you to doubt your salvation. Every altar call seemed peppered with the same phrases “if you can’t remember a time”, “if you don’t have an exact date”, “did you really mean what you said?”

Now granted,  I was young, and it hadn’t been that long since I had been saved. But I was barely five years old. I remembered certain parts of it, but I didn’t remember everything, and I certainly couldn’t remember exactly what I said. That bothered me to no end.

It bothered me so much, that in the years that followed, I would ask Christ to save me numerous times because “what if I didn’t mean it enough the first time.” What does that even mean? As if Jesus has some meter stick up there measuring the sincerity of your prayer. Seriously? Can you imagine what that does to a girl who is already desperate to achieve perfection.

The worst part is, who does that put the burden of salvation on? Me! Five-year-old, eight-year-old, 12-year-old little me.

Do you see the problem with that?

I never did, not until God sent an evangelist who actually got it right. He said the problem with all those phrases that I had heard all of my life was, they make salvation something we have to achieve instead of the free gift God meant it to be.

He so lovingly explained that once we accept Jesus’ payment for our sins and ask Him to forgive us of those sins, that’s it. Our part is over – done. The rest is up to Him because we are not the ones who do the saving – He is!

So it was no longer a case of did I say the right thing or have the right level of belief, but do I trust Jesus to do what I ask Him to do.

WHHEEWWW!!!

Finally, after all those years, somebody who understood that salvation is by grace not guilt.

The exact same thing can be said of our sanctification.

You can guilt someone into following a bunch of external rules and never have any long-term effect on their heart.

It takes the amazing grace of God through the work of the Holy Spirit to change a habit, an attitude, a life.

That’s the problem with making the law your guidebook for sanctification. Disobey the law and you’re left with guilt. Disobey the spirit and your left with grace. God’s grace, not just for you but for others.

When all you’re depending on is your own ability to keep some rules in order to please God, you are continually disappointed. There is no doubt that you will always fail to be perfect, and when you fail your left with nothing but guilt and disappointment. The law has no ability to make you better.

However, when you are depending on the Spirit for help, though your flesh will still inevitably fail, there is always  hope. All it takes is a sincere confession, a turning back from your own desires to the Spirit’s desires for you, and you are on your way again to becoming more like Christ.

How glorious! How wonderful! How amazing! Amazing grace!

Even more wonderful than what grace does for us though, is what it does to our attitude toward other people. Once we experience the enormity of God’s love for us and the reality of his grace – all he’s given us that we truly don’t deserve – an amazing thing happens. We begin to stop pointing fingers at others and start lending them a hand.

We become a whole lot more interested in working on the beam in our own eye, than the mote in our neighbor’s. (Matt. 7:3-5)

It’s not that we should become soft on sin. Jesus hated sin.

There is certainly a proper time and place for that, but that’s a whole other post.

The point of this post is that it’s time for Christians to get a proper understanding of the difference between the law and the gospel, between condemnation and sanctification, between guilt and grace.

Let Jesus Be Your Guide to Grace

Jesus knew the difference.

I never see in the Bible where Jesus preached a message on what people should wear when they came to listen and learn from Him.

Nor do I see him telling people to leave him because their hair was scruffy or their language was poor.

No, Jesus never majored on the minors. He didn’t have time.

He spoke the message God gave Him, and let God do the rest.

However, I do recall a time, when a large group of people who thought they were pretty righteous brought a proven sinner before Jesus and practically begged Him to mete out the fullest extent of the law upon her.

There was no doubt she was guilty. They had caught her in the act of adultery and thrown her before his feet.

There was no doubt what her punishment should be – stoned to death, according to the law.

These self-righteous morons actually thought they were going to get one over on Jesus. They thought they had him in a catch-22.

Oh how the scribes and Pharisees loved their law and especially the piety it brought them to obey it. But this Jesus fellow was teaching that he was going to be the fulfillment of this law, as in, after Him it would not exist in the same way, and they hated him for it.

So they set about to catch him in a trap. They knew that while he had always perfectly obeyed the law, unlike them, he showed sinners love and compassion. They felt with the adulteress woman, they had given him a no-win situation.

But in a simple command, Jesus showed them exactly what he thought of their hollow Christianity, their blind devotion to external rules with no inner change of heart.

He first silently wrote on the ground as if ignoring them and as they continued to ask, he finally calmly advised, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Now who was caught in a trap?

In one sentence Jesus showed the difference between the stiffness of the law and the grace of the gospel.

But that’s not the ending of the story.

As one by one, the forsaken dropped their stones and walked away, Jesus stood alone with the woman.

What would He do?

He had saved her from death, but she was still a sinner.

Would he berate her for her wickedness, destroy her self-worth, make her wear a scarlet A?

No, he simply asked her a question. “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no man condemned you?”

“No man, Lord,” was her reply.

His sentence – “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”

No condemnation, only grace.

We are never told if this woman did as Jesus asked, or went back to her life of sin, but that’s really not the point.

The point is, Jesus gave her the choice.

He did not try to guilt her into making the choice he wanted her to make.

Instead, he showed her the truest, the purest form of love and grace.

She knew she was guilty, and she was well aware of the punishment she deserved.

Yet, instead of giving her what she deserved and condemning her to death, Jesus gave her a pardon and a choice.

A choice she would have never had, if the pharisees had gotten their way.

Now tell me honestly, how many of you think she did as Jesus asked that day, and every day for the rest of her life.

I don’t know about you, but I’m planning on seeing her in heaven some day.

Why?

Because grace is a powerful thing my friends. A beautiful thing. A supernatural thing that we could never hope to have the goodness to extend on our own.

But praise be to God, He gives us grace to bestow His grace to others.

When we look to God’s law, not as a set of rules we must follow or be punished, but as a reminder of the punishment we deserved, and the grace our God has shown us instead – only then are we able to show the love he’s shown us. And only then, are we willing to throw down our stones of condemnation and offer others a hand of grace.