The Way of Love Triumphs over Legalism – A Manifesto

Thank you, blessed Holy Spirit, for releasing us from systems of religion, from striving, from mere morality, and from all forms of legalism.

“Legalism” is when we live under law and not under the expansive, free love of God’s grace.

Legalism is represented in the Bible by people like the Pharisees, the Romans 7 man, Paul before his conversion, the Judaizers of Galatians, and many others.

Fundamental to legalism is the idea that we can work our way into God’s favor, rather than receiving the free gift of God’s love. You could also call this “works-based salvation,” where, in our pride, we think we can save ourselves.

But legalism also comes in other forms.

It can crop up when we are the lawmakers, imposing laws that simply don’t come from God.

Conversely, the one who knows God’s grace but turns it into an excuse for sin can be a legalist, because he too is the lawmaker, imposing his own parameters of morality, even though they may be very loose.

Legalism can also crop up when we interact with God’s word without God’s presence, meaning that we regard the Scripture as a dead letter, and not the voice of a living God (we will discuss this more below).

But most fundamental to the legalistic heart is this: a desire to control.

The legalist has a basic desire to control others, and oftentimes to control self. The legalist needs to control and be controlled by rules because he has not yet been compelled by Love.

This desire to control can be felt in all sorts of people, and it can be corrosive in churches, families, communities, and workplaces. Thankfully, Jesus gives us the way out, and He wants us to shift the atmosphere in our churches, families, communities, and workplaces, so that love and grace disperse the spirit of control.

Praise You for freedom from all forms of legalism, precious Lord Jesus! O how we desire to walk in Your “more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31).

The following three headings will describe the way of God’s love – hopefully in such a way that we can use it as an “escape plan” from the bondage of legalism.

The way of love starts with…

GOD’S INITIATIATIVE

God’s initiative, God’s power. You, Jesus, set Your affection on the needy one. We love because You first loved us (1 John 4:19).

This is such an important revelation, because we can always come back to the startling, beautiful fact of God’s initiative. God initiates salvation, and it causes us to say, “Where did that come from?!” It causes us to wonder, to behold, to stand in awe, to be awestruck, and to have our lives changed.

And God will always continue to move in the humble heart – all throughout the Christ-following life. So there is an endless store of riches in God’s first loving us. He will continue to “first love” us, and we can count on His surprises, His answers, being beyond our expectations. Glorious King!

OUR CAPTIVATION

The way of love then goes from God’s initiation to our captivation. Because Jesus first loved us, we love Him (1 John 4:19). We are now captivated by a love we have never known before – true love, unconditional love, manifested love, demonstrated love, Cross, Resurrection, and Pentecost Love.

So we go from God’s initiation to our captivation – but nowhere has MERE MORALITY been a driving factor. “Moral improvement” is not a motivator, and it is not a goal.

In legal religion, moral improvement is THE motivator and THE goal. This only produces death and blasphemy of the living God. (This is described in Romans 7, for example.) It is important to realize that this is an affront to the very heart and nature of God. It has NOTHING to do with God Himself, who is burning Love. 

In the realm of captivation, the motivator AND the goal is the sheer beauty of Jesus. He is absolutely shocking and astounding. And beholding Him fills us with radiance, with pulsing happiness, and with the divine nature itself (see Psalm 34:5, 1 Peter 1:8, and 2 Peter 1:4).

It is in the realm of being captivated by God’s beauty – and only in this realm – that we can hear God’s commands as sheer bliss, and our happy choice. The love of Christ does not allow us to hear God’s truths as mere law, or things we can use to coerce, correct, and compare.

This is why Jesus Himself, in the Sermon on the Mount, SITS DOWN IN FRONT OF US before we can even hear what He says (Matthew 5:1–2). We must see Christ sitting down before us, granting us His gracious presence, being our Friend, before the commands of this sermon come forth as the melting voice of the living God.

This is also why God says, “I am the Lord YOUR GOD, who has brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:2), BEFORE we can even hear the gracious 10 commandments. Relationship and redemption proceed a true hearing of God’s voice, as God’s voice is always bestowed in grace.

So it is vital that we hear even the commands, truths, and directives of God (things that people often weaponize for legalistic death) as just a part of our CAPTIVATION and awe in the presence of such a Lover of our souls. Many Scriptures trumpet forth this reality:

Psalm 17:2 “Let my vindication come forth from Your presence”

John 14:15 “If you love Me, keep My commandments.”

1 John 5:3 “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”

Matthew 11:30 “For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

There is also a hint here for how to read the Scriptures. God’s love and presence comes first, THEN comes the hearing of the Word.

INTEGRATION

Finally comes integration, where what we have learned as God first loved us (initiation) and we began to truly love (captivation) is now dispersed into all corners of our life (see 1 John 4:20–21).

Here again, though, morality is neither the motivator nor the end game. Rather, the beauty of Jesus is the thing propelling us toward an all-of-life integration of truth. The beauty of Jesus propels us to see every aspect of life as engulfed in God’s love, and to COMPLETELY ABOLISH any sacred-profane distinction in our lives.

The stage of integration is where God’s movement and our captivation by His beauty now seep out in our workplace, our homes, our communities, our churches. And this happens like the radiation of light, not like a worker who wants to fix things.

The motivating factor in integration is the all-consuming beauty of God, and the goal of this integration is a reckless abandon to the all-consuming beauty of God, ending in…heaven.