M a n ’s D o g m a o r G o d ’s D o c t r i n e ?

Legalism vs. Grace

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sing the words, “Grace” and “Legalism” in the same sentence is a paradox. When speaking of
true Christianity, these two words seemingly should not be used together yet unfortunately, in
these contemporary times we live in, there are still a number of Christian churches that teach
about grace but continue to engage in legalistic practices.

When speaking of “Grace” in a biblical sense, it is defined as the “free and unmerited favor or
beneficence of God”. We learn that grace is given to us freely, without conditions and without limitations.
We learn that grace is absolute. There is nothing we can do to earn it. We can only receive it, as the gift
of God, wholly and generously provided through the sacrifice of God’s precious Son, Jesus who gave His
life in ransom for us. When we accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts as Savior and received Him as Lord
of our lives, He entered in to sup with us not because of anything we could have or would have done, but
because of what He did for us over 2000 years ago! His Word tells us in Ephesians 2, vs. 8-9, “For it is
by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by
works, so that no one can boast.” Salvation can neither be earned through good works or generous giving,
not even through pious living! Rather God says, “Repent…” as in forsake your sins, turn away from evil,
and be sorry for what you’ve done. He promises to take care of the rest. He has provided redemption,
justification and sanctification. All we need to do is receive it as a gift. Grace says there is nothing, no
good nor sufficiency nor virtue that can merit or earn God’s act of kindness toward us. Only through His
steadfast love and undeserved favor can we find and receive grace.

Legalism, on the other hand, is defined as a strict, literal adherence to the law or to a particular
code, as of religion or morality. Legalism conditions us to think that only through our own seemingly
good works and efforts can we attain God’s pleasure. Someone wrote, “Though legalism has several
different forms, all of them flow from the same source, namely, religion without relationship,
emphasizing standards more than the Savior. To an unsaved person the legalist preaches justification by
works, saying, "You're a wicked sinner, and you need to get rid of all your filthy habits if you want the
Lord to accept you." There is no grace in this message, no exalting of the life-changing , sin-cleansing
power of the blood of Jesus, no clear proclamation of mercy. The declaration of God's love expressed
through the cross is muffled--if it is even heard at all. Consequently, the proof of the new birth is seen
almost entirely in what someone no longer does.”

The Scriptures tell us that God’s people perish for lack of wisdom. The opposite of wisdom is
foolishness and that is what legalism is. Legalism is foolish behavior masquerading as religion. What
wisdom is shown in a teaching that purports to be Scriptural yet keeps persons bound to standards they
cannot possibly reach nor fulfill?

MY EXPERIENCE

I
n relation to this topic, I would like to share my own personal experience. I am no stranger to
legalism as it is the system I “grew up” with in my formative years in the Lord. As a person who
embraced Christianity at an early age, I grew up with a misguided idea of what it meant to be a
follower of Jesus. From the age of 10 or 11, I accompanied my grandmother to her church on Sundays.
She attended a very small and extremely strict Spanish-speaking Christian church. The brethren there
were very loving and very sincere in their efforts to convert me and as the years progressed, the seed of
the gospel was sown in my heart. Every Sunday during Bible class, the teacher would ask me if I wanted
to accept Jesus into my heart. Every Sunday I would tell her, “No.” as I held the traditional religious
beliefs of my mom and dad. I was young and had not learned about grace and despite the teacher’s best
efforts to explain it; I just couldn’t grasp the concept of being “born-again”. As many people still believe
to this day, my thought was that I needed to do good works and/or give up certain things in order to please
the Lord. So at the age of 15 I began to think about making what I considered, at the time, a radical and
life-altering decision to “forsake” those things that did not please God in order to serve the Him, as He
required.

As time went on, I developed a profound love for the Lord and I knew I wanted to serve Him
with all my heart. At the age of 16, I made a decision to “give up the world”. I truly thought at the time
that that was how you became a Christian. I’d always felt God was calling me to Himself and although I
was ignorant of many things at the time, He made a way for me to begin to understand what the new birth
was all about. A few months before I asked Jesus into my heart, I read a book on the subject written by an
elderly preacher named John R. Rice. The book explained in simple terms what it meant to be born again
and on February 16, 1979; I was ready for that experience. I was visiting Beulah Christian Church in the
Bronx on a Friday night. The young people were celebrating “Youth Week” and a brother named Freddy
Marchi was preaching. When the sermon ended, I responded to the altar call and gave my heart to Christ.
That night I became a new creation and I don’t doubt for a moment that on that momentous night, so
many years ago, I was truly born-again.

At that moment, I knew I was a Christian but as a new believer and seeking to follow the
teachings of my church, my notion was that to please the Lord, I had to earnestly maintain myself
separate from the “things of this world”. This to me meant that I needed to give up my pants, take off my
earrings, stop cutting my hair, not wear any make-up, stop going to the movies, etc. All these things were
now considered “taboo” and if I practiced them, according to this church’s teaching, I would be “in sin”
before the Lord. Because much of this dogma was backed up with selected Scripture verses, you just did

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not question them. I never considered that this could be a man-made doctrine. I was still young and
ignorant of the Scriptures, so as many others before me, there began my journey on the straight and
narrow path or as they called it, “La Senda Antigua” (“The Highway to Holiness”).

As the years passed, however, I began to find it increasingly difficult to serve the Lord for fear of
God’s displeasure at every little thing I did wrong. The beliefs of this church were so prominent in my
mind that I suffered enormously every time I felt “convicted” of a sin. Whether or not something was
scripturally wrong, if my church taught against it, it was wrong and it was considered sinful. It pains me
to recall how many times the young people in our church were “threatened with prophetic utterances of
doom”. Some were told, “God is going to destroy you if you don’t do this or
that!” Some shrugged it off; some continued in their “sins”, others like me tried harder to please the Lord.
Although, I was always a little wary of these nay Sayers, the fact that they “spoke for God” gave them
certain credibility in my eyes. One thing is certain, though, none of the young people who were
prophetically destined to die ever did.
At the time as a young believer and still very ignorant of the Scriptures and its truths, I didn’t
realize that our enemy, satan was using legalistic dogma to keep me bound. To further define what I
experienced, let me just detail some of the things I believed back then:

“PRAYER & SCRIPTURE READING”:

Being a Spiritual Christian meant that you were expected to pray at least an hour or more a day,
on your knees. My own efforts to pray and read the Word were disastrous. There were constant feelings
of failure, oppression and distress because I felt I never prayed or read the Scriptures enough to please the
Lord. I just couldn’t stay on my knees more than a few minutes at a time and how many times did I not
pray or read the Bible at all for days at a time, because I felt so defeated at my lack of desire for this
intimacy with God. “How can you be a Christian and not like to pray? I knew prayer was an extremely
important aspect of a believer’s daily walk with God. I also knew it was never meant to be a burden but a
delight, but it wasn’t a delight for me. Instead, it felt more like a chore and I felt guilty at my weak and
sporadic efforts to develop this discipline in my life. “Every Christian needs to have a daily
communication with God. There is something definitely wrong with you.” and so on and so on and so on.
I’d hear this like a battering ram in my head over and over again. The mental oppression I experienced
from entertaining the devil’s lies was horrendous and unbearable at times.

“FASTING”:

A fast (without food or water) was to begin at 6 am and last till 6 pm, otherwise it was not
considered valid. If you didn’t begin your fast at that hour of the morning then you were wasting your
time. As you can well imagine, fasting was not one of my favorite activities as beginning a fast at
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daybreak meant you had to get up well before then and prepare yourself. I felt horrible that I couldn’t
make this sacrifice as often as I was expected too. Again I felt like a failure. Defeatism is the enemy’s
modus operandi.

“THE BAPTISM IN THE HOLY SPIRIT”:

You were expected to seek the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” complete with the evidence of
speaking in tongues and hyper kinetic bodily movements. It took four long years from my conversion for
me to be “baptized in the Spirit” and for all that time, I lived under a spirit of self-condemnation,
convinced that I had done something wrong; that somehow I was walking in disobedience because God
had not blessed me with the Baptism. I did not believe that I was “Spirit-filled” prior to that experience.

“CHURCH ATTENDANCE”:

You were expected to attend every service, even if that meant going to church 7 days a week.
Attending every service was mandatory. If you missed a service, your walk with God was probably weak
and you were becoming lukewarm or God forbid, even cold!

CONSEQUENCES OF LEGALISM:

I
did not know it at the time but my journey through legalism was creating bondages in my life that
to this day I still struggle to free myself from. Denominational legalism creates constraints on the
freedom of God’s people. It places barriers between one group of Christians and another, solely
based on differences in their teaching when, in fact, our basic declaration of faith is the same. We believe
that Jesus went to Calvary and died as a sacrifice for our sin. We believe that the precious Blood He shed
on that cross provides redemption. We believe that He arose on the third day to give us new and eternal
life in Him.

For many years, I studied the subject of legalism and came to the conclusion that
denominationalism with the legalism that it brings does divide the Body of Christ and destroys the unity
of the Spirit that God so desires of His people. We are One Body, created for service to our Master. We
should be working together for the furtherance of God’s kingdom but instead we’ve allowed ourselves to
become a factious and egotistical society of religious people who think we’re more righteous and pious
than the next person. We judge when we should not judge our precious brother or sister who was bought
with the same precious Blood of God’s Son.

As a clarification, I am not talking about Ecumenism, which is the uniting of different religious
faiths. I am talking about coming together as true believers in Christ. What God desires of us in

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Ephesians 4. We should be completely humble and gentle, patient, bearing with one another in love 1.
Making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 2 A true Christian is
committed to this one faith3 and obedient to God’s Word. A true Christian seeks holiness not by
performing rituals but by living a life that seeks God while He may be found and calls upon Him while
He is near. A true Christian will strive to follow the mandate to share the Good News of God’s kingdom
to a lost and dying world but will not keep a tally of how many souls he has won. Remember we are only
the Sowers of His message. God is the One who provides the growth.

As for me, I lived too many years under legalistic teaching. It took 8 years before I felt that I had
truly made a commitment to the Lord and it was only after I decided to make a sincere dedication to
prayer that I began to see changes in my life. Around this time, I also met a couple, both of whom God
used to show me many spiritual truths in His Word that I had not yet been exposed to. With them, I
learned not to judge my fellow brethren solely on appearance or denomination. I learned to fellowship
with other Christians in other churches that were not exactly like mine. They taught me about spiritual
warfare and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I learned that God loves me no matter what. I learned the true
meaning of grace and how humbling it was to experience God’s mercy in the midst of my worse instances
of self-commiseration.

I am no longer in that system. In 2000, I believe God led me to seek a church home where I can
rear my children without fear of legalistic dogma. The freedom in Christ that the Scriptures teach about is
what I long to experience for myself and for my children. To be honest, I am still struggling with many of
these beliefs, that is how ingrained they were in me. My head may tell me one thing, but at times my
heart will say something else. It’s like I’m in a constant tug of war. I can relate to what the Apostle Paul
said in Romans 7, “18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the
desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the
evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who
do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. 21 So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is
right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23 but I see another law at work in
the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of
sin at work within my members. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of
death? 25 Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to
God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

Jeanette Lockerbie wrote this in relation to these verses in Romans 7, “A wise woman once said,
“The person I have the most trouble with is the person I see in my mirror every day.” Surely this is an
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Ephesians 4: 2
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Ephesians 4: 3
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Ephesians 4: 4-5
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honest admission. What Christian has not sincerely grieved over his or her own spiritual shortcomings;
over “doing those things I ought to have done”. No follower of Christ was ever more acutely conscious
of this very trait and tendency than the Apostle Paul. We might take comfort from this thought. But to
allow ourselves to be trapped in Satan’s snare – wallowing in despair – is to disparage the limitless,
liberating grace of God. Let us then not linger in this valley of spiritual desolation. There is a way to get
rid of “troublesome you,” or “troublesome me.” The cry, “Who will rescue me? (Vs 24) echoes to the
very throne of God. The reply ringing with triumphant deliverance and assurance echoes to our very ears.
“Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8:1

IN CONCLUSION:

L
et us not forget that the message of Jesus is grace and more grace. His love He freely give us,
undeserving as we are and we should not take advantage of His mercy and grace. Let us not
judge our fellow brothers and sisters who choose to remain in these churches but let us pray
that they will seek the Word and obey it. Let us not take on an attitude of pride for this does not please
the Lord either but let us humbly serve our Master. Do not impose your man-made beliefs, opinions or
rhetoric on anyone but instead rightly divide the Word of Truth and share only that, which is valid and
scriptural. Mostly though strive to have a sense of true conviction of what is right and wrong according
to God’s Word by reading, studying and meditating on its truths every day.

Personally, I have tired of trying to live my life to achieve what I know now is certain men’s
interpretations of Biblical truths. There are still bondages I need to be freed from but I’ve come to
the conclusion that it’s only as you examine yourself through prayer and study of the Scriptures
and that you begin to recognize what those bondages are in your life that the true process of
liberation can begin. I certainly don’t want to remain in bondage. I just want to serve the Lord freely,
obey His Word and raise my children soundly according to God’s Word. Let us break the hold legalism
has on us and let us live the life of grace that God has apportioned for us.

Amen.
Written by Margie Jimenez