An Article about Legalism (a good read)

Just ran across this link by accident. It's pretty good food for thought, IMO.

http://randalrauser.com/2014/01/the...ther-favorite-examples-of-christian-legalism/

JCFantasy23 said:

Interesting - especially the Lutheran/Baptist joke Hadn't heard that one before.

Click to expand...

What caught my attention were the examples given of the families in the '60s and '40s who wanted to go to the theater to see the movies that were popular but wanted to keep their "upright image" so they drove into other towns to see these movies where nobody knew them.

This, too, reminds me of a lady I know. She is a Christian, and is known to have extremely strict viewpoints on many things. From what I know, she claims to be against TV because it's supposedly "ungodly", yet she watches TV programming on the Internet! I might be wrong, but this seems to be a bit hypocritical. TV programming is what it is, no matter what source is used to obtain it. Even if the content of a program may be "up to standard", if anyone claims to be against TV due to personal conviction, then they should not view it at all. Others may not see, but God does.

This is not to be confused with a person who does not have a conviction against a certain thing (such as going to the movies or watching TV) and, not wanting to offend a fellow believer who they know has such convictions, may lay it aside when in contact with the person out of respect for their personal convictions. In fact, Romans 14 addresses that type of issue as well. What this is talking about is someone who sets a personal standard or conviction for themselves, then goes against it and thinks it will hurt their "moral image" in the presence of those who know that these are their "personal standards", so they go to where others "can't see" and do it anyway.

See, it's not wrong to honestly have a conviction on a particular issue and hold to it as a strictly personal thing; that is not legalism. True legalism is just having rules for the sake of having rules because "the Christians before always did it that way" with the mindset that "anything 'new' is of the devil". In fact, there are sects in different Christian denominations that do things just this way; it's not a matter of personal conviction, but they actually come right out and say it's wrong because "they say so", and "it's the Bible" when many of these things are actually so-called "gray areas" (aside from Biblical truths) where convictions are going to differ. This is very hard for me to explain; these articles do a better job of explaining it than I do.