We received many positive responses to the article on the differences between holiness and legalism, so this question is a very good follow-up. Here are some important steps you can take.
1) Make every effort to keep (or regain) your first love. A heart aflame with love for Jesus will not quickly degenerate into legalism. Charles Finney had this to say about walking in our first love: “Show me a young convert, while his heart is warm, and the love of God glows out from his lips. What does he care for the world? Call up his attention to it, point him to its riches, its pleasures, or its honors, and try to engage him in their pursuit, and he loathes the thought.” When we are deeply in love with Jesus, our obedience will not be that of rote and ritual. Instead, we will love what He loves and hate what He hates.
2) Live a life of thanksgiving and praise, and be a worshiper, not a murmurer or a complainer. This will help you to keep your focus in the right place, looking upward with gratitude as opposed to outward with grumbling. In fact, a liberated believer will be overflowing with thanksgiving; a legalist primarily thanks God that he is not like other people, sinful and unclean! (See Luke 18:9-14, where Jesus spoke a parable “to some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else. . . .”) It is one thing to be holy; it is another thing to be a hypocrite.
3) Be very conscious of your own sins and shortcomings, always looking to remove the beam from your own eye before you point out the speck in the eye of your brother or sister (Matt 7:1-5). Before we go to correct others, we should examine ourselves first, remembering how much mercy God has had (and continues to have) on us.
4) Give yourself to private prayer for those with whom you differ – and for those you don’t particularly like. This will produce in you a genuine desire to see them blessed and lifted up as opposed to a fleshly, immature desire to see them brought down or hurt. You won’t become critical of them if you spend quality time interceding on their behalf.
5) Learn to appreciate the beauty of holiness, recognizing it is as one of the most wonderful aspects of our eternal destiny and as something marked by the very character of Jesus. This way, you won’t be able to reduce holiness to a mere system of laws and regulations. You will embrace holiness as a wonderful, pure way of life.
6) Be quick to recognize narrow judgmentalism arising in any area of your life, such as negatively judging other congregations that don’t worship exactly the way yours does, or becoming totally exclusive in what you are open to spiritually, taking in teaching material only from those within your own small camp, as if the rest of the Body was somehow sub-par and had nothing to offer you. Don’t fall into this trap!
7) Never use the Bible as a weapon against other believers. Avoid bashing people with scripture quotes allegedly backing up your position in the name of, “My Bible says . . . !” This is a common trait of legalists, since the Bible for them is often more a textbook to be used than a living Word to be imbibed and embraced. By all means speak the Word and share the Word and quote the Word to other believers, but let us use it properly.
8) Finally, be careful not to compromise your own convictions. If the Lord has laid something on your heart, be faithful to live that out, whether or not others understand. (Conversely, if this is something personal between you and the Lord, don’t judge others if they don’t live like you.) And if you see something clearly stated in the Scriptures, and after study and prayer and humble interaction with others you cannot get away from it, then stand firm, regardless of pressure or judgment, counting it a privilege to honor the One who gave so much for you and for me.
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