Can being a perfectionist be bad? Why do we try to sugar-coat God’s Word? This devotion looks at what God’s Word says about rewriting Scriptures.
Nuggets
- Heresies are opinions that are different from what the church believes.
- Legalism is where the proponents advocate strict adherence to God’s laws.
- Antinomianism says, because faith is all that is needed for salvation, we can ignore the laws.
- Scriptures tell us that, if we try to rewrite Scriptures, we will be branded a liar.
- Believers are not distinguishable from the world if we are not bearing fruit and living no differently than non-believers.
My Ladies and I are studying First Timothy right now. The lesson had some good points that I thought we would talk about. It really got me thinking about how some are trying to rewrite Scriptures these days.
Now, this may be an instance where 2 + 2 = 5. I have warned you that sometimes my connections are only visible in my mind.
Paul wrote to Timothy about false teachers. He also wanted to encourage the younger man to live a godly life.
False Teachers
“Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared” (I Tim. 4: 1-2 ESV)
We don’t hear the term false teachers used much these days. Just because we don’t hear about it, however, doesn’t mean that we don’t have them.
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What my Ladies and I talked about was heresies. Heresies are opinions that are different from what the church believes. That is very prominent in today’s society.
In our study time today, we talked about three different heresies. They have big churchy names (that led to some interesting autocorrect wars last night!). Two of them really struck me.
Legalism
Legalism is where the proponents advocate strict adherence to God’s laws. God has laws — or commandments. I’ve been calling them guidelines.
Whatever we call them, we have to be careful. Our salvation is not tied to those laws. To gain salvation, we have to admit we are sinners, believe Jesus’ death was God’s gift to make salvation available to us, and confess that God is now our Lord of lords and King of kings.
Salvation is the gift of life through the deliverance from condemnation and sin to acceptance and holiness and changes us from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive.
- Sins are actions by humans that disobey God and break one of His reasonable, holy, and righteous laws and commandments, goes against a purpose He has for us, or follows Satan’s promptings.
- Holiness is the transcendent excellence of His nature that includes elements of purity, dedication, and commitment that lead to being set apart. Purity means possessing God’s moral character, having eliminated the stain of sin.
- Spiritual death is the spiritual separation from God that occurred as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s original sin. The spiritually alive are those who have ABCDed, so they are no longer separated from God.
The ABCDs of Salvation
If you have not become a believer in Christ, please read through the
Plan of Salvation and prayerfully consider what God is asking you to do.
A – admit our sins
B – believe His Son Jesus is our Redeemer
C – confess God as Sovereign Lord
D – demonstrate that commitment by making any changes needed in our lives to
live the way in which God has called us
The Disciple’s Job Description
Glossary
Even if we don’t expect adherence to the laws for salvation, God does expect it later. Non-believers are quick to point out when believers fail to keep God’s law. This may not be strict legalism, but can we spell perfectionists?
However, we sometimes try to adhere to laws that we’ve rewritten, especially to add things to them.
We’ve talked about the Eve Syndrome.The Eve Syndrome is when we see a law and commandment and take it to the extreme. God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit. Eve interpreted that as don’t touch.
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We do that. We put add-ones to God’s laws. Sometimes, we do this to help keep temptation at bay.
We aren’t the only ones to do that. The Pharisees did, too. But instead of getting atta-boys from Jesus, He kept telling them they had it all wrong.
Person of Interest
What does Scripture say? “You must not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it, so that you may keep the commands of the LORD your God I am giving you” (Deut. 4: 2 CSB).
A consequence is given. “Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar” (Prov. 30: 6 ESV). Lying is a sin.
We have to be careful how we devise ways to keep from being tempted to commit the sin. This is especially true if we judge others for not following our add-ons. We aren’t supposed to judge anyway; but how are others going to know our add-ons?
Antinomianism
I know. I don’t think I pronounced that word right even one time today. I said it was a big churchy word.
Antinomianism is the opposite of legalism. It says, because faith is all that is needed for salvation, we can ignore the laws.
Faith is a gift from God that enhances the conviction that the doctrines revealed in God’s Word are true, even if we do not understand all aspects of them, a belief which impacts our lives and distinguishes us from others.
Glossary
That isn’t true, either. Remember what Jesus said? “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Mt. 5: 17-18 ESV). Unfortunately, worldview people have rewritten the laws.
Glossary
It seems like there are a lot of people who subscribe to a form of antinomianism. This is where they feel like they can keep on sinning, even after their salvation.
Now, don’t get me wrong. No one is going to be perfect in following all of God’s laws. That is why legalism doesn’t work.
We should follow God’s laws. Plus, we should repent when we break those laws.
Repentance is acknowledging our separation from God and expressing sorrow for breaking God’s laws and commandments by making the commitment to change our sinful ways to ways of righteousness through obedience.
We can’t ignore God’s laws just because we can’t keep them perfectly. It also doesn’t mean that we rewrite them to better fit into today’s society. God does not change (Jas. 1: 17), and neither has what He has asked of us.
After we ask God to be Lord of our lives, we need to live the way He wants us to live. We can’t pick and choose which sins we want to give up and which we want to keep on doing.
If we pick and choose, we make it about us, not about God’s authority. “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me’” (Mt. 28: 18 ESV). It is about Him, not us.
Making the Connections
I can see shades of both heresies in society today — but with a different slant. I can see non-believers as being legalistic. We talked previously that they expect fruit-of-the-spirit perfection.
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On the other hand, non-believers can think they don’t have to follow God’s laws after we’ve accepted the gift of salvation — because believers don’t. Have you ever heard someone say, “I can be a Christian and still [do this sin]?”
We aren’t the ones to judge whether they are believers or not. But being a believer means your lifestyle has changed.
Pastor Chad was also preaching on this. His sermon series is from the Book of James. He said a couple of things that stuck with me.
The first thing Pastor Chad said was “You can’t look into someone’s heart and see they are saved. We see Jesus through the fruit they bear and the life they live.” The second was “When our lives are undistinguishable from world around us, our faith is dead.”
Believers are not distinguishable from the world if we are not bearing fruit and living no differently than non-believers. My Ladies and I said we were concerned that so many believers may be being pulled astray because society is branding believers as cold and heartless if we do not tolerate how society is choosing to live. We are allowing God’s laws to be rewritten in society so that we fit in better.
How Do We Apply This?
It is hard to stand up for our beliefs when we are in the minority. We don’t want to lose friends, and we don’t want to make enemies.
If we are believers, we have to live the lives that God has called us to live. We have to follow His laws.
It is hard looking at ourselves sometimes, but we have to do that. “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? — unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (II Cor. 13: 5 ESV. We have to see what laws we have rewritten or agreed to a rewrite by our silence.
Most importantly, we need to ask God to show us those areas in our lives and ask for Him to change us. We can’t change on our own. He has to be the one to change us.
It is so vital that believers live a life that is different from the world. Jesus needs to find us faithful to Him when He returns. We can’t do that by rewriting or ignoring God’s laws to sugar-coat it for the society in which we live. We have to be faithful to Him.
Loving Father. Satan is fully in charge of our world today. Believers are called either to live up to fruit-of-the-spirit perfection or to sugarcoat your laws to appease those who wish to continue sinning. Lord, help us to stand firm in You Will. Help us to keep Your laws and Your commandments. Show us the areas on which we need to work. Help us grow in faith in You. Amen.
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Great thoughts, I agree that legalism and antinomialism are two areas we easily fall into when we don’t come humbly to the word and receive it as it is written. The failure to do so severely limits the impact of our witness and by extension the church. Coming to the word in arrogance to determine what is right is also a form of secular humanism.
Yes, we can go both ways. The humanism is a more modern slant. It has been interesting how yours and Tim’s sermons augmented what we had just talked about in Bible study. Everything does truly tie together — hopefully to help us witness.
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