Satan's Endeavour To Make Christianity A Legal System

 

Now at that point things divided. There is the true foundation, the true beginning, and the meaning of the Spirit being in us, but at a point with these people, the thing divided.

They moved away from the true guidance, the true constraint, the true movement of the Spirit on to an artificial one, and their Christian lives began to become artificial.

The reason was that these Judaizers came along, always on Paul's heels to try to destroy his ministry.

They came along and said, "You must be circumcised; except you be circumcised, you cannot be saved" - bringing in again the old legal idea, and making even Christianity into something legal.

It is a persistent thing all the way along. It is one of Satan's persistent objects, not to turn us away from Christianity necessarily, but to make Christianity something which it really is not, and to turn the great blessedness, joy, life and liberty of a true Christian life into something burdensome, something difficult and hard.

It is so easy just to come to a point where, from what has been a really living and blessed experience and enjoyment of the Lord, Christianity becomes something of laws and regulations, and we begin to feel that the Christian life is a strain.

Something has happened. A twist is being given to it, and now the whole prospect is one without real joy, without real liberty.

It is a case of, "You must!" It is the big stick kind of thing. "You must, and if you do not, woe betide you!"

It is easy for anything in Christianity to become like that, so that the Christian life now has become a burden, and the work of the Lord has become a burden.

Then we are more slaves than sons. That is what the apostle is arguing in this letter: "Thou art no longer a bondservant, but a son" (4:7).

But what has brought about this change? We have begun to take on something which for us is not living; it is not for us a matter of life, it is a matter of something that we have to measure up to and try to attain, of trying to be something that we are not, and so the thing becomes a weight and a burden.

It is an artificial kind of Christianity.

But over against that, the apostle is saying this, that immediately things begin to get like that, something has gone wrong.

If ever the Christian life begins to appear like that and become something like that to you, things have gone wrong; you have ceased to move in the Spirit, you have got on to some other ground.

The Spirit is the Spirit of life and of liberty. What do we mean by life and liberty? Well, the spirit of rest - just the opposite of burdensomeness.

~T. Austin Sparks~