The recent theme continues with another blogger's recent entry which I thought was worth re-posting here:
I had a great time at the Gospel Life Conference tonight.
Tullian Tchividjian preached on the Gospel and the Individual, how the gospel is both the ignition for the Christian life and also its fuel.
One idea that I found particularly interesting was this notion that both legalism and lawlessness are the same.
The Christian life is often pictured as an attempt to balance legalism and lawlessness. Too great of a focus, dependence, and emphasis on law and rules and you end up in legalism. That's one extreme. The other extreme is lawlessness, stemming from too much grace.
But that's problematic. Too much grace?
God's grace to us is so extreme, so radical, so undeserved, so ... so ... so gracious. How can you have too much grace?
What if lawlessness didn't stem from too much grace, but from a misappropriation of a law, hiding behind a law, leveraging technicalities? And isn't legalism, at its core, also a misappropriation of a law, using a law to make you feel superior to others?
This is how Pastor Tchividjian came to the conclusion that lawlessness is just another form of legalism.
If you start from the assumption that there's no such thing as too much grace, you need another way to explain lawlessness (aka licentiousness).
Addendum: I love how God works. I posted this earlier today and now tonight I run across a video from Driscoll in which he also makes the connection between legalism and lawlessness. There are no coincidences with God.
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