This post will be twice as long as usual because of the scope of the struggle and who it affects.
I used to be a legalist. It comes from my perfectionist personality and my spiritual heritage of being from a group who loved their reputation as “People of the Book”. When you're a legalist, you learn to esteem knowledge with great sincerity and enthusiasm. However, legalists tend to believe the more they know the stronger they are in their faith. They subtly trust in head-knowledge rather than heart-faith (not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not the same thing). My faith was in what I knew, not what I trusted in. (Btw, a legalist will readily object to what I am saying and accuse me of disrespecting God’s Word. If you’re doing that right now, the alarm sirens going off in your head are about YOU, not about me.)
Two things helped my knowledge become actual faith by making the leap from my head to my heart.
The first came when I met a severely mentally handicapped young man. I don't even remember his name or the circumstance of our meeting. I just remember that he talked about how much he loved God, how'd he given his life to him, and how he loved living every day for him. That really bugged the snot out of me. That kid had something I had not yet experienced, and that was beyond my ability to understand. This kid could barely speak, let alone understand the Christian snob languages of Greek and Hebrew. In fact, he couldn't read at all! All he could do was listen to what he was taught and believe it.
It forced me to be honest with myself: I didn't love God so much as I knew He was Sovereign and gonna get His way anyhow, so I didn't have a lot of choices but to do what He said. Doing the right things were my defense, not actually loving Him. I figured a lot of people "loved" Him and yet weren't gonna be in Heaven.
The second came when I was studying a rabbinical commentary (like any good MacArthurite legalist – or disciple of Rob Bell! Ha!) and read the footnotes on the story of Abraham and Isaac. I'd always thought that God had flatly ordered Abraham and that he had no choice but to offer Isaac. After all, God was sovereign. Abraham had to obey or he was toast. "Take your son..." Yeah, let him be the toast instead.
Then I learned about a little participle in the Hebrew: na'. When na' is added to the imperative command in the Hebrew, it "softens the command to an entreaty" (The JPS Torah Commentary on Genesis, 1989, page 151). It makes it a request between friends. "Abraham had absolute freedom of choice. Should he refuse, he would not incur any guilt" (ibid). So it hit me that a hero of the faith actually demonstrated trust because of the relationship rather than the fear of punishment. Wow. And had Abraham chosen not to offer the boy, God would not have counted it against him as guilt.
I heard a guy say once that most people will miss Heaven by 18 inches - the distance from the brain to the heart - but it was only then that I understood it. Strange that a character from the OT would introduce a student of the NT to grace.
I'm not discounting "fearing" God. One of my favorite scenes in the movie Evan Almighty is when God (Morgan Freeman) shows up in the car Evan's in and Evan (Jim Carrey) jerks and screams in terror. God laughs and says, "It's okay, son, that's the beginning of wisdom”. :)
The thing is, under the New Testament, God calls us "friend." Who fears a friend? Remember this verse?
John 15:15 - "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you."
Friend. God is still sovereign, but I actually like Him - no, make that LOVE Him - and while I still respect God extremely and profoundly, I don't live and act out of fear of Him. Maybe that's what the Bible means when it says:
1 John 4:18 - "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love."
I think I really like being a Christ-follower. And I love that I don't hafta be fearful to be one, nor do I hafta fear God or what He wants from me. In fact, it's not scary at all anymore.
