Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Avoiding Legalism: The Source of Our Justification

I read a great post on GirlTalk today that speaks directly to one of my New Year's resolutions: managing my time better. I know I needed to hear this--perhaps it will be an encouragement and a challenge to you as well. Carolyn Mahaney writes about the need to preach the gospel to ourselves as we seek to grow in godliness. Here's an excerpt (emphasis mine) to entice you to read the complete post:
...whenever I become aware of areas where I need to grow and change--stewardship of time being one of them--I’m susceptible to legalism. (...Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God.)

Here’s how legalism can progress in my life using stewardship of time as an illustration: If I become a better time manager, I think God approves of me. I tend to approach the throne of grace with confidence. However, when I fritter away my time or give in to laziness, I can feel God disapproves. He’s not happy with me. And I often want to avoid approaching God’s throne until I get my act together. It happens subtly and can even go undetected in my life for awhile. But relating to God in this way is an egregious error.

“There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot be accepted at all.” --B.B. Warfield
I hope you'll take a minute to read the full post here.

3 comments:

Kayla said...

I am propably way behind the times but for some reason your sunday and monday posts just showed up on my computer this morning and this Wednesday post just showed up right now. I check everyone's blogs Mon-Fri a couple times a day. I wonder what is taking so long???

ANYWAY, I wanted to say how powerful that spoke to my heart. I am very guilty of going boldly to Christ when I feel I am close to Him and living in obediance but I shy away from approaching Christ (maybe even push it from my mind) when I think I have drifted or am wollowing in my sin. As if I, a lowly sinner, can hide anything from Christ or would have the power to change His Love, Grace, and Mercy on me. Thank you for calling me out on this again, even though you may not have known you were.

Amy said...

haha...nothing's wrong with your computer...I have been post-dating my stuff. sorry--didn't mean to confuse you. I started the year-in-review post last weekend but didn't finish it until yesterday, so although it was just newly posted, it was dated Sunday. Same with today's post--I started it Wednesday but saved it until I had the new years posts up first. I've just been behind with blogging this week! :)

Glad this post spoke to you. GirlTalk is one of my favorite blogs--they always have great stuff that encourages and challenges me.

Kayla said...

HA HA HA HA!!!! I am laughing out loud!!! That is too funny.