We overemphasize God's law when we think that we have to please God to win his favor.

But we under-emphasize the law if we think that God doesn't care if we follow it.

Legalism on one hand, anti-nominism on the other.

That's next on renewing your mind.

This week Dr. Sinclair Ferguson has helped us bring the gospel into sharp focus.

He's done that through the lens of an 18th century church dispute.

12 Scottish pastors read a book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity.

It caused them to reconsider the nature of salvation itself.

Those 12 marrow men, as they came to be known, did a great service to the church in their

day and to us three centuries later.

We've been talking recently about these problems, endemic problems really in the Christian

life of legalism and anti-nominism.

One of the things we've been seeing so interestingly is that legalism is the basic problem.

It was what was injected into the relationship between the Lord and Eve and the Garden

of Eden by the serpent who very subtly turns her into a legalist, distorts the commandments

of God and gives her the sense that God is not a gracious God, giving kind commandments

for their benefit, but God is a kind of jealous person who doesn't want any joy, any happiness,

wants to restrict their lives.

Then the reaction that sets in of anti-nominism and in our study we were seeing last time, how

there is throughout the history of the Christian church a sense in the masters of the spiritual

life, that anti-nominians are never fully and finally delivered from legalism.

Only the grace of God in the gospel can deliver us from legalism, but in many ways the problem

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