Legalism is a term that is used a lot today, but what is legalism?

Welcome to Grace and Truth. My name is Owen Strand and I will be your host.

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Today I want to do this. I want to

define what legalism is. And I hope that I can show you that there are four major forms of

legalism that I identify in our movement, several of them explicitly mentioned in Scripture,

and then a couple of them. We work out from our reading of

scripture, I believe. The first and most common form of legalism, which means living by a code

that you add to what the Bible teaches. If you're a legalist, you are adding to what the Bible

teaches. You are saying it is not enough that the Bible says these things,

and in terms of our era, we're in the New Covenant era, so we're under the New Testament.

It's not enough that the New Testament says this. We also have to do this. So in the most

succinct form, the legalist is an adder. You add things. You add things to what God

teaches and what God would have his people do, and you then bind the consciences of your listeners,

frequently in a church setting, and say, this is what you must do in order to please God.

And so what you end up doing, perhaps unwittingly in some cases, is that you make

yourself an equivalent authority to God himself. All of this drives us back, of course, at the outset.

We need to say this to the Word of God. The Word of God is the authority of Scripture. There's

nothing on par with the Word of God. There's nothing equivalent to the Word of God. There's no body of people who accredit the word of God. There's there's nothing equivalent to the word of God.

There's no body of people who accredit the word of God. There are no documents out there that have

equal weight with scripture or that prove that scripture is scripture. There's no person out there

on earth who speaks with the same authority as the word of God, in whatever they say, in their pronouncements.

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