the most common form of legalism is where we add legislation to God's law and treat it as if

it were divine law. When Jesus reputed the people this way saying, you teach human traditions

as if they were the Word of God. Now that's a very dangerous thing because what happens then is

that men presumptuously and arrogantly usurp the authority of God himself and where God has left

men free, men put other men in chains. As you and I pursue holiness and have a zeal for righteousness,

we must be careful not to, as Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, teach his doctrine the commandments of men.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham and thank you for joining us today for renewing your mind.

If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you may at some point or another be accused

of being a legalist and we know that's a bad thing, but what exactly does that mean?

And how do we fall into that era? From his series, Building a Christian Conscience Today,

our seesprul walks us through and warns us of the legalist distortion. Here's Dr. Sproul.

You know, Jesus tells us that broad is the way and why does the gate that leads to destruction

and that there are many who travel on that way? But our Lord says narrow is the way and straight

is the gate that leads to life and few there are who find it. We remember that in the first century

Christians were not first called Christians, but they were first called people of the way.

That's not the same as being narrow-minded or brittle or rigid, but they did have a clear focus

of walking the razor's edge of godliness and of holiness. Now rather than use the graph as we did

in the first session to refer to evil on one side and good on the other, let's look at it from

a different perspective. Let's recall and understand that we can move away from the track that

god is calling us to walk and we can get lost either to the left or to the right. We can

err in either direction. We can send by moving to either pole of the continuum, by moving into

extreme positions on either side, too liberal, too conservative, to whatever. Now the twin

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