Top 99 Quotes About Legalism
#1. A sure way to have someone crushed by their doubt is to preach a sermon on how to remove your doubt.
Matt Chandler
#2. Through Jesus, you now have freedom to be the unique creation God designed you to be. You don't have to rely on anyone's opinion of you to find your worth. You are free to pursue Christ with abandon, to throw off the shackles of legalism and let God's glory shine through you.
Daniel Darling
#3. Conceit makes the way God deals with me personally the binding standard for others.
Oswald Chambers
#4. An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws
Mark A. Noll
#5. Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.
Criss Jami
#8. A new and more powerful proclamation of the law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour ... A low view of law always brings legalism into religion; a high view of law makes man a seeker after grace. Pray that the high view may prevail.
J. Gresham Machen
#9. She was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn't fit into a rigid frame.
David Brooks
#10. Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from GOD and acceptance by GOD through my obedience to GOD
C.J. Mahaney
#11. The Word and prayer are inseparable. When one engages in prayer without the Word, it can lead to mysticism; when the Word is used without prayer, it can lead to legalism, intellectualism and coldness of heart.
Richard A. Burr
#12. According to Aquinas, effort may not be the best measure of our virtue.
Jen Pollock Michel
#13. If thy meditation tends to fill thy note-book with notions, and good sayings, concerning God, and not thy heart with longing after him, and delight in him, for aught I know thy book is as much a Christian as thou (553).
Richard Baxter
#14. Legalism is adding human rules and regulations to the Bible, and judging others based on these new humanistic rules. Legalism is not taking the Bible seriously on every point. That is Christianity.
Rob Rienow
#15. Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day.
Geraldine Brooks
#16. Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.
Peter Kreeft
#17. Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.
Richard Rohr
#18. Most moms and dads think they are either the best or the worst parents in the world. Both are wrong.
Kevin DeYoung
#19. To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. In our eagerness to get rid of the legalistic doctrine of works we have thrown out the baby with the bath and gotten rid of obedience as well.
A.W. Tozer
#20. Legalism is looking to something besides Jesus Christ in order to be acceptable and clean before God.
Timothy Keller
#21. Christ didn't join in. He saw which direction the rocks were being thrown, and became a shield.
Criss Jami
#22. When there's something in the Bible that churches don't like, they call it legalism.
Leonard Ravenhill
#23. Legalism lacks the supreme sense of worship. It obeys but it does not adore.
Geerhardus Vos
#24. Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law ...
Martin Luther
#25. So many of those who take Christ into the world, whether it be it's missionaries or artists, are tied by those who look over their shoulders. There is a lot of peer pressure within churches and Christian movements to dot all the i's and cross all the t's of a precise and perfect faith.
Steve Stockman
#26. Christianity is at its purest a philosophy about a person, Jesus Christ, and at its dirtiest a philosophy about requirements and law.
Criss Jami
#27. These considerations give us some clues as to why legalism and antinomianism are, in fact, nonidentical twins that emerge from the same womb. Eve
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#29. Jesus does what legalism can never do: he gives us a new heart and a new spirit. Without
Tim Chester
#30. A low view of law always produces legalism; a high view of law makes a person a seeker after grace.
John Gresham Machen
#31. Now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant him during "the fussy, time-wasting, botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing," and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.
Philip Zaleski
#32. You see, the human creature is prone to legalism. There is nothing the devil likes more than to impose a set of legalistic rules on a person. Then when that person has a hard time keeping those rules, his confidence that God will move in his life is greatly shaken.
Dave Roberson
#33. There prevails still a subtle form of legalism which would rob the Saviour of his crown of glory, earned by the cross, and would make of him a second Moses, offering us the stones of the law instead of the life-bread of the gospel.
Geerhardus Vos
#34. Law will take over because law always carries with it a sense of security and manipulative power.
Richard J. Foster
#36. Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
Rebecca Goldstein
#37. Legalism is when we try to obtain the result of obedience by our own means and strength. It is self-righteousness, as opposed to God's righteousness covering us, and the two are as different as spirit and flesh.
Kelly Minter
#38. Legalism is man-centered; discipline is God-centered.
Barbara Hughes
#40. Security is by far the city's predominant business.
Ron Suskind
#41. I had escaped the snare of certitude that I welcomed so avidly at first and entered, via the name of Jesus, the wide and comprehensive company of Jesus.
Eugene H. Peterson
#42. There is a gap between our love for the gospel and our love for godliness. This must change. It's not pietism, legalism, or fundamentalism to take holiness seriously. It's the way of all those who have been called to a holy calling by a holy God.
Kevin DeYoung
#43. Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.
Tullian Tchividjian
#44. We've replaced the proclamation of Christ with an easy-listening legalism of do more and try harder.
R.C. Sproul
#45. Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
Marquis De Sade
#46. We also have a new motivation to battle with sin: we're no longer under law, but under grace. This is counterintuitive. People think that law and legalism will best motivate us to strive to do what's right. But it's grace that enables us to live for God. "For
Tim Chester
#47. The secret impetus behind legalism is its competitiveness. The point is not just to win: it's to beat everyone else.
Mark Buchanan
#48. The onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.
Philip Zaleski
#49. She was just too curious to stay in a self-imposed mental straight-jacket for very long.
David Brooks
#50. We live in an age so legalistic, we find it hard to imagine someone wanting to obey their God simply because they love their God.
Criss Jami
#51. Only Christ can free us from the prison of legalism, and then only if we are willing to be freed.
Madeleine L'Engle
#52. Although he didn't care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).
C.S. Lewis
#53. Moralism and its stepchild, legalism, reduce the love story of God for his people to the observance of burdensome duties and oppressive laws.
Brennan Manning
#54. You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#55. There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#56. We have a crippling tendency to forget what God has done for us. For a while, we're humbled. Then, if we do not guard our hearts and minds, we begin to think we must have done something right for God to have been so good to us. Therein lies another road to captivity. It is the road of legalism.
Beth Moore
#58. I am tolerably ignorant about Judaism, and much of what I do know about it seems hard to swallow, because it is so grounded in legalism, and adherence to rituals.
Fred Melamed
#59. In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#60. The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.
Aldous Huxley
#61. In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.
Criss Jami
#63. Believers have just as much to fear from legalism as from waywardness. The first detracts from the beauty of the message, while the second mars it content.
Max Anders
#64. Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.
Philip Yancey
#66. Legalism insists on conformity to manmade religious rules and requirements, which are often unspoken but are nevertheless very real ... There are far too many instances within Christendom where our traditions and rules are, in practice, more important than God's commands.
Jerry Bridges
#67. Men promise freedom while establishing laws; God promises laws while establishing freedom.
Criss Jami
#68. You didn't learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics
Jeri Massi
#69. (Pastor Chuck) Smith told his elders in no uncertain terms that if the church had to turn away young people because of bare feet and clothes that they would be better off ripping up the carpet and replacing the pews with steel folding chairs.
Larry Eskridge
#70. Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?
Elisabeth Elliot
#71. The knowledge of God's Word without love is a destructive force because it puffs us up with pride and legalism.
John Bevere
#73. Innovation is the lifeblood of an organization. Knowing how to lead and work with creative people requires knowledge and action that often goes against the typical organizational structure. Protect unusual people from bureaucracy and legalism typical of organizations.
Max De Pree
#74. If you feel that you can follow a few little rules or some clever gimmicks to make you a mature Christian, then you have fallen into a subtle trap of legalism.
J. Vernon McGee
#75. The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn't produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.
Tullian Tchividjian
#76. At its heart, legalism is a desire to appear holy. It is trying to be justified before men and not God.
David Wilkerson
#78. The main thing between you and God is not so much your sins; it's your damnable good works.
John H. Gerstner
#79. There seems to be something in our human nature that draws us away from a life-giving relationship with Jesus because it feels more comfortable to focus on what to do and not do. That tendency robs us of real joy and peace.
Chris Hodges
#80. Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally,
Max Weber
#81. It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies.
C.S. Lewis
#82. We live Law to ourselves. Our reason is our Law.
John Milton
#83. I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless.
John Newton
#84. Religions find lasting utility in terms of prescription or parameter, rules for the conduct of human affairs.
Ron Suskind
#85. Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#86. A legalist is not someone who places divine law above all else. A legalist is someone who places human law above all else.
Rob Rienow
#87. Trying to know God and serve Him before we come to love Him is exhausting.
Beth Moore
#88. Legalism breeds a sense of entitlement that turns us into complainers.
Tullian Tchividjian
#89. People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honor.
T.H. White
#90. Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.
Brian D. McLaren
#92. Legalism is nothing but a leader's way of avoiding suffering.
Gene Edwards
#93. Jesus reserved his hardest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed and legalism.
Philip Yancey
#94. If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.
G.K. Chesterton
#95. The law repels, the gospel attracts. The law shows the distance which there is between God and man; the gospel bridges that awful chasm, and brings the sinner across it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#96. The only way into a ministry that sees people's lives change, that brings joy and power and electricity without authoritarianism, is through preaching the gospel to deconstruct both legalism and relativism.
Timothy Keller
#97. Ecclesiastes 7:20 clearly sounds the futility of legalism: There is not a righteous man on earth / who does what is right and never sins.
Beth Moore
#98. But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism.
Richard Perle
#99. Opportunities have often felt like obligations to me.
Kevin DeYoung