refusing to accept a legalist version of my faith

I want to stand for freedom. I am not necessarily laboring for the national or political type, although I resolutely am for that.

It is more the interior version. It is the kind that leans arduously against the pressure to conform to external obligations because someone or the other feels uncomfortable.

This often arises in the church. Because none of us likes treading alone, it is more comfortable to insist, in most cases with fervor and “God’s” authority, that others do the same. I have found that in most cases, this insistence emerges from honest and genuine personal conviction to live a well-ordered or devoted life, but then it gets projected onto others as a sacred expectation. There may be a better definition out there, but from my humble vantage, this behavior is a garish picture of religious legalism.

It is often couched in terms like “the Bible says…” or “God commands…” Sometimes, the Bible does say, and God has commanded, and I am happy to bend my life to those concepts and directives. What has more often happened, though, is these personal convictions become an “ex-cathedra” ordinance for everyone when in all truthfulness, there is no actual Biblical support.

So, I am in vigilant resistance to that type of control and authority and want to give way to a liberty I believe with all my heart true Christianity can and absolutely should provide. Without it, Christianity is only a veneer of its intended existence. It is a shell without its innards.

That is the type of freedom I want to live in and stand for.

“The task of future Christian leaders is not to make a little contribution to the solution of the pains and tribulations of this time, but to identify and announce the ways in which Jesus is leading God’s people out of slavery, through the desert to a new land of freedom.”

Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus