Join us as we unravel the concept of legalism and its stark difference from true righteousness as taught by Jesus. This episode emphasizes the importance of internal motivation over external compliance, highlighting how good works and genuine faith lay the foundation for treasures in heaven. The conversation offers a compelling narrative on the significance of trusting in God’s provision and focusing on the eternal rather than the temporal.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Why do you suppose God gave us laws? Life would be a whole lot simpler without so many laws, wouldn’t it? They’re a bit of a nuisance, you know. They interfere with a lot of fun things to do. At least that’s the way some people look at it. I mean, without laws, we could drive our cars as fast as they’d go, 100 to 120 miles an hour, and we wouldn’t have to worry about it. Pedestrians would have to worry about it. Other drivers would have to worry about it, but we wouldn’t have to worry about it. One fellow opined that sin is like vanilla, and God hates vanilla. The idea is that, well, if God liked sin, by this line of reasoning, all sin would be okay. It’s just a matter of preference. God preferred that we not commit adultery, so he told us not to do it, and therefore it’s a sin. And otherwise, it would have been perfectly all right to have run off with your neighbor’s wife. All of us grow up familiar with rules. Our parents had rules for us. Schools had rules. The community had rules. We all are very familiar with rules. If you’re a parent and you’ve got a teen in the house, I can almost guarantee that at least once in the years preceding today, you have heard the expression, “‘Aw, Dad, you never want me to have any fun.'” Right? It isn’t just a question of whether you heard it. It’s a question of how many times you have heard it. And if you’re a teenager, you have heard at least once in your life when you ask the question, well, why, Dad? Dad came back and said, because I said so. In fact, you probably could have repeated that right along with me. The reason you get that kind of answer is often because the reasons behind the rules are just a little too complex to explain to a kid. And he might anyway assume that, well, he’s an exception to it or he can figure out his way around it. There are times when you just have to make certain demands on your kid. You say you do not run into the street. You don’t go in the street under any circumstances. You don’t go in the street after your dog. You don’t go in the street chasing a ball. You don’t do any of that. Why? Because I said so. You can tell the kid it’s because he might get wiped out by an 18-wheeler. But he might figure, well, there’s no 18-wheeler coming. I don’t have to bother. What is the idea behind rules anyway? Well, there are quite a few ideas. Individual safety is one of them. Don’t play in the street. That’s a rule. And it’s to keep the kids safe. Consideration of others is another one. Be home by 6 o’clock. Why, Dad? Because we’re going to have supper. The family will be there, and it will be much more convenient for your mother if you’re here on time for supper. We have rules for the safety of other people. Don’t drive over the speed limit. We have rules that have to do with character. Tell the truth at all times. Don’t lie. We have rules that deal with personal responsibility. Pay for any damage you have caused. If you, by your negligence, bend some other guy’s fender on his car, you’ve got to pay for it. Now tell me something, would you? Why would anyone want to do away with rules that have to do with the consideration of other people? Why would you want to do away with rules that deal with personal safety? In other words, if it’s a rule that keeps us safe from harm, why fool with it? Why do away with a rule that has to do with personal responsibility or the development of character or with the safety of other people? When you grow up and you move away from home, well, you no longer have to obey the rules of your parents. Does that mean the rules have been abolished? Well, hardly. We hope that they have been internalized by the time you move away from home. So why does God give us rules, what we tend to call in the Bible laws? Well, for the same reason our parents did, to civilize us, to keep us safe, to teach responsibility, to develop character. There’s an interesting little passage in Deuteronomy 10, verse 12, about why God gave the law. He said, Now there’s a good question, right? What in the world does God want from us? Well, to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord and His statutes, which I command you this day for your good. Now, isn’t that fascinating? All the laws, commandments, statutes, everything else were commanded for their good. Now, perhaps you can explain why God would abolish laws that were given for the good of man, but I don’t think it makes any sense to suggest that. Let me draw another analogy from the family. A wise father will insist on the family eating meals together. Oh, there might be an exception occasionally, of course, but by and large, families should eat together. That’s the reason for the be home by six rule. The way we live today, we are so busy with football, with soccer, with all the school activities that go on, that it’s easy for family members to see one another when they pass in the hall and otherwise not see each other at all. To sit down, actually, and eat a meal together and carry on an intelligent conversation in families today is becoming relatively rare. But a lot of fathers and mothers insist, no, no, we have got to have times when we sit down and we eat the family meal together. The reason for the rule is that we eat together is that we should not grow away from one another. Now, what’s curious is that among the set of rules that we might expect from God is a set of appointed times for meeting with God. Just like your dad says, be home for dinner at six, God says, I want to meet with you on these particular times. Those times are the Sabbath and seven annual festivals. They involve a break from routine, and they involve a coming together in festival in the presence of God in order that God We might not drift away from Him like too many of us have already drifted away from our families. God has rules to keep us close to Him, as well as rules to keep us out of harm’s way, rules to help us live together in harmony, rules of character, rules of responsibility. And you just have to ask the question, since this is God’s objective in these rules, why would He abolish them? Well, Paul seems to be assuming that these rules have not been abolished when he writes to Timothy in the first chapter, verse 5. He says, “…now the objective of the commandment,” that’s any commandment, “…is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and of unpretentious faith.” In other words, we’re trying with the commandments to produce a certain type of attitude, a frame of mind, an approach. And he says, “…some people have swerved aside from that and have turned aside unto vain babbling.” Desiring to be teachers of the law who don’t understand what they say and they don’t know what they’re affirming. But we know that the law is good if a man use it legitimately. Now that’s a fascinating statement that Paul says here because he makes it very clear that there is an illegitimate use of the law and a legitimate use. That the law is, present tense, good. It hasn’t been abolished. It hasn’t been done away with. As Jesus said, he didn’t come to abolish it or to do away with it. He came to help us understand it and to use the law in a legitimate way. Paul continued to say, We know that the law is good if a man use it legitimately, knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and for the disobedient. Now, what in the world does that mean? Well, it’s not that hard. The laws against burglary in your community were not made for you. They were made for the burglars. Does that mean it’s okay for you to steal? Well, no. What it all means is that you’re not going around thinking about that. You’re not planning burglaries. You’re not having to even take that law into consideration. It was made for the burglar. Now, this is a funny play on words because the definition of a righteous man is a man who, from the heart, keeps the laws of God. It’s like saying that the laws of God weren’t made for the man who keeps them. But, of course, the fact that he keeps them means that he’s aware of them. But what Paul is developing here is an idea along the lines of the New Covenant. In Hebrews 8, beginning in verse 10, the writer opens up an idea in quoting God this way about the covenant. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord. I will put my laws into their mind, and I will write them in their hearts, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people. And they won’t have to teach every man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for all shall know me from the least to the greatest. What he is talking about is the internalization of the law of God to where you don’t need it necessarily written on the doorposts of your house anymore. You don’t need to read it out of a book because it has been written into your character. It’s like the kid who grows up and goes out and gets his own apartment. We hope the rules have been internalized. Dad will no longer be there to see that he brushes his teeth and shines his shoes, but we hope that he will continue to take care of himself. We hope that he will continue to stay in touch with the family. We hope that he will do the things that are right. God intends for us to internalize the rules, to make them a part of our character. To be out from under parental administration in no way invalidates the things that they have taught us. So perhaps we can understand Jesus a little better on the Sermon on the Mount when he said, Don’t think I’ve come to destroy the law or the prophets. I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill. I’m going to explain something very important about that to you when I come back after these words.
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Just how great is God? Really? How much power is controlled by the creator of the universe? And what does he plan to do with it? To find out, request your free CD titled, How Great Thou Art. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44.
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We may be a little closer to understanding why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, said, Don’t think I’m come to destroy the law or the prophets. I’m not come to destroy them. I’m come to fulfill them. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till everything has come to pass. So you can go look out the window, and if heaven and earth are still there, well, so is the law. Jesus goes on to say, whoever will break one of these least commandments and teach men so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever shall do and teach them the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Why? Well, because these are all the rules of life that make life work better, that teach responsibility and character, that keep us safe and help us to keep from hurting others. He then went on to say, rather interesting thing, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, what was wrong with the righteousness of the Pharisees? What was wrong with the Pharisees was legalism. Now, let me digress just a moment to define that for you. Legalism is the strict adherence to law or prescription, especially to the letter rather than the spirit. There’s a secondary definition, the theological doctrine that salvation is gained through good works. There aren’t very many ideas that have entered into religious thought that have created more problems than legalism. It’s based on the idea that the law is arbitrary and that it is controlling. But the law isn’t arbitrary. It’s a guide to life. It’s based upon life. It’s based upon the way things are. It’s based upon human nature and the divine nature, both of which are going to remain the same. As long as there are human beings, human nature will be here. As long as God is there, God’s nature will be there. The law is God’s revelation to man of what works and what doesn’t. Legalism presumes that God observes every technical transgression, numbers them, and punishes for them. In other words, you and I down here as we walk around this earth, every time we commit a physical transgression, every time there’s something that we do that’s observable, that can be marked down, it’s marked down in a book. In the judgment day, God will open up that book and count up every single one of those things we have done wrong, and he will punish us for them. But the law contains its own consequences. We get hurt when we break the law whether God lifts a finger or not, and that’s why God tells us don’t do it. It’s like parents. You know, they’re not necessarily there trying to keep track of every time the kid runs into the street after a ball so they can punish him for it. The idea of the law is to keep him out of the street so he doesn’t get hurt. Why is it so hard to understand that the law of God runs in the line of a loving parent telling the child to stay out of the street? rather than a parent that is giving his child all kinds of arbitrary rules and adding up all of his mistakes to punish him for all of them. I have a sneaking suspicion that some parents think they are patterning their child-rearing after God and after the Bible and after God’s rules. But boy, they’re not if they’re following a legalistic approach. Legalism also presumes that the law only involves conduct. It doesn’t matter what goes on in the mind as long as we don’t actually do anything. It doesn’t matter what we think. It doesn’t matter what we believe. It only matters what we do. That’s the legalist. I think that a lot of people who make the mistake of assuming that Jesus came to abolish the law make that mistake because they assume that the legalism of the Pharisees was the law, that it was the law of the Old Testament and the religion of the Old Testament, and that Jesus came with a new religion totally different from that of the Old Testament. But the truth is, what Jesus was rejecting was the legalism of the Pharisees, and they’re mistaking it for a rejection of the law. When we come to the epistles of Paul, the rejection of legalism is found once again, and once again people mistake it for a rejection of the law of God. But Paul says, the law is good, and holy, and just, and righteous. The problem that both Jesus and Paul had was, was with the Pharisaic interpretation of the law, with the legalism that handcuffed people and made them feel restricted and bound and burdened by the law of God, something which God never intended. Jesus came on the scene as a teacher of the law who rejected legalism, but still taught the law. The Sermon on the Mount, which is probably the most basic and comprehensive statement of Jesus’ doctrines, is a collection of his teachings on the law. Repeatedly, he addresses an old idea about the external observation of the law and tells us what goes on in the heart is what really counts. In this series of programs on the words of Jesus, we’re studying what he actually said and what he didn’t say. And we’re in the Sermon on the Mount where we’re working our way systematically through all those places where Jesus said, now you’ve heard it’s been said to them of old time, you shall not commit adultery. But I say unto you that whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her in his heart has committed adultery with her already. And what Jesus is saying very plainly is, that the law of God isn’t done away. What you need to understand is that your transgression begins a lot earlier than you thought it does. And merely because you actually don’t carry through with the act does not make you innocent. You’re doing harm to yourself and to your family and to your wife by the act of lust, much less the act of adultery. We’ve come to a place in chapter 6, verse 16, where Jesus says, Moreover, when you fast… Now, again, the idea… among the Pharisees, among the legalists, is that it is the act of fasting, the fact that you are going without food, that is important. But they would go beyond that. They would apparently in many cases look like they were fasting more than they were, and perhaps even look like they were fasting when they were not, to go through the motions. And it was all a matter of externals. But Jesus says to his disciples, what you’re going to do here when you decide to fast has got to be strictly between you and God. It’s like the giving of alms. If you give alms for personal advantage, You actually go by and you give alms to a charity, and you do so so that men will think well of you, or you do so so that men will give you a break when it comes down to some business contract you’re working on. If there is any personal advantage in your giving, then you have your reward. There’s no point in it from God’s point of view. He says, when you give alms, when you fast, you do it all strictly between you and God and don’t let other people know what you’re doing. If there’s not a reason for fasting that overrides being seen to fast, don’t bother.
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I’ll be right back with more words of Jesus after this break. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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Isn’t that the truth? I’ve heard a lot of preachers cite this passage in my time, and often is not as cited as an illustration that we should give to the church to lay up treasures in heaven. Don’t put this money in your bank account. Put it in the church and lay up treasures in heaven. I’ve got news for you. The church is not heaven. Every church I have ever attended is full of sinners. And because we’re all humans, every church will be full of human problems. We don’t go there because the church is perfect and there aren’t problems there. No, you don’t lay up treasures in heaven by giving money to the church. nor do you do it by giving to radio or television evangelists. This program is supported by donations, and we’re very grateful to those who help us. But I’m not going to tell you that you’re laying up treasure in heaven by giving money to this ministry. This ministry is on earth. It’s located down here near Tyler, Texas, and you can’t lay up eternal treasure here. The treasures you lay up in heaven come about not by the money you give, wherever you give it. They come about by the works that you do for God, the prayers you make on behalf of those who are oppressed and downtrodden, the sacrifices you make to help others. Late in his ministry, Jesus will say that the Son of Man will come in all of his glory and all of his kingdom, and then shall the king say to them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Oh, this is great. Christ has returned. He’s gathered us together, and he says to us, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom. For, oh, there’s a reason behind all this, I gather, because he then begins to explain why we are inheriting the kingdom. For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty. You gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in off the street and gave me a place to sleep. I was naked, and you gave me something to wear. I was sick, and you came and visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me. Well, then the righteous answered and said, Well, Lord… I don’t remember doing that. I never saw you hungry and fed you. I don’t remember seeing you thirsty and giving you drink. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And the king will answer and say to them, I’ll tell you the truth. In as much as you have done it to one of the least of these, my brethren, you have done it to me. Jesus is saying in the simplest possible terms that the doing of good works to our fellow man, that when we do that, we are doing those good works to him, and he goes beyond that. That’s how we lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. You know, I don’t believe for a minute that God is up there writing down every one of our transgressions in a book somewhere, and he’s going to call us all into account, balance up the books, and punish us for everything we ever did wrong. I don’t believe that. But I’ll tell you one thing. There is no good work that we do in his name that is not written down somewhere and for which we will not receive a reward. He will never forget those good works that are done in his name. The light of the body is the eye, he continued. If therefore your eye be single, your whole body shall be full of light. But if your eye be evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness. You know, this metaphor tends to be lost on the modern reader. But Jesus is still talking about it. He’s still developing this theme. He’s been developing all through the Sermon on the Mount that what goes on inside is the determinant in what’s going to happen on the outside. The evil eye is the eye of a man whose heart causes him to see things from an evil perspective. He isn’t single. He doesn’t look straight on. He looks at things from a wrong perspective because of the way he thinks in his heart. The Scripture will say, As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Jesus continued to say, no man can serve two masters. He will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Mammon? Well, mammon is just another word for money, wealth, in whatever form it takes, be it real estate, be it property, be it cars, boats, and all the like. You can’t chase those things down and serve God at the same time. So that the laying up of treasure in the terms of money, cars, and the like, that’s something you do on earth. The laying up of treasure in heaven has to do with the good you do to your fellow man. Therefore I say to you, Jesus said, don’t worry about your life, what you’re going to eat or what you shall drink. Don’t worry about your body, what you shall put on. Isn’t life more than food and isn’t the body more than the clothes that you actually have on it? Of course it is. Now, he doesn’t mean to say that you can’t plan at all the meals, where you’re going to get your next meal. He says, don’t worry about it. Behold the fowls of the air. They don’t sow, and they don’t reap, and they don’t gather into barns, but your Heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you better than birds? Which of you, by taking thought, can add one inch to his height? Can you manage it? Just sit there. Go ahead. See if you can manage. Sit in your chair and think, and then go measure yourself and see if you’re any taller as a result of that thought. And why do you worry about raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t work. They don’t spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God clothes the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? So stop worrying about what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to drink and how you’re going to get your clothes on, for these are the things that all the losers chase. Your Heavenly Father knows you need these. Seek first the kingdom of his God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. But the people who chase after these things are losers in the end, because none of it lasts. The ones who chase the kingdom of God.
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are born to win. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560 White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at…
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1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at borntowin.net
