In this video, Dr. Derek Thomas suggests some signs that legalism or antinomianism may have crept into a Christians’s life.
What are the signs that legalism or antinomianism have crept into the believers’s life? I think that all Christians experience this phenomenon. I tell young preachers to avoid 1 John in the first ten years of their ministry because they’re almost guaranteed to preach all of those demands that John makes in a legalistic fashion. I think legalism in its essence is trying to obey God’s commandments or ethical demands upon our lives in order to win God’s favor. So, we have a sense that we’re not walking with God as we should and God is sort of frowning on us. And so we need to introduce a little more Bible reading, a little more prayer—with a little more fervency and that’ll make us feel good. But we’re operating then under a sort of works righteousness model that God rewards your obedience and therefore that you are justified—that your standing with God is based upon your performance.
And that sort of performance mentality can very easily creep in. I think Christians in the past and present have tried to correct, make course corrections, in their pilgrimage by swinging from legalism. Okay, I’m now walking with so many rules and regulations and there may be rules and regulations that aren’t even in the Bible anymore. They’re rules and regulations that are imposed by others or imposed by ourselves. And therefore I need now a little bit of the opposite and you swing that the course correction for legalism is antinomianism. So I can let go for a season. And then the opposite is true that when you realize that you’re living a life that isn’t in obedience, that the correction to that is a little more rules and regulations. And I think both of those are mistaken because the answer to legalism and the answer to antinomianism is Jesus.
Paul’s methodology in sanctification and holiness in the New Testament is constantly to ask the question, “Who are you?” And the answer to that question is, “If I’m a Christian, I am a man in union and communion with Christ.” So in terms of “in Christ” or “in Christ Jesus” or “in the Lord,” and there are three or four different expressions that Paul uses—there are 150–160 uses of these. And it’s a reminder that the gestalt, the mindset of the Apostle Paul in thinking about gospel life, Christian life, is to remind yourself that you are in union with Christ and therefore to obey Him is the response of who you are. If I’m in Christ, I want to live in obedience to Christ. If I’m in Christ, I cannot live an antinomian, lawless life. And so having a relationship with Christ, walking with Him, fellowshipping with Him, talking to Him in prayer on a minute by minute basis, that I think is the corrective to a legalistic or antinomian way of life.