"What a weird blog title! Isn't that like a double negative...a not, not, cancelling itself out???"
Wait, wait, let me explain. A lot of blogging space has been used recently to defend the importance of grounding our ongoing growth in the gospel. This is a cause I resonate with--as I said in a recent message, we simply do not grow apart from our union with Christ. Only gospel grounded growth is growth in true maturity, growing up into Him who is the Head, into Christ. We also must always guard against making our progress or lack of progress in maturity the center of our meditation, the basis for our approach to God, or our hope of eternal life.
My worry is that in an attempt to preach the gospel of freedom in Christ, both for justification and as the source of our growth, some language that is used can create an unbiblical restraint, a "you'd better not" where God says "yes." This happens when the commands, or imperatives, of the Bible (even the NT ones) are questioned or even dismissed as unhelpful in our view of Christian growth. If our teaching about growth makes it sound like it is dangerous for Christians to meditate on or seek to obey the commands that the Bible intends to give Christians, we are creating anti-legalism legalism.
Of course this is not the intent of the teaching--the goal is to free Christians from extra-biblical rules and especially from a works centered spiritual experience. However, if Christians walk away from our warnings about commands and the danger of rules with the thought that truly spiritual, truly gospel centered Christians grow without ever focusing on the Biblical calls for godliness issued to Christians--we have placed a fence around part of their identity in Christ. We have cut them off from part of the good pasture of God's Word, opened to them in Christ. To be in Christ is to be under his headship, to embrace his Word, all of it, with freedom, fueled by his Spirit. We are not free to misuse his Word in any way, nor are we free to make it sound as though Christians should be able to grow only using part of their Bibles. This is anti-legalism legalism, and it will produce the same death and condemnation that it is our goal to fight against.
