Legal, Who Cares?

There was always a competition between my brothers and me while we were kids and maybe still today. I felt like the dummy of the group, because my grades were always lower in school. My little brother was always on the honor role and getting the bumper sticker for mom to put on her car, when with my best efforts I never came close. At times I still feel like the wimp of the three, after all their married and I'm not. My brothers live within fifteen minutes of my parents, and I live eight hours away. So at times I wonder why my parents love us all the same.

My parents acknowledged good behaviors, so I found myself comparing my good behaviors to theirs, in a never ending battle to receive more good acknowledgements then my brothers. So in one hand I had my bad behaviors, and the other the good, then another set of hands weighing my brothers' good and bad behaviors. Each day I spent weighing the good and bad, always hoping that mine were heavier on the good side then they were.

In our stages of life my brothers each made different decisions. I would compare myself to them on this level too. Surely mom and dad loved me more because…but maybe their love is not based on my performance but instead an unconditional love, a love that Paul tells us about in 1 Corinthians 13. Later I came to realize this was the way my parents loved us, and not by this comparison system based on performance.

God is the same way, loving unconditionally. Many Christians would say this but how many live it? In life is our relationship with God based on how our life is going? A series of ups and downs, good days and bad days, it is all a matter of how we are "feeling" that day. Then we get this assumption that God is the same way, changing His view of us and/or His love for us.

We set up this system of comparing our good deeds to our bad deeds. This process is commonly called Legalism. We weight in our deeds, and feel that we have God's approval, and love, so long as our good deeds out weigh our bad ones. The only problem with this kind of thinking is that it is totally unbiblical.

If this legalism system were the way God is then we would see it expressed, throughout the bible, or at some point. Throughout the bible we see God acting totally different from this system.
Ultimately if we accept this system, we deny why Christ died on the cross. Christ died to wash away our sin, so that we may have a relationship with God. If God was concerned with our goods deed outweighing the bad, why ever send Christ to wash the bad away? If God only cared for those whose good deeds outweighed the bad, then why did Christ walk and heal the sinful?

Mom and dad do not weight my good behaviors and bad behaviors; instead they focus on one thing loving. It does not matter how many times I have disobeyed them, they still love us. God does not care about the "good" we do, but instead what is in our hearts. After all that's why Christ came, to show that God does not operate by this Legalism system.