LIVING WATERS
For the proclamation of the Gospel and the edification of the Body of Christ
A Matter of Life
“…the strength of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:56b).
You can have Christian law just as much as you can have Mosaic law; you can be in bondage in Christianity just as much as men were in Judaism. Christianity can be made into an imposed system just as much as Mosaic law was, and there are many Christians today who live under the fear of the “Thou shalt” and the “Thou shalt not” of a legalistic conception of the Christian life.
You can take the Bible as God's standard for your life and try to fulfill it and yet be burdened with a sense of constant failure. It is God's standard, and it is a very exhaustive one which leaves no part of the practical life untouched, but those who make the effort to try to live up to it only ends in disillusion.
No, it is not just a matter of a Book, but of a Person, the Person who did live up to that standard, absolutely fulfilling every least demand and with the most perfect success, so satisfying God to the full. By His death He has delivered us from the bondage of legal demands. This same person now lives in us by His Holy Spirit, seeking to work out that perfect will of God not on the basis of some binding instructions from without but as a living force within. We have the law written in our hearts.
To be in Christ is a matter of life and not of legalism. (T. Austin-Sparks).