We talk a lot about grace in the church, and, rightly so! As Christians, we are saved by grace, live by grace, mature in Christ by grace, are filled with grace so as to extend grace to others, both inside and outside the church. The importance of God’s grace cannot be overstated.

But there’s an enemy of God’s grace that lurks in every Christian church, in every Christian family, and in every Christian heart. That enemy’s name is legalism, and it’s antithetical to grace as it elevates rules, expectations, and traditions to a place of authority that only Scripture should have. Legalism kills joy, strangles liberty, and may be the most tolerated sin in Christianity because it masquerades as serious-holiness and super-spirituality. Our text today is going to help us identify it as the monster that it is and highlight four terrible consequences of legalism.

Manuscript

We talk a lot about grace in the church, that is, unearned and undeserved gifts from God we can never pay back. And, rightly so! As Christians, we are saved by grace, live by grace, mature in Christ by grace, are filled with grace so as to extend grace to others, both inside and outside the church.

As Paul confessed to the Corinthians, so do each of us: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I laboured even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). God’s grace pursues us, shapes us, accompanies us, teaches us, seals us, compels us, and empowers us (see Ephesians 1:7–8a). As one emerges from a swimming pool sopping wet, so the Christian, who lives immersed in God’s grace should drip it wherever they move.

But there’s an enemy of God’s grace that lurks in every Christian church, in every Christian family, and in every Christian heart. It’s the snake in the grass that quietly moves into position before striking. It’s the carbon monoxide leak, slowly filling what should be the life-abundant with that which is life-stealing.

That enemy’s name is legalism, and it’s antithetical to grace as it elevates rules, expectations, and traditions to a place of authority that only Scripture should have. Legalism kills joy, strangles liberty, and may be the most tolerated sin in Christianity because it masquerades as serious-holiness and super-spirituality. But it’s neither of those things, and needs to seen as the grace-killing monster it is.

Legalism Hinders the Mind

Our text this morning is going to help us do that by putting on display four terrible consequences of legalism, the first of which is that it hinders the mind. When we prioritize human custom over holy compassion, tradition over grace, we stop seeing God, his work, and his people rightly. Legalism hinders the mind.

In our text, Jesus and his followers are taking a Sabbath stroll through grain fields and, being hungry, some pluck ripe heads, roll them in their hands, and eat them—something Deuteronomy 23:25 explicitly allows.

But the Pharisees, as if out of nowhere, pop out: A-Ha! They say to Jesus, Look, your disciples do what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.

Exodus 20 declares that the Sabbath (from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday) was to be set aside as holy. God declared it to be a day of rest and reflection. Modelled after the creation week, Israel was, on the seventh day, to lay aside normal activities and focus on the Creator. It was a physical declaration of man’s neediness and God’s worthiness of worship and of trust.

But over the centuries, this wonderful reminder became buried under a complicated system of strict laws and regulations. Listen to one scholars’ description: 

During the period between Ezra and the Christian era the scribes formulated innumerable legal restrictions for the conduct of life under the law. Two whole treatises in the Talmud are devoted to the details of Sabbath observance. One of these … enumerates the following thirty-nine principal classes of prohibited actions: sowing, plowing, reaping, gathering in the sheaves, threshing, winnowing, cleansing, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking; shearing wool, washing it, beating it, dyeing it, spinning it, making a warp of it; making two cords, weaving two threads, separating two threads, making a knot, untying a knot, sewing two stitches, tearing to sew two stitches; catching a deer, killing, skinning, salting it, preparing its hide, scraping off its hair, cutting it up; writing two letters, blotting out for the purpose of writing two letters, building, pulling down, extinguishing, lighting a fire, beating with a hammer, and carrying from one property to another. Each of these chief enactments was further discussed and elaborated, so that actually there were several hundred things a conscientious, law-abiding Jew could not do on the Sabbath.

Steven Barabas, “Sabbath” New International Dictionary of the Bible, 877

While the Sabbath was meant to be a means of worshipping God it had become, itself, a bloated, unrecognizable object of worship. God had been cut out. By the first-century, the Sabbath had become a stressful, man-centred day of forced inactivity guarded by the Pharisees sitting in their holy sniper towers ready to pick off anyone who would transgress their unbiblical rules.

So, when Jesus’s disciples took some grain, the snipers pulled the trigger. “They’re farming! Sabbath-breakers!” The Pharisees were so convinced that what they had built around the law was godly they couldn’t see they were no longer defending the law itself and, more importantly, the God of the law.

Jesus responds by drawing the attention of the Pharisees to people they’d have a hard time ignoring. First, he points to David (verses 3–4) who, in 1 Samuel 21, while running from king Saul, entered God’s house with his hungry men and snacked on the bread used for worship. David broke the ceremonial law to remain alive. So, even if the Pharisee’s strict understanding of the Sabbath was right, David provides president for Jesus’s disciples transgress when hungry.

Without waiting for a response, Jesus follows that jab with a right-hook (v. 5): “Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent?” In Leviticus 24, God told the temple priests to make bread and eat on the Sabbath. So, it’s not nearly as rigid as the Pharisees are claiming. They weren’t seeing the law as God intended and were drowning its grace in regulation. Legalism had hindered their minds.

If we view God’s word through legalistic lenses, we’ll struggle to see God’s grace as it truly is. If we understand following Jesus as a list of dos and don’ts, we will never be able to extend to one another the grace of Christian liberty and conscience and we’ll never enjoy the beauty of the diversity of the body of Christ, because we’ll demand uniformity. Legalism hinders the mind.

Legalism Hardens the Heart

It also hardens the heart. A hardened heart is the devastating terminus of a hindered mind. Prioritizing human custom over holy compassion can devolve into a callousness impervious to truth, love, and grace. Legalism hardens the heart.

The Pharisees weren’t only misunderstanding the OT, they had malicious intentions. With the question they asked Jesus in verse 2, they were looking to trap him not learn from him. And, in verse 6, we find Jesus warning them that, because of that hardness, they’re missing something bigger: “But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here.”

If the law could be bypassed by those associated with the temple (v. 5), then certainly it could be bypassed by those associated with that which is greater than the temple: the kingdom. Since the kingdom is greater than the temple, then kingdom workers—Jesus and his disciples—are greater than temple workers. If David, who at the time was not king, could feed his men with consecrated bread, then surely the King of Israel could allow his men to eat on the Sabbath.

The Pharisees could have seen this had their minds not been hindered and their hearts hardened. Instead, they couldn’t see what was before them because their legalism had them filled with malice.

Verse 10 records a second loaded question by the Pharisees. Notice, this time, Matthew’s editorial comment: “And they questioned Jesus, asking, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’—so that they might accuse Him.” And then drop to verse 14. “But the Pharisees went out and conspired against Him, as to how they might destroy Him.” The Pharisees go from not understanding the law to actively working against the writer of the Law (see 11:12).

Legalism hardens hearts against God, his work, and his people. God graciously acts in many different ways in many different people at many different speeds. A hard-hearted legalist or legalistic church family has no time for that diversity and no patience for imperfection. Modern-day pharisees have tight definitions and expectations and, because of that, they not only miss the great things God’s doing but they often attack them. Legalism hardens the heart.

Legalism Harms the Innocent

Third, it harms the innocent. When God’s grace is replaced with rules and traditions, no matter how well-intended they are, there is collateral damage. Legalism harms the innocent.

Still correcting the Pharisees in verse 7, Jesus again (9:13) quotes the prophet, Hosea who, in turn, is quoting Yahweh: “But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.”

The innocent, in this case, are the disciples who had been snacking lawfully. But because the Pharisees were so bound up in their legalistic mentality and didn’t understand God desires compassion, grace, lovingkindness more than raw religiosity, they went into attack mode.

Then, starting in verse 9, they follow Jesus into their synagogue where there’s a man with a withered hand. They ask Jesus about Sabbath healings, which, according to their regulations, was clearly not allowed.

And He said to them, “What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.

Matthew 12:11–12

“Of course you wouldn’t let a helpless sheep suffer and potentially die simply to keep your Sabbath rules. An exception would be made out of mercy. How much more for hurting people?”

Even if they could have, the Pharisees wouldn’t have helped because their rules trumped grace. How cruel! Is that the character of the law and of the God of the law? No! God desires compassion, not a sacrifice, grace not religious rigidity. Legalism harms the innocent. 

Lest we forget it was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us. It was while we were sheep in a pit of our own sin that the Great Shepherd pulled us out. Our God is a God of graciousness, compassion, love, and mercy. But when we, as Christians, get enamoured with, or find comfort in, the forms and expectations and rules of church life, the first people to suffer are the innocent. 

Legalism Hides the Messiah

Legalism hinders the mind, hardens the heart, and harms the innocent. It does a lot of damage. But this last consequence may be the most devastating: It hides the Messiah. When we focus on our own rules and religiosity instead of God’s compassionate grace, we distract from, obscure the image of, and block people from seeing the beauty of Jesus. Legalism hides the Messiah.

The back-and-forth in the grain fields culminates with Jesus declaring his unmatched authority: “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (v. 8). Again Jesus grabs that Daniel 7 messianic title and slaps it on his own name-tag. The Sabbath is not master of the Son of Man. No, the Son of Man is Master of the Sabbath because he’s its creator and, therefore, he can do whatever he wants on whatever day of the week he wants.

No response is given by the Pharisees. What could they say to that. Their unflinching commitment to their stale religion, their legalistic and grace-less approach to God, had hindered their minds, hardened their hearts, harmed the innocents, and now we find that it was hiding the Messiah from them in plain sight. And what’s more tragic than that?

Be Conduits of Grace

Friends, we want to be conduits of grace, not enemies of grace. We want a renewed mind, a soft heart, an outward compassion, and Christ at the centre of our vision. We want to spread grace to one another and to this world. And, in closing, I want to give us three ways we can do that: the ABC’s of becoming conduits of grace.

Assume the best. Assume the best in your brothers and sisters in Christ knowing that, while we differ in maturation, experiences, and backgrounds, we’re united by the same gospel, servants of the same Lord, and destined for the same eternity. Assume the best.

Be Bible-centred. Learn to discern between God’s instruction and human expectation. To do this, you need an open Bible. Sometimes well-meaning people can say you must do this and you must never do that. They may be right. They also may be pharisees. Copy Jesus and go to Scripture with care and prayer. Be Bible-centred.

Control yourself, not others. At the end of the day, I’m going to give an account to God for me, my conscience, my actions, my life. While the temptation exists to control the people around me, I need to be able to leave them to the Lord, the Holy Spirit that indwells them, the conscience God’s given them. I can encourage and ask questions, but ultimately, the best thing I can do for them is to be a conduit of grace, concerned chiefly with become christlike myself. Control yourself, not others.

Friends, legalism is a grace-killing monster. It lurks in very Christian church, every Christian home, and every Christian heart. It’s fuelled by the prideful desire to measure, contain, control God, his work, and his people. It often parades around as sincere holiness and sober maturity but, in reality, is poison hindering minds, hardening hearts, harm innocents, and hiding Jesus. 

With God’s help, we must seek it, find it, and kill it. When we do that we can, as a church, as homes, as individuals, enjoy the liberty, unity, maturity, clarity, safety, and charity that a clear view of our gracious Saviour, Jesus the Messiah, invites us to enjoy. Let’s be conduits of grace for the glory of our gracious God.

---

---