Half Law and Half Grace?

What does it take to receive the salvation of God? Is it half law and half grace as some Christians seem to believe? Is it half Jesus Christ giving us grace and half us keeping the law?
Many churches and pastors believe that the ten commandments (and at times other portions of the old covenant) must be preached to sinners to prepare them to accept Christ. The idea is taught in several different ways:

1) People must be convinced that they have a problem (that they are sinners) before they are given the Answer. 2) Before people can appreciate the gospel (good news) they must first understand the bad news, their own predicament.3) Before people are motivated to be rescued and saved they must realize that they are lost.

While these ideas may sound good and are not entirely erroneous, what they amount to, in many cases, is that condemnation and shame are preached. First, send them on a guilt trip - then rescue them is the idea. Send them to hell with fire and brimstone sermons so that they will appreciate heaven. Or expose people's sins, so that in their embarrassment they will accept Christ!?! Wow - does that sound like Jesus? Where do we find Jesus doing such a thing? The only people or system that He exposed were those who thought they were so religiously superior - the very ones who were running around exposing and condemning the hell out of everyone else! WE DON’T FIND JESUS "EXPOSING” THOSE WHO DID NOT PRETEND TO BE RELIGIOUS.

Nothing in the New Testament gives instructions to Christ followers to inflict this kind of devious, manipulative preaching on others, in the name of God. The New Testament tells us that people are brought to Jesus for their salvation. It does not indicate that people are saved by shaming them through condemnation.

This kind of teaching leads to externally based criteria - so that the vast majority of this kind of preaching (which is really not the gospel at all!) is all about how people are disobedient, how they need to start keeping the law, how they need to start pleasing God, etc. The word "grace" is used but not understood.

If even one-percent required-for-salvation law is preached, the grace of our Lord and Savior is not preached. One-percent required-for-salvation law keeping so dilutes, waters down and poisons the gospel that it is no gospel at all. That's the absolutely clear message of the book of Galatians. This kind of teaching completely ignores the fact that once we are in a living union with Christ, because of God's grace, that we are changed from the inside out. When the risen Lord lives His life in us He transforms us into His "workmanship" (Ephesians 2:10) so that we are obedient to Jesus Christ. We are obedient because He lives in us.

The New Testament categorically teaches that God loves us and that we are accepted, saved, reborn, transformed (any number of terms used) because we accept Jesus - because of His obedience we are saved, reborn, transformed, etc. The New Testament, conversely, DOES NOT teach that we make ourselves loved by God, and accepted by Him, because of our obedience. That is a false gospel, specifically the heresy called Galatianism!

When we obey laws, externally, that obedience does not bring about internal transformation. Jesus is not produced by us being moral. Morality does not produce Jesus. Nor, on the other hand, does Jesus do something because it is the right thing to do. What Jesus does IS, by definition, the right thing to do. Christ-centered morality is produced out of a transformed heart, out of the inner beings of those in whom Jesus lives, for, as He promised, living waters will flow out of us (John 7:38).

The approach of Puritanism (which is sadly still alive and well) was that a man is made holy on the basis of deeds. Holiness is found, in this view, through our external obedience to God's laws. This approach leads to a deification, or at least semi-deification, of the ten commandments - with plaques, monuments, embroidery, tapestry, extolling the law - but not the Savior. Many people who call themselves Christians would never dream of displaying a cross in their home, but will instead festoon their living environment with ten commandment posters and plaques. The failure of this approach can be demonstrated over and over again. The law fails to bring righteousness and holiness. Righteousness and holiness can only be imputed, by grace; produced by the indwelling of our Lord and Savior. No human or group of humans, no law or combination of laws, produces holiness. It never has and never will.

There is a sense in which the law prepares the way for the gospel - and that sense is this: The law demonstrates the complete bankruptcy and inability of humans to even begin to keep the law and to make God love them more because of their obedience. The law leads to Christ in the sense that the cross obliterates the law as a system of worshipping God. For Christians, Jesus is the very center and foundation, He is in the spotlight of our worship - and He does not share that spotlight with any ethical system, whether it be the old covenant, or some other. We become in Christ all that He wants us to be because of who and what He is, and what He works in and through us. This approach is yet another legalistic system of religion - at the very best it is getting the cart of law-keeping and moralism ahead of Jesus. It is religion, not relationship. It is hopelessly flawed, and anti-Christ by its very methodology.

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