There was a negative view I had of Christianity back in the day, that the religion was more about following the rules and maintaining a legalistic status quo order of the law rather than truly loving thy neighbor and the people that the faith was intended to serve. Yes, there are Christians that are like that, and hell, I can think like that sometimes.
But that line of thinking is Pharisee, not Christian and certainly not receiving an outpouring the love of Jesus Christ. If the mission is to follow the rule and laws, we're going about our faith the wrong way. The law functions to show us how wretched, broken, and sinful we are, to expose to us that we need the grace of a higher power to save us through grace, rather than saving us ourselves.
No, Christianity is about a personal relationship with Christ, not rule-following. Christianity is about love, not rule-following. And I am not saying that obedience to God's law is not important, because at the end of the day it still is, but keeping an attitude that prioritizes obedience will, contradictorily, lead us to be less obedient than if we focused on relationship and love, what Christianity is truly about.
Wes McAdams, the preaching minister of the church of Christ on McDermott Road in Plano Texas, writes that having a rule-keeping attitude in thinking of our faith is destructive. "It seems to me, most of the metaphors in the New Testament, that describe our walk with Christ, have to do with relationship, rather than rule-keeping." And a relationship with Christ means a relationship with the people around us, because God's gift of unconditional love comes in human form, not material possessions.
And relationships do have rules. Obviously, it's an incredible breach of trust to be in a relationship with your spouse or partner and then go sleeping around. But we don't usually think of our relationships in terms of following rules, and McAdams puts it best that "a couple who primarily thought of their marriage in terms of 'rule-keeping,' wouldn't have a very healthy marriage." As such, as the brides of Christ, we must not think of our relationships with Christ as a rule-following endeavor, but rather like we'd think of the most important relationship of our lives.
Rule-following promotes sin, rather than keeping us away from sin. Self-righteousness is often cited, by C.S. Lewis, as the greatest sin of our faiths. After all, Jesus reserved his greatest condemnation towards the self-righteous religious scribes, the Pharisees. With the attitude of rule-following, our naturally competitive natures will start comparing our own sin towards other peoples' sin, and the reality is that our respective sins are between a relationship of ourselves and God, not anyone else.
The Bible verses for not condemning and judging other people falling short of the rules and law are in Matthew 7, where Jesus tells us to "judge not, that you not be judged" and to "first take the log out of your own eye, and then clearly you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." In John 8, Jesus tells us to "let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone." They are used often in Bible studies I've attended and in conversations, I have had with other Christians, and I believe it is incredibly important in how we treat and regard our neighbor.
But what about ourselves? I can easily say and believe that I cannot hold other people to a rule-following standard when I can't even hold myself to a rule-following standard. But there is a term in theology called sanctification, which I recently defined by Rev. Shawn Slate, pastor of the Redeemer Church of Knoxville, as "God's work of making us holy through the story of Jesus, as we rest in him even when we fail." And we will fail often, as Jesus's disciples and characters in the Bible often did. Naturally, the inclination to be more like Jesus and sanctified is to follow the rules more, not sin, and obey God's law.
I argue, however, that receiving needs to come before we obey, that a determined spirit to follow God's law without first receiving God's love is misguided. In Romans 6:11, Paul tells us to "consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus," but the key word in the verse is consider. It's a paradox to be dead to sin but still sin and fall short all the time, as I do constantly. But to consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God means that our old selves before we became alive to God is still there, but that we have to grow into our new identity in God, and are enabled to become alive to God through the love that God has granted us.
There is always some part of religion that will be a series of rules to get it right and that is dogma to tell us what to do. John Piper, the famous Baptist preacher, says that Christianity is "not first and foremost a religion. It is first and foremost news." It is news that God has loved us and set us free through the death and resurrection of his only son, we are freed from our internal prisons. Jesus is the man who conquered death. Jesus brought us home, and because he did, we are in a relationship with him.
In Piper's own experience, the best worldly news he received in his life was the end of the Vietnam War, watching soldiers be reunited with their wives. Some soldiers were separated for up to five years. "I remember watching them run toward each other and seeing them sweep their wives off their feet. My heart leaped and my tears flowed when I watched that kind of reunion." We are saved by that grace of God, not by our ability to follow the rules by ourselves.
And when you have that kind of relationship with God, in his three forms, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are free. You are reunited. You don't need to compare yourself to others and ways they don't follow the rules anymore. You will not feel superior to anyone. You won't be bound by what other people think of you, as you are bound as the bride of Christ, and you will treat others with hope.
Let abiding by the law and by the rules be an outflow of God's grace and love and secondary goal rather than the primary goal. Galatians 5:14 tells us that the whole law is fulfilled in one word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," And 1 John 4:19 echoes the fact that "we love because he first loved us," so we receive love before we even have the capacity to follow the law.
Christianity is, above all else, about relationship and love, not rule-following.
