Saturday, August 24, 2002
From Erwin McManus' book
An Unstoppable Force
When we sense the dissipation of our ethos, we begin to undergird it by establishing more laws and more rules. And that has been the experience of the church. In seeking to keep people moving in a common direction, the church has become far too dependent on rules, guidelines, and laws. One of the unusual things about a commonly held belief or value is that the law or the rule isn't necessary to keep people within its boundaries. If you have to try to make someone do something, then you have a real problem. As long as you're making people do things, it implies that they don't want to. This may work with children, but it is destined to fail with adults. When the church neglects the development of ethos, legalism rules.
How true! What irony there . . . the people in church lack the desire to pursue God in a genuine
and personal way, so they legislate it. Then when voices come along that attempt to free them from the chains of this legalism, they rebel and insist that they love their chains.
Perhaps prison is the safest place of all . . . nobody would ever try to break in, would they?
