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1 " In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity. "
― Criss Jami , Killosophy
2 " Going back to legalistic roots contaminates the blood of Jesus. "
― Sherry K. White
3 " These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief. "
4 " Christ is our Friend; He is also the Righteous King. God is our Father; He is also the Sovereign Lord. Christianity can be said to be both a religion and a relationship. You may often hear the cliché that it is not a religion, but a relationship only - which, I believe, is a bit too vague a statement - 'religion' has long had different meanings and implications depending on who you ask or where you are coming from. Honestly, it is sometimes the case that Christians like to think they are too cool and free and up-close and personal with God to be like other religions. Perhaps that could be argued, that could be the case, as it is written thus: 'You are no longer a slave to sin, but God's child.' So we might very well assert that Christianity is not at all some stale philosophy centered around legalistic guilt and empty rule-keeping, as the modernists so commonly define religion; although by other definitions we might as well be boasting that it is 'The Religion' simply by claiming that it is too real and too special to be deemed 'just another religion'. "
― Criss Jami , Healology
5 " To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. In our eagerness to get rid of the legalistic doctrine of works we have thrown out the baby with the bath and gotten rid of obedience as well. "
― A.W. Tozer , Paths to Power: Living in the Spirit's Fullness
6 " DID YOU KNOW that the UNBELIEVING, the FEARFUL and LIARS are no better than the MURDERERS, the SORCERERS and the IDOLATERS? In fact, they will all go to hell. The Bible says, " But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death." (Revelation 21:8). The Bible did not say those wearing jewelry and trouser will go to hell. Don't allow the religious and legalistic people to divert your heart from the real issues. Stop playing with sin. No sin is greater than another. All lead to hell fire. "
7 " The conscious attempt to be a good person without Christ is as legalistic as an attempt to make it into Heaven through empty religiosity. "
8 " We make a fatal mistake when we try to force Scripture to offer redemption to those who want to go to heaven but who don't want a relationship with the living God. By trying to offer some minimal standard of conduct that will allow them to qualify for salvation while continuing to to pursue their own agendas, we distort the gospel and destroy its power, and we concoct legalistic games to give them a false sense of security. "
― Wayne Jacobsen , He Loves Me!: Learning to Live in the Father's Affection
9 " The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes and Avicenna became heretics whose influence disappeared under the weight of rote preaching and practice. Islam as a result has a moral code, a legalistic system of right and wrong, but no evolved ethical tradition. "
― R. Joseph Hoffmann
10 " Ask Jesus to help you fully understand the joys of obedience. Also, ask Him how you can be a woman fully committed to obedience without slipping into a legalistic approach to life. We must always remember our goal is pursuing revelations of Him. Our focus can’t be just following rules but following Jesus Himself. "
― Lysa TerKeurst , Becoming More Than a Good Bible Study Girl
11 " And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest. "
― Bruce Bawer , Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity
12 " This wasn't a legalistic play. He simply wanted more and more of God. "
― Matt Chandler
13 " The attempt to understand morality in the legalistic terms of a natural law is ancient but is now mostly associated with the formulation given it by Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. All earlier natural law is commonly seen as leading up to Aquinas’s paradigmatic version, whereas later natural law is understood as deriving from it. "
― Knud Haakonsen
14 " Adams met with a convention on keeping the Sabbath and found the atmosphere surprisingly similar to that in Congress. Legalistic disputes so abounded that he found it difficult to keep order. "
― , John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life
15 " For Bonhoeffer, the relationship with God ordered everything else around it. A number of times he referred to the relationship with Jesus Christ as being like the cantus firmus of a piece of music. All the other parts of the music referred to it, and it held them together. To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by " rules" or " principles." One could never separate one's actions from one's relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. Legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate. "
16 " Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God's " curses" are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God's wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children. "
17 " But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent. "
― Richard A. Posner , How Judges Think
