Can You Overcorrect from Legalism?

Overcorrecting After Legalism and the Danger of Deconstruction

Our experience through Theocast and personal life and pastoring, we have seen, you know, the famous phrase is overcorrecting. Overcorrection could cause a car to flip. But I understand because when there's a fear and there's adrenaline and there's like all of this passion, you can immediately go, I don't want anything to do with that.

And you rip so hard and you rip so fast, you don't, you're in new territory. And Justin and I have seen this actually implode people so much so that some of them, they've walked away from God's gift of the church and God's gift of the gospel.

They might still be believers. Some of them probably are. We know you can wander. I mean, we're having a guest speaker at our conference named Chad Bird who wandered from the faith for many years. Justin and I wanted to talk about what people I think have overcorrected into, what does that look like?

And then how do we, how do we deconstruct properly and end up pursuing something that's not a dirty word, Justin? It's not a dirty word. We both agree. Godliness is a good thing. Underneath a lot of.

Grace, Forgiveness, and Living in the Light

What you and I are calling unhealthy deconstruction is a manipulation of the principle of grace in order to convince ourselves that we can have peace with God without forgiveness. So let's not do that.

Let's not manipulate the principle of grace in order to convince ourselves that we can have peace with God and others without forgiveness. Until we are raised incorruptible and imperishable, we will commit real sins because we still have the corpse of that old man that we drag around.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Not that he doesn't have transgression, but it's forgiven. Not who doesn't have sin, but that it's covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.

Not that you don't have any iniquity, but that the Lord doesn't count it. Then the second part of verse two, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Well, what does that mean? For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me and my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

What does it mean to have a spirit in which there is no deceit? It means that I don't cover and hide my iniquity. It means that I confess it. I acknowledge it. I bring it into the light. I own it and I take it to God.

So we're not, do not hear me say that what we need to do is just talk about how we're all pieces of crap all the time and that I just need to go around self-deprecating all the time. And I'm just terrible.

It's not what I mean at all. I'm not dismissing any pain. I'm not dismissing any church hurt. I'm not dismissing any of that. And at the same time, in as much as it depends upon each of us, we need to have this posture about ourselves that I'm going to live in the light.

I'm going to trust Christ and cling to him. I'm going to confess my sin and own it. Because when I don't, and when I cover up my iniquity, all it does is kill me. I literally die inside. And it's not that I'm not forgiven.

It's not that I'm not justified. The Lord will keep me, but it's terrible for my life. And it's terrible for anybody around me. And so our encouragement is in light of Christ, because of him, because of freedom, because of peace and rest that we have in Jesus, let's live in the light and confess our sins and assess ourselves honestly and not always want to point the finger at others and not always just blame the church.

Avoiding Self-Righteousness and Embracing Spirit-Empowered Obedience

Even if you hate pietism and you hate legalism, it's easy to become extremely self-righteous because at least I haven't put pietism on people. At least I haven't put legalism on people. And so we have this upper ground on people.

It's almost like if you have been hurt, there's no way that you could hurt somebody else. And that's just not necessarily true. There is a purpose for the believer's life. Your obedience really, really matters.

Once you understand the significance of what your life is for, you want to deconstruct. Like, I need to get out of this junk. I need to get the car out of the garage and there's junk in the way. So let's get the clutter out so we can use the car the way it was intended to be used.

The new purpose of your life isn't just to indulge yourself with the flesh. That's the we were just liberated from. Do not return back to the indulgence of the flesh.

And don't be ruled by your passions and cravings like you were when you were dead.

By the way, this is spirit-empowered people. So you can have the spirit. Yeah. And this is why you and I hate pietism and worship salvation and all this junk because it's like, you know, well, if you're not living by the power of the spirit and you're not reflecting godliness, you're not saved.

It's like, well, then why are all these warning passages in the Bible, for crying out loud? They're not in there because Christians can't do them. They're in there because Christians can do them. Like we're doing this episode because Christians can actually live sinful lives and it's not good for you.

He has called you out of the kingdom of darkness, put you into the kingdom of light, and you are now projectors of light. Like that is the purpose of your life is to stop living like the world, live like Christ to liberate others as we live a constant life of seeking forgiveness, confessing our sins, teaching others how to seek forgiveness, confessing their sins.

The gospel leads us to the very thing that Peter is saying. He's saying, hey, you've been filled with this wonder. Now, this is how the wonder comes out of you. This is why it's called fruit. I love that the Bible uses the picture of fruit.

Oh, it's perfect.

Does the tree benefit from the fruit? No. Who benefits from fruit? Others.

Fruit does not make a tree alive.

No.

A tree has to be alive to produce fruit.

That's right.

So that's also beautiful. Anyway, all kinds of good things. It's like the Lord knew what he was doing and giving that illustration.

As Hebrew says, we're going to remove the weight and the sin. So if you're deconstructing, if you're taking, hey, my life was built around this sin. My life was built around this weight, legalism, pietism.

I'm going to pull that off and I'm going to reconstruct my life around Jesus. And we're here to say that is the proper perspective of deconstructing.