Legalism says we can be good enough in and of ourselves, earning God’s favor by constant self-improvement. This denies the gospel and rejects the Bible, which says that God saves us and grows us, by his grace, through faith in Christ (Ephesians 2:4-10). The gospel is a message of radical grace and love: God in his love does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We cannot and are not required to change ourselves to earn his favor. God wants our hearts, not our perfection.
Nobody talks to you as much as you talk to yourself. Your mind, constantly filled with an internal dialogue, interprets the world around you. What do you think about this? What do you believe about that? With little effort, your mind continuously feeds thought after thought.
As we experience the world around us, we develop interpretations in the form of our beliefs and how we think life works. Whether we are aware of it or not, we develop beliefs about God, family, church, gender, sex, relationships, pleasure, and so on to help us navigate life. The problem is that our interpretations and beliefs are often tainted with perceptions and ideas that aren’t true. The result? Lies bang on the doors of our belief systems and invade our thought lives.
Living with the lies and messages that we believe is like breathing—we don’t even think about it. These automatic tapes in our internal dialogues can get stuck on repeat. As trials and pain seep in through the cracks of our experiences, we grapple to process our realities. Often when we can’t make sense of life, we become aware of how we view God. We begin to take inventory of our experiences. In our thoughts, we tally up the pain of our lingering sexual sin struggles, our deferred hopes, and our life circumstances that aren’t going as planned, and we start to consider what God has—or hasn’t—done for us in these situations. As we look through the lens of our experiences, we question, we doubt, we blame God, and we believe lies.
