What is it like to step into the freedom of grace after leaving legalism?
Stepping out from the pressure of legalistic religion into grace is described as thrilling, like setting a bird free from its cage. A person once blinded can begin to see truth, eagerly study Scripture, and cannot get over it. The apostle Paul likewise was set free from Judaism’s demands after being weighed down by them.
Les explains that when a person comes out from underneath the pressure of a religion of legalism—the constant “you have to do this, you have to do that”—and steps into the freedom of grace, it is just like setting a bird free out of its cage. He illustrates this with a young man in the television audience from a distant state who came out of one of these binding religions. The man was so thrilled that he called time after time; he kept seeing another truth and could not get over it. He had been blinded to all this for so long, but now he had begun a Bible study on his own—by his third study he said he could not wait until tonight. Les says, “Well that’s the way it goes.” He then points to the apostle Paul, who had been weighed down with Judaism and all its demands as a religious leader, and was now set free. Paul had three years to shed himself of all that and to absorb what he later brings out in his prison epistles—Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon—probably revealed while he was in prison in Caesarea before Rome, so the new revelations were fresh when he wrote. In his earlier epistles too, these tremendous doctrines are separated from legalism and Judaism, yet all fits; it is not a thorn in the rest of Scripture.