Part 1 - My Story
Part 2 - A Biblical Theology of Offending Your Brother
Part 3 – How to Offend a Legalist and Not Sin

Part 3 – How to Offend a Legalist and Not Sin

This is the part we’re bound to struggle with since it can too easily turn into the wrong kind of offense. You have to do the work of discernment before stepping into the water. You need to make sure you’re in the presence of a genuine legalist. A genuine legalist is someone who wants to exercise control for no other reason than to have power over another believer.

You should feel free to offend a genuine legalist in any way your conscience allows. In fact the opposite (playing by your legalist friend’s rules) give tacit approval to his faulty formula for salvation (Faith in Jesus + [NOT doing this or that] = salvation). Once you’ve approved the formula by which it’s determined who is and isn’t a Christian, watch out –  more plus (+) signs are sure to follow.

How much light could this have brought to the small-church, selectively legalistic bubble I was living in? Plenty.

1. I could have had a much less burdened conscience.
I had to live with head knowledge of truth and a conscience that was trained to deny that truth in some ways. Some things we did weren’t wrong but we were counseled not to do them anyway on the grounds that some people found them to be a “stumbling block.”

2. I could have done a lot less second-guessing.
Was the way I was dressing and cutting (on not cutting) my hair really offending people or did they just want me to be a slave to their preferences? I battled this constantly. In retrospect I don’t think there was a single person who was genuinely, biblically offended.

3. When someone is offended by everything, inevitably there are things you allow yourself to do that are genuinely offensive.
It may not be a completely conscience decision, but a heart that is told too often that it’s doing wrong starts to feel like it can’t do anything right anyway, so why not do something really wrong? (Not claiming victim status here, BTW)

4. Offense as a tool was never offered as an option.
That we could have – as Carson describes – wisely used offense as a tool AGAINST legalism would have spared the turmoil of the above three points and probably kept us a bit more “on the path” at times when we were feeling the frustration of point #3 above. When you give people too many things to rebel against they’ll act accordingly.

(I’ve always thought my dad was very wise in this through my teenage years, eben though he was in the unenviable position of being the pastor of the church AND the father of the kid that made a habit of “offending” people. He set boundaries for me but only when needed – and not so many that I couldn’t step out of the house without breaking one. Love ya, Dad!)

So in the end, as long as you’ve done the work of discernment and are sure you’re not offending for the sake of your own pride and ego, you should be able to go forward, with much prayer, and make this your slogan:

“Hard-core legalists.

May God bless ‘em as I offend ‘em.”