How Do You End an Argument? Call Your Opponent a Legalist!

Many years ago when I taught adult Sunday school at a church in North Idaho I tried to include Scripture memorization as part of our class structure. Mind you, the class was made up mostly of married couples, ranging in ages from the mid twenties to late thirties, and there were about 6 couples plus a few single people. At any rate, I soon found myself facing a minor rebellion when some people took offense at my obvious attempt to impose my legalism upon them. Some people stopped coming to class and others refused to participate, which was fine since it was always proposed as a voluntary thing in the first place! Another little bit of background information is that our class was about one hour and fifteen minutes, so there was plenty of time to review a few verses together AND open up our Bibles to study from the text (we were studying Genesis at the time). And finally, one significant if baffling factoid is that many of the people in the class were involved with the AWANA program, where...ummm...kids are expected to memorize Scripture! And, oh yeah, one member was also the director of the Baptist Student Ministry on the college campus! Go figure.

Well after a number of weeks of this, I set aside the regular lesson to address the concerns of the people in the class. I took as my text for that morning John 14:15, in which Jesus declares that if we love Him we will keep His commandments. I won't repeat the entire lesson here but I tied it into the need to memorize Scripture as a means of remaining obedient. For example, as we face particular temptations, having memorized Scripture which addresses that sin issue will help us to avoid committing it. Well the class never jumped onboard with my idea, and we did indeed lose members to other classes...but that was fine. Others joined, and while my class never grew to its former size, it was made up mostly of people who were of one mind. As a side note, however, I will point out the focus of SBC churches by mentioning that within weeks I'd been moved to a tiny cramped room in the back of the church...my former room being taken over by a class that was much smaller than mine! :)

Well...this entire point serves as a mere introduction to a fantastic post by those pesky Pyromaniacs, who have once again written such an excellent post that they leave me no choice but to link to them and encourage my few readers to head on over there and check it out!

So please do so by following this link! And if you get a chance, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.