Vaunt Not – Uses of the Law: Unlawful Uses (4)

Vaunt Not

Uses of the Law: Unlawful Uses (4)

1 Timothy 1:6, 7

Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.

It is unlawful not to use the Law of God. It is unlawful to use the Law as a means to salvation or to achieving a righteousness of our own. And it is unlawful to use the Law as a way of vaunting one’s status within the believing community.

The Law of God is a complex, mysterious, and beautiful body of divine wisdom, justice, and love. It is not easily mastered.

Yet it is the duty of every believer, as we shall see, to make proper use of the Law; and, in order to do so, we must understand the Law. For this we engage in personal reading and study. But we will also look to wise and experienced teachers for help. Yet any putative teacher of the Law who uses his position in order to boast about what he knows or to vaunt his knowledge above others has made the Law of God his own servant. And this represents a gross misuse of the Law.

The Law of God, as all of Scripture, intends to exalt and glorify God only. Any time we use the Word of God to impress others or to advantage ourselves over them, we have made the Law our servant, a means for our exalting, rather than God’s, and this is yet another unlawful use of the holy and righteous and good Law of God.

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Bookstore, then Church Issues.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.