Hey Parents, Don't raise a Pharisee

Carey Hardy, former Senior Executive Pastor at Grace Community Church, offers some good warnings for parents so that they don't raise their children up to be Pharisees. He begins:

The counterpart to the Pharisees today is the people who are afraid to allow Christians to live only with God’s Word. To biblical principles they add rules, regulations, and standards…and then come to the point of believing they are part of the Scriptures themselves.

This is the way it is for legalists—God lays down a principle, and then man reduces God’s great principle to a set of rules that may be burdensome but that certainly remove individual responsibility for making choices. Finally, man elevates rule-keeping to a mark of spirituality and judges himself and others by it.

He then offers a 12-step program to raising a Pharisee (so we can all be on our guard against these 12 steps).

HT: Justin Taylor