The “spirit of the law” spoken of in the New Testament is revealed in a believer through the Holy Spirit, not through self-indulgence or self-righteousness, not, in fact, through “self”-anything but through God. Knowledge of the difference between the letter and the spirit of the law is at the very core of the new life granted to the children of God. It is part of the freedom bought for us at the cross and absolutely essential to fully experiencing that freedom. The opposite errors of legalism and license that have plagued so many Christians through the centuries are both derived from a functional ignorance of what Jesus came to free His people from, and both lead to spiritual bondage.

In legalism this ignorance manifests itself in the futile attempt to earn our way to God through self-righteous moral scrupulosity. Such scrupulosity may be based on codes of conduct obvious or seemingly implicit in either the Old or New Testaments, but in each case it is manifested by works that originate in the self rather than in the power of God. The motivation behind legalism is often found in a combination of pride and fear of punishment instead of the love of Christ. Because of this faulty motivation those caught up in it cannot please God no matter how holy they may outwardly appear. They are out of touch with the kindness of God, the only thing that leads to true repentance. People who are bound up in legalism have bypassed the cross to their own harm as well as the harm of those under their sway; to be given over to legalism is to exhibit the same alienation from the Son of God for which the Pharisees were condemned..

Licentiousness, on the other hand, shows an ignorance of the continued destructive power of sin. This is the error that says Jesus came to abolish the law rather than fulfill it; to be licentious is to be morally self-indulgent, to commit sins, big and small, in the mistaken belief that someone can avoid sin’s deadly wages because they have been released to do so by grace. But as Paul said in Romans “Are we to sin so that grace shall abound? God forbid!” (Romans 6:1-2). License does not prove freedom from the law of God, only defiance of that law. Its end is the same slavery to sin that held us before we came to Christ and, like unrepented legalism; unrepented licentiousness begs the question of whether we ever really came to know Him at all.

Standing over and against both these destructive errors is the state of living in harmony with the “spirit of the law”. This is the hallmark of the truly surrendered and Spirit-filled Christian (Romans 8:9). Such a person is no longer ruled by the opposite poles of self-centeredness apparent in both legalism and license, but by the Spirit of Christ Himself. This kind of believer is not sinless, no Christian this side of Heaven is, but the law is in the process of being written on his or her heart. This can only happen when the Holy Spirit has so shifted our attention off ourselves that Jesus is before our spiritual eyes more than we are. He then fulfills His law of love in us and progressively makes us holy as He is holy. We come to embody the fulfillment of the law that our Lord and Savior achieved on Calvary. True freedom from sin is the lasting fruit of this fulfillment. The “spirit of the law” now becomes resident in our deepest hearts and we are set free to live the kind of truly moral life that we once tried to either simulate or reject (Galatians 5:16-24).