Common Rule

Legalism is the belief that the world hangs on what I do and that God and people love me based on how I perform. This is an important concept because it’s the exact opposite of the gospel: God loves us not because of what we do, but rather in spite of what we do—in spite of our good deeds and our bad deeds. Legalism takes the unmerited love of God and bends it into something earned—and just like that, the world is about us and not about him.

In the habits of embrace, we try to train our bodies and our hearts to love God as he actually is and to turn to our neighbor as we were made to do.

habits are how we get our hands on our purpose. I

Both saw habits as the gears by which to direct life toward the purpose of love

The way to freedom is through submission.

There, we tried to become gods by rejecting God’s authority and eating the forbidden fruit. In trying to free ourselves from our limitations, we brought the ultimate limitation of death into the world.

The key thing to notice here is how Jesus’ actions are the exact opposite of what humans did in the Garden of Eden

By surrendering his freedom for the sake of love, Christ saved the world. By surrendering our freedom to him, we participate in that love. We find our true freedom in the constraints of divine love.

I had lived my whole life thinking that all limits ruin freedom, when all along it’s been the opposite: the right limits create freedom.

The second reason is that it blinds us to what the good life really is. When we act out the “no-limits-none-ever” freedom liturgy, we assume that the good life comes from having the freedom to do whatever we want. So to ensure the good life, we have to ensure our ability to choose in each moment. But what if the good life doesn’t come from having the ability to do what we want but from having the ability to do what we were made for? What if true freedom comes from choosing the right limitations, not avoiding all limitations?