The Fortress of the Spirit

The spiritual government of the home requires us to reject both legalistic bondage and fleshly license, establishing instead a household of liberty governed by scriptural clarity, charitable preferences, and protective standards.

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1).

The Rail on the Deck

Every working boat that goes out of Bayou La Batre is built with a rail around her deck. Ask the man who works that deck at night what he thinks of it. The boards pitch under his feet, slick with rain and diesel, and the water alongside is black. A deckhand will complain about the weather, the cook, and the price of shrimp before morning, but you will never hear him complain that the rail restricts his freedom. He knows what it is for. He leans on it, he works against it, and on some rough night it is the difference between finishing the trip and going over the side.

Take that same rail indoors and it changes its name. Let a father set a boundary inside his household, a curfew, a standard of dress, a rule about what comes through the front door, and the rail no man resents at sea is suddenly called a prison. The young call it bondage. The father half believes them and grows quiet about his standards for fear of being thought narrow.

He is caught, and he knows it. Preach the necessity of standards and the carnal mind cries legalism. Preach the reality of our freedom in Christ and the rigid mind cries compromise. A man who sets out to satisfy both accusers will end up with no house at all. I intend to demonstrate that the Bible refuses both charges, and that it refuses them by a distinction most homes have never learned to make. A home that tears out its rails does not become a free home. It becomes a bare deck, waiting on weather.

Two Ditches and a Straight Road

Three paths lie open to a household, and two of them are ditches.

The first ditch is legalism: the attempt to govern a home and cultivate the spiritual life by external pressure and the works of the flesh. The word is thrown at anything that asks anything of anybody. Legalism is not the presence of standards. Every orderly home has rules, and a man who calls his father legalistic for saying the children will be home by ten has simply learned a convenient word. Legalism is the belief that keeping the rules makes a person spiritual. It is dependence upon the flesh to produce what only the Spirit can accomplish.

In the home where performance is the only currency, the father lays down a rigid code and measures his fathering entirely by outward compliance. There is no warmth in it, no joy, and no conversation about mercy; there is only the standing weight of demand. The children conform while they are small because they have no choice. But their hearts fill with resentment, and the hour they find independence they throw the whole code overboard, because they never had anything in them but the code. Such a father is cultivating conduct rather than character, and conduct is all he will ever get. A house run this way produces, at best, obedient strangers, and the sowing decided the harvest: “he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption” (Galatians 6:8).

The second ditch is license: the throwing off of all boundaries, permitting the flesh to rule under the pretense of grace. The young man reared under legalism very often ends here, because when he despairs of the rules he does not walk to the middle of the road; he runs to the far ditch. He claims his liberty, rejects every standard his parents held, and begins to live in open conformity with the world.

But parents fall into this ditch too, and they usually fall in gently. In the name of Christian freedom they let the values, the entertainment, and the philosophy of a secular culture come into the house unchallenged, and they tell themselves that this is what love looks like. The Bible is not vague about it. It warns of men “turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness” (Jude 4). Grace is not a permission slip for the flesh. It came teaching the opposite: “Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:12). A home without boundaries is not a household of liberty. It is a household of carnal indulgence with a Bible on the shelf.

The straight path between the two ditches is neither the flesh straining nor the flesh indulged. It is the flesh crucified. Paul said, “I am crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20), and again, “they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts” (Galatians 5:24). That crucifixion has two parts: the finished work of Christ on the cross, and the daily choice of the believer to put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit.

Push a locomotive along its track by hand and you will strain, sweat, and scarcely move it. That is legalism, the labor of the flesh trying to reach the standard of the law by muscle. Take the same engine off the rails because the crew has decided the rails confine it, and it sinks to its axles in the open field and is ruined where it stands. That is license. Light the firebox, get the steam up, and leave it on the rails, and it is not fighting the track at all. The track is not its prison; it is the channel of its power and the condition of its safety.

Convictions, Preferences, and Standards

Most household quarrels about rules are not really quarrels about rules. They are the result of a father never having sorted three different things into three different piles. A man must learn to distinguish convictions, preferences, and standards, and to treat each one according to its own weight.

A conviction is a settled persuasion resting on the unchanging authority of God’s word. It is not a strong feeling and it is not a family habit; it is a position a man holds because the Bible holds it. Convictions are built on two things: precepts, which are direct commands, and principles, which are the truths underneath the commands. That second half matters. A man who will obey a plain command but ignores an obvious principle is not being careful with the Bible; he is hunting a loophole to satisfy the flesh. When the Bible says “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 6:19), a father does not need a separate verse naming every place that body should not be taken.

A preference is a choice in an area where the Bible has not spoken definitively. One family in an assembly educates its children at home; another does not. Those decisions belong to the realm of preference, and Paul’s rule in such things is “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). What keeps the peace is this: what is a conviction in one household may be only a preference in another. In these matters we owe one another charity, room for a difference of administration, and no verdict at all, “for God hath received him” (Romans 14:3).

It is also no compromise of faith to submit to another man’s preferences when you are under his authority. A soldier in the barracks may think the drill tedious, and may have private opinions about the angle of his bunk and the shine of his boots. But if he rebels at those, he is no use on a battlefield, because the small discipline was never about the boots. It was training a will to answer a command. A child who cannot yield to a rule that costs him nothing will not yield to one that costs him everything.

A standard is a boundary set to protect a conviction. You will not keep your convictions long without them. A standard is the guardrail at the top of the cliff, and the guardrail is not the same thing as the cliff. If a man holds the conviction that he will be faithful to his wife, he will build standards around it: he will not travel alone with another woman, and he will not keep a screen in his house that nobody else is free to look at. The standard is not the conviction and must never be mistaken for it. It is the fence that keeps a man from finding out how close to the edge he could have walked.

Four rules keep a standard in its place. First, set them well back from the edge, because a boundary drawn at the last safe inch is not a boundary. Second, never make the standard the main issue of your spirituality; a fence has never changed a human heart, and a father who measures his godliness by the height of his fences has exchanged one sin for a prouder one. Third, imposed standards must become invited standards. A rule your grown child keeps only because you are watching has already failed. Fourth, do not tear down a fence until you know why it was built. When a man pulls down the fence of modesty in the name of liberty, he does not receive liberty in exchange; he receives the world, which was waiting on the other side.

Not one father reading this would allow an unmarried couple to share a bedroom under his roof; he would put them in separate rooms without apology and think nothing of the awkwardness. Yet many of those same fathers will sit the family down in the evening and watch that very thing acted out on a screen in the living room, and never think of it as a breach of anything. The conviction is real. The standard has a hole in it the size of a television.

The Law of Charity under the Roof

There is a danger on the other side of all this, and Paul spends a whole chapter on it. A man who has sorted his convictions correctly and built good standards can still ruin a household, if he governs it without love.

Paul’s rule is plain: “Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations” (Romans 14:1). The strong believer is the one who rightly understands his freedom under grace. The weak believer is the one whose conscience is still tied to unnecessary rules, and who has quietly attached his personal preferences to his standing before God. Every household contains both temptations. The strong are tempted to look down on the weak as small, though their business is not to display what they may do but to carry what a brother cannot. The weak are tempted to judge the strong as worldly. The Bible does not leave the stronger man neutral, “We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves” (Romans 15:1), and it cuts both temptations off at the root by saying that God has received them both. We have no authority to reject a man God has accepted, and “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant?” (Romans 14:4) is a question with no good answer.

Then Paul turns the whole business of judging around and points it home: “Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way” (Romans 14:13). If we must exercise judgment, we are to exercise it on ourselves. A stumblingblock is a careless use of liberty that trips another believer. An occasion to fall is a liberty pressed until the weaker man follows it against his own conscience, and Paul names the outcome plainly: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak” (Romans 14:21).

A father may have genuine liberty to take up a certain activity, or to bring a certain thing into his house, and be perfectly able to handle it himself. But if the exercise of that liberty wounds his wife’s conscience, or teaches his children an appetite they are not yet able to govern, he is not walking charitably, whatever his rights are. And the ground of the whole argument is not household harmony. It is the cross: “Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died” (Romans 14:15). If the Saviour laid down His life to redeem that weaker person, a man ought to be able to lay down a preference.

Christian maturity is not measured by the liberty a man displays. It is measured by the readiness with which he surrenders it for somebody who cannot yet carry it.

A Liberty the Law Never Gave

The law was given to Israel. It was never given to the Body of Christ, and we are not under it: “ye are not under the law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14). That single fact settles what the standards of a Christian home are, and, more importantly, what they are not.

Household standards are not law and can never become law.

Standards do not sanctify. They protect convictions, which is a genuine and necessary service, but a fence has no power to change what is inside it. A family can be fenced to the horizon and be dead.

Standards earn nothing. The Galatian error was not that those believers had rules; it was that they expected the flesh to finish what the Spirit had begun. “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3). A man who keeps a standard in order to secure something from God has stopped keeping a standard and started paying a debt that was settled at the cross.

Standards are household government, not divine command, and therefore they cannot be demanded of another man’s house. Good men do the damage here, and they do it while quoting the Bible. A father has every right to govern his own home and no right whatever to legislate for his brother’s. That is precisely the abuse Romans 14 was written to stop.

And grace is not a permission. Liberty has an express limit written into the same sentence that grants it: “ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13).

One more error must be refused here, because it circulates freely and it is deadly in a home. Some teach that a man’s good works are the proof that he belongs to God, so that a family’s performance becomes the evidence of its salvation. That is not the gospel, and it will crush a household. Works are not the ground of salvation: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Neither are works the proof of it, and the objection comes here with a verse in its hand. James writes “shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works” (James 2:18), and asks, “Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?” (James 2:21). Note who is being shown. One man shows another man. Paul takes up that same Abraham and draws the line where the Bible draws it: “For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God” (Romans 4:2). Two courts, and a verdict in one of them is not a verdict in the other. Before men a man may justify his faith by his works, and only so far as men can see; before God there is no such transaction at all, for “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight” (Romans 3:20). The Lord Himself set the two courts side by side: “Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts” (Luke 16:15).

Judas Iscariot ends the argument. He was numbered with the twelve and sent out with them (Matthew 10:1-4), he was trusted with the bag (John 12:6), and on the last night the other eleven could not pick him out of the room; “they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?” (Matthew 26:22). Before men his works were unanswerable. Before God, “one of you is a devil” (John 6:70).

Your children should keep the standards of your house because they are good and because they honor God, not because they are anxiously demonstrating to themselves that they are saved.

The Legacy of Rechab

Fathers, you are the sentries of your households. You cannot lead a family while asleep at the post, and you cannot lead one while shifting your own convictions every time the flesh finds them inconvenient.

Consider the Rechabites, in Jeremiah 35 as a monument to this whole subject. Jonadab the son of Rechab set a standard for his household. His descendants were to drink no wine, build no house, sow no seed, and plant no vineyard, but to dwell in tents all their days (Jeremiah 35:6-7). It was a standard of total separation from a corrupt culture, and the Bible nowhere says God commanded it. It was a father’s rule for a father’s house.

Jonadab himself rode in Jehu’s chariot the day the house of Baal came down: “Come with me, and see my zeal for the LORD” (2 Kings 10:16). Jeremiah met his sons in the days of Jehoiakim king of Judah, with the army of the Chaldeans already in the land (Jeremiah 35:1, 11). Twelve reigns came and went in Jerusalem between that chariot and those pots, from Athaliah to Jehoiakim, and the tents were still up. The prophet set before those sons “pots full of wine, and cups” in the house of the LORD and said, “Drink ye wine” (Jeremiah 35:5). They refused. Their answer was not that they disliked wine, and not that a prophet had no right to ask. It was this: “We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of Rechab our father commanded us” (Jeremiah 35:6). And God held up that household as a rebuke to a whole nation that would not obey Him.

Those sons had never met Jonadab. What they inherited was not simply a rule, because a bare rule does not outlive twelve reigns. Note how they answer, and whose voice they say they are obeying: “Thus have we obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab our father in all that he hath charged us” (Jeremiah 35:8). The obedience was in their own mouths, not on their father’s tombstone. The imposed standard had become an invited one, which is what almost no household achieves.

Set that beside the house we examined in Solomon and His Sons, where a father wrote perfect rules and lived against them, and the kingdom was rent in the next generation. The difference is not the quality of the rule. Jonadab’s rule about tents is a smaller and stranger thing than anything in the book of Proverbs. The difference is that one father kept his own standard and the other did not.

So do the work of sorting. Learn which of your household rules are convictions with the Bible under them, which are preferences you are entitled to hold and not entitled to impose, and which are standards guarding something you have determined not to lose. Then keep them yourself, out loud, where the children can see it, and tell them why the fence is where it is. A rail is not a prison. On a black night with the deck pitching underfoot, it is the only friend you have.

The message this article came from was preached at Victory Baptist Church and the audio is on SermonAudio: Galatians 5:1 | Order, Charity, and Liberty under the Roof.

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com