The Battle for the Middle
It is so easy to become a legalist. Even when you come out of such, you can slip back into it in so many ways. The craving for structure, the comfort of clear boundaries, the fear of being wrong—it all creeps back in before you know it.
Conversely, it is just as easy to become a liberal, even after you find your footing. The desire for freedom, for grace without tension, for a faith that feels light instead of heavy—it has a way of sneaking up on you too. Normally, such spiritually dark places as these come à la carte along with your personality. We tend to fall into one ditch or the other, depending on our natural bent.
The most difficult place to be is struggling in the middle, afraid either that you have compromised or that you’ve been too harsh. This middle ground is uncomfortable because it demands constant humility, self-examination, and reliance on God’s wisdom rather than our own inclinations. It’s not a place where you can rest on autopilot. There’s no certainty here outside of Christ, no simple checklist to follow. Just tension. Wrestling. Dependence.
The Doctrinal Battle
This played out for me just this past weekend when my son was baptized. I couldn’t baptize him myself because of a torn ligament, so someone else did it. A good man, full of excitement for the moment. But as I watched, I found my attention shifting—not toward the joy of what was happening, but toward whether or not it was done correctly.
Did he have my son make the right confession? I didn’t hear it. My son doesn’t even remember, caught up in the moment. Did the man use the right words—Father, Son, and Spirit? Did he renounce Satan? Did he know enough? Was he trained enough?
That creeping sense of doctrinal legalism started to take hold. I wasn’t doubting my son’s faith. I wasn’t even doubting the man’s faith. But I was questioning whether it was done right enough—as if somehow the power of the moment rested in the precision of the form, rather than in God Himself.
And then I had to step back.
I had to trust God. Trust my son’s faith. Trust that this man’s heart was in the right place. Trust that the power of baptism belongs to God, not to my careful evaluation of it. It was a moment of surrender, of letting go of that need to grip too tightly—that fear that if we don’t do it just right, it won’t count.
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The Moral Battle
And it’s not just doctrine. It’s morality too.
There are people you don’t even want to be around because they are so strict. You feel their gaze, their raised eyebrows, their unspoken judgment. You can feel the pressure before they even say a word. You don’t want to be that. You don’t want to become that.
But at the same time, you don’t want to swing the other way, falling in with people who shrug off sin as if it’s nothing. Where you’re welcomed as long as you don’t actually try to live righteously, because that would make things uncomfortable.
So you stand in the middle.
And the tension doesn’t go away. If anything, the tension itself is the sign that you’re still in the fight. Because the moment you stop feeling it, you’ve probably compromised in one direction or the other.
The Safe Place
Nevertheless, suffering the blows of both sides—being called a legalist by the lax and a liberal by the self-righteous—is often the safest place to be. Not because it’s easy, but because it keeps us leaning on the Lord rather than on our own sense of correctness. It’s where He refines us, where He teaches us, where He humbles us.
This is part of our battle.
