Legalism and sin

This one's about sexual sin, but the negative affect of legalism applies to any sort of sin.

"Put up a sign warning people not to touch the wet paint, and what happens? A lot of fingerprints. In the same way, many men have stumbled into sexual sin because the height of the fence they built "around the law" stirs up in them a desire to climb the fence they built. This is not said in order to justify anything along the lines of "it is okay to lust a little." Rather the point is to show that "extra laws" to keep us away from sin usually do not have the effect of keeping us away from sin.

"Suppose a husband and wife are watching the evening news (the kids are in bed), and the story that comes up is all about salacious material on television elsewhere and asks the question, "Is this kind of thing good for our nation's kids?" The answer is no, of course not, but in pursuit of the inquiry, the newscast helpfully shows us fifteen seconds of some strippers somewhere bumping and grinding away. There are two possible problems here, one of them obvious. If the husband is thinking something along the lines of, "Oh boy, oh boy," then he has obviously got some weeds in his garden to pull up. But the other problem is if the wife throws herself in front of the screen and the husband hides under the afghan. This can create the formal "understanding" between the two of them that "we are mighty pious" and have "high standards," but it can also have the effect of creating an allure for this sort of thing that it would not otherwise have. Then that allure can come back in a bad way later — to just one of them."