Guardrails in Action: How Context Keeps You Free | Ep. 104

Ever feel like you opened your Bible halfway through the story and were expected to have all the answers? In this episode, we unpack how legalism creeps into study and church culture—and how guardrails bring you back to grace. Through Paul’s message in Galatians, learn why “context before conclusions” protects you from fear, pride, and burnout. You’ll walk away with practical steps to study Scripture freely and confidently—no more rule-keeping or spiritual one-upmanship, just clear, Christ-centered growth.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome and Guardrails Tease
• 1:31 Defining Legalism Clearly
• 4:40 Galatians and the Problem of Judaizers
• 7:10 How Legalism Binds and How Guardrails Help
• 8:45 Guardrail #3: Don’t Join the Movie Halfway
• 10:45 Spotting Bad Interpretation Habits
• 13:10 Freedom in Context and Christ-Centered Reading
• 15:12 After-Party: Thanks, Contest Winner, and Why Study Matters
• 17:05 Rapture Predictions and The Call to Be Faithful

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is episode 104, and I'm your host, Latoya, and this is Equip the Next, where you get equipped to lead, disciple, and move the mission forward. So do you want to see one of the guardrails in action? You don't want to miss this. Um, I've mentioned my guardrails. I hope that you've downloaded them. They are free 99. Um, so feel free to subscribe and you can get those guardrails, I guess, immediately. Don't hesitate to do it. I really encourage you. They're just five simple, quick, easy guardrails to help you study with confidence. And I'm going to share one today. But before I get started in breaking that down, I thought it was important to define what legalism is. This is important because if you are using the guardrails and maybe you don't know what that means, this conversation will have you kind of confused, right? So I wanna briefly I looked up a definition, so give me a second. So I'm going to read to you just a basic definition and some key points to realize, and then I'm gonna go and segue into some scripture, of course, but I want to define legalism. So in Christianity, legalism, or I'm sorry, in Christian theology, legalism refers to an excessive or misguided reliance on laws, rules, or moral codes, particularly when these are seen as the basis for a person's acceptance before God rather than faith in Jesus Christ. I'm also going to give you the definition. So it says legalism is the belief or practice that one can earn God's favor, salvation, or righteousness through human effort, rule keeping, or religious performances. It emphasizes external obedience over inner transformation and grace. In simpler terms, a legalist tries to earn God's approval by what they do instead of trusting in what Christ has done. That in short is what legalism is. Now you have two different types of legalism. You have legalism that kind of focuses on the laws and all that stuff, and then you have legalism that focuses on um it's more, how do I say, it it focuses on doing things like, are you dressing this way, are you looking this way, are you acting this way? Um, and that's something that we put on ourselves, and I say we as just a whole, so no one feels, you know, like I'm picking on anybody. But that's in short what legalism is. Now the scripture reference that I'm going to, well, I'm not going to point to a specific scripture, but rather I'm going to refer to a book. There are many books that we could look at in the New Testament, but I'm going to point to Galatians because this starts, Paul starts it off and we kick it off and we see firsthand what legalism does. Now, if you want to know more about the book of Galatians, I would encourage you to listen to episodes 79 through 82. We go through the book of Galatians starting at episode 79. So if you're new to following, I would strongly encourage you to check those out as we go through. I'm not going to go through that here today, but I will kind of give you a synopsis of the people in Galatia. So you had what was called as these Judaizers who were legalists. And they even charged Paul of being a secondhand apostle. See, they put these stipulations on the church in Galatians and they said, hey, you know, you got to practice these laws, you got to do the laws of Moses and all these other things in order for you to be Christian. I'm I'm highly I'm just summarizing it, but this is essentially what Paul was up against. And this is how the letter opens up. And so when we go back and we look at the definition of legalism, and then we look at an example, and there's other examples, but looking at an example in the book of Galatians, we see how legalism has crept into the church even now, how it was back then, and how it binds people, it puts people in bondage, in my opinion. It puts people in bondage because you're always trying to catch up to the next thing. You're always trying to people please, and sometimes you even try to outdo yourself. But guardrails can protect you from that, and it doesn't have to involve legalism. So, where do guardrails fit in? When I'm talking about guardrails, if this is your first time, um, I've created five Bible study guardrails for confidence. You can um go to equipthenex.com forward slash freebie for that, or you can just um click on the link wherever you're listening to, there should be a website link that will point you to that. You can sign up and you'll get those guardrails immediately. But they're just five simple guardrails. And so, how does this fit in without being legalistic? So I'm gonna point out one of the guardrails on this sheet, number three in the checklist. It says, don't jump in to the movie halfway. Basically, before you claim a verse, read a few chapters around it, read a few chapters, maybe the whole book, depending on especially if it's a letter, get the full picture so you don't take the text out of context. See what guardrails does in this nutshell, and these are just guardrails that I came up with, but there are other guardrails out there, I'm pretty sure. But what guardrails do is they give you the confidence to study effectively and they remove legalism. A lot of times, people fall into legalism because they take scripture out of context, or they don't look at the full picture of the story, or they put themselves in the story, or they interpret scripture or text one way, and they think that everybody is supposed to interpret it that way, or they don't understand what the audio what the author was talking about. There's so many different reasons as to why people be can be legalistic, and so it's important to have those guardrails. So if I had to share, like how how do you spot bad interpretation habits? There's a lot of there's a lot of ways in which you can spot. I'm gonna give you one. One way that you can spot a bad interpretation habit, whether you're doing it or somebody around you is doing it, is if it's more a me-focused thing than a him-focused thing. If you find yourself reading into the text to put yourself in the text, if you find yourself hearing someone talk about the text and making it about them, and it doesn't point you to Christ, that might be a chance that they are not interpreting that passage correctly. Now, after you have studied the Bible and after you have understood the context, then you can go back and look at the application, but you don't go into it trying to get an application and you haven't even read it. And so a lot of times people put themselves in the text. I can attest to that in my real life, um, when guardrails worked for me, when I understood what the text was about. See, when I understood what the text was about, it freed me. I think it will, I'm gonna be honest, it took me about maybe two years to unlearn some stuff that I was taught in error. And once I unlearned it, I was able to learn the truth. And it was so freeing to be able to understand what I was reading. A lot of times, people may not understand what they're reading simply because they've been taught in error. Because the Bible, once you realize that the Bible is not about you, but it's about Him, it takes the guesswork out, it takes the pressure out, and it allows you to really understand who God is. That's the most important thing, is understanding who God is, his sovereignty, the fact that he gave his son for us. That's a gift. And so I challenge you to take yourself out of the equation and put God in. So guess what? Challenge, pick one of the guardrails and apply it this week. If you haven't got the guardrails already, what are you waiting for? Get them, download them, it's free. Bless you. Okay, so we're gonna do after party set or um overflow. I'm not done yet. First, I want to announce the winner of the contest, and the winner is Ann Brooks. So thank you so much for commenting on the YouTube channel because we're also on YouTube. So um, check your email for your gift. It's a small token, but I just want to thank you, and I want to thank everybody for listening. I really do, I really appreciate it. Um, it means a lot to me. So thank you so much. Now, let's talk a little bit. No script. This is just me. If you stuck around this long, thank you. I figured I should probably, you know, you want to get to know me a little bit because people are listening from all over the place. So thank you so much. Um so I'm gonna be talking about something, and I'm gonna share something that's coming up next week. So, anywho, um why the why studying the Bible is so important to me. I love studying the Bible and I love teaching other people how to study the Bible correctly. It's it's something that is a passion of mine, and we had a recent event or lack thereof that just solidifies that. So if you are in the, I don't know if this was a states thing or if this was all over the world, I don't know. But it is now, by the time you're listening to this, it'll be October 8th, 2025. And for the umpteenth time, people were talking about the rapture was coming that was supposed to be September 25th or 26th, depending on where you are. There were people that were in the um, I think some people were in the forest or something like that, waiting and shouting and whatever the case may be. And God, you know, just I pray for those people because this is why reading and studying the Bible is important, because the Bible clearly says that no man knows when he's coming. Yet people still out of fear, out of desperation, they still predict when Jesus is coming. I mean, literally, and this happens every so often, and it happened last month. This is why I go hard when it comes to studying the word. I just, I don't know. I love it, and I want to encourage you to just join in in the conversation. You know, we don't know the times and seasons. We don't, only God knows that. We can prepare, we can be productive, not idle, and we can be about our father's business and allow him to use us to minister, to disciple others. And so with that being said, um I invite all my listeners, my new, my new my new listeners, you'll know you're new because you you never like met me via Zoom or anything, and you just started coming. You never talked to me. You're probably new. So all of my new listeners, I invite you. I'm going to be having a Zoom party that will go out next week. We're having it next week. I don't know the date offhand, it's written down somewhere. But we're having a Zoom party next week where we are going to map out our goals for 2026 with God in mind. We're going to put God first. And um, it's a journaling party. So if you're into journaling, bring your notebook, pencil, whatever. We're gonna be journaling. It's really exclusively for the people who um attended my um Bible Foundations course. But I also wanted to extend it to new people who are listening to um the podcast. So you can get to know me. Um, I can get to know you, you could meet other people. So it's gonna be small, gonna be intimate, but we are going to be journaling together. We're gonna put God first, and I'm just super excited, and I just want to extend this invite. Um, if you're subscribed already, then you'll get notified. If you haven't got notified yet because you do have to register, you can just email me at hello at equippedhenext.com and just let me know and I will make sure that you get that invite. But I, you know, if you can come, I greatly appreciate it. If not, I completely understand. But bless you anyway. Thank you so much. And we'll talk again soon.