his foolishness--or ours?

Forrest and I have been noticing lately that Timothy likes to talk about what we say he can and can't (mostly the latter) do. In fact, sometimes he construes what we say as a "no"...for instance, he'll ask for something, like cocoa, and we say, "Clean up your toys first" or "Take off your jacket first", etc. So he says, "Daddy say no cocoa?" It sometimes gets to where we have to tell him to stop talking about the thing, because he's focusing so much on what we tell him to do, that he doesn't do it. Augh.

But then...isn't this like us with our Heavenly Father? Forrest likened it to Phariseeism--caring so much about doctrines and externals that they became legalists. (Except--in Timothy's case, hopefully as he grows in grace, he'll be able to avoid legalism to an extent, Lord-willing, that we his parents can't, having the advantage of Christian heritage behind him.) And I said, don't you mean he's 'reformed'? We take a simple command or declaration of His and turn out all these doctrines, to explain what it means so that we're not "wrong" in our intellectual understanding. But in our endless talking about it, we forget to DO it. And for us, I think there's more behind it than is behind Timothy's childish reason. Ours is bigger foolishness, partly because we ought to know better, and partly because we do know that what all this is, is selfishness--pride. Wanting to know more than the "other" Christians...or something ridiculous like that. What is knowledge, though, if we don't know HIM? If we know "it"--a doctrine, a formula, whatever, and don't bother so much to know the Lord of it all, we've missed the point. The Word is personal. So personal that He is a Person.