When a Lordshipper asks, “what are you just saying I can do whatever I want and still be saved?” I have found that they are secretly looking for permission whether they know it or not.
Please understand that this is not intended as an insult but is a sad reality that I have observed. Someone who denies the gospel of grace and does not believe it, is not regenerated. Or if they are regenerated, because they have fallen from grace, they are insulated from the Spirit as their only source for any chance of overcoming sin.
Without the Gospel, and the regenerated human spirit, they don’t have the new nature that motivates and constraints them entirely because of love for Jesus. They have the law and its terrors as their motivation. Jesus is distant, and a hard master. So they are left to fight their flesh with the flesh. The flesh never stops lusting, thirsting, and hungering.
After I was saved for about 15 years, I found myself in a church of zealous young reformed believers. This was the first time I had ever met anyone who claimed to be a Christian but openly stated that we were under the moral law as a “rule of life”. Most of the legalism that I had encountered was more subtle than that. This was (to me) a new breed of people who were clearly ignorant of the main themes of scripture but were zealous and insisted on identifying themselves as Christian.
What was interesting to me about this group was that they were very intellectually oriented and loved debate. Also, they seemed to be looking for kany excuse to indulge the flesh and find the “boundaries of what was permissable”. They loved vaping, microbreweries, beer halls, wine, smoking pipes and cigars. There was absolutely no semblance of sanctification, they were actually the worldliest Christian group I had encountered. Please understand that I had only experienced the charismatic church for 9 years, and then I was in a very small group of isolated believers who had separated themselves from Christianity as just another part of the World. I admittedly had a legalistic view of separation from the world, so I hadn’t encountered this before and it was shocking to me. At the time I thought these people were really lukewarm, but how could I judge? I was backslidden and trying to recover myself. But I could not agree with their doctrine.
They were very nice, but very worldly, and yes. they were trying to keep themselves in what was “permissable” and they had a lot of debates about it. Everything was framed in the law. What could they get away with? Moderation was key. They were trying to moderately flirt with indulging the flesh. They were ignorant of the law of sin that lurks in the members to take them captive and make them do its will.
Since then I’ve learned that many of these people end up committing gross sin eventually. These perhaps through their fall are now in a position to reach out and grasp ahold of grace since its the only hope they have.