I wonder whether Dave would have ever noticed, without me pointing it out here, that the one he accuses of teaching that one can "sin with impunity" was the one calling him on the carpet about lying? Probably not.
In any case, I've been working on the following essay in response to this whole topic. Whether Dave ever reads it and gets anything out of it is beyond my control. I didn't create it for him. I learn by writing. It is my desire to know, for my own sake, that I know not only what I believe, but why I believe it. This "sin with impunity" charge always gets my heart rate up because it's so false from so many different directions. Dave, and others that have similar reactions to our doctrine, seem to think that Mid-Acts hamartiology amounts to pretending that sin doesn't exist.
Full disclosure: I passed this through an AI for editing sake. It made a few modest alterations but not enough to alter the meaning of anything. That is to say, the only things it changed had to do with spelling, grammar and slight wording alterations for "flow".
Righteousness Apart from the Law: Why We Do Not Teach That Believers Can Sin with Impunity
People throw this charge at us all the time, and it is pretty predictable. If we are not under the law anymore, if every sin is already forgiven, if our righteousness is only in Christ and not in how well we perform, then what is to stop a person from just doing whatever they want and calling it grace?
The problem with that question has to do with what it presupposes. The law was never the thing that made people righteous or produced real moral living in the first place. Scripture calls the law holy, just, and good, but its main job was never to transform anyone. It was there to expose sin, to name it clearly, and to hold the sinner accountable. It could diagnose the disease, but it could not provide the cure. It never gave the life or power needed to actually obey what it demanded. If the law could have produced righteousness, Israel’s track record would have proven it. Instead, it proved the exact opposite. All those perfect commands still could not create the obedience they required.
A Mid-Acts view just takes this seriously and follows it all the way through to its logic conclusion. The believer is not under the law because the law was never meant to make us righteous to begin with. It was like a mirror. It showed us what was really there, but it had no power to change what it reflected. It could command, threaten, and condemn, but it could not impart life. And without life, real righteousness is impossible.
Once you are placed in Christ, everything changes. Righteousness is not something you chase anymore through effort and discipline. It is something you already possess because you are joined to Him. You do not stand before God based on how well you measure up to a standard. You stand there on the basis of how well Christ measured up to THE standard. You stand before God based on Christ's righteousness, which is now counted as yours. Your whole identity has shifted, and so has the ground of how you relate to God and to right and wrong.
That is usually when the objection comes up almost automatically. If the law is gone, then morality goes with it. Anything goes! But what actually disappears is not morality, but rather the mistaken idea that morality was ever rooted in the law in the first place. Law reflects morality. It does not create it.
Morality is about what actually sustains and promotes life. It is about what lines up with the way reality is built. Evil is what corrupts, twists, and eventually destroys. That is not some made-up definition that depends on a written code. Life itself is the standard. Actions are moral or immoral based on whether they build up that life or tear it down. (To answer some who might insist the God is the standard - You aren't following the logic. God Himself is Life Itself. (see
Deuteronomy 30:15,
Proverbs 11:19 and elsewhere.)
When the law says do not murder, do not steal, do not commit adultery, it is not inventing moral truth out of nowhere. It is pointing out behaviors that destroy trust, relationships, and life itself. The command is descriptive before it is prescriptive. It is telling the truth about how things really work, and warning us away from what carries real consequences. Once you see that, taking the law away does not remove morality. It removes the middleman and puts you in direct contact with reality. The question stops being which rule applies here and becomes what actually leads to life vs. what leads to destruction?
This is why love ends up being so much more than just avoiding the "thou shalt not" list. Love is not rule-keeping. It acts and moves with real intention toward the good of the other person in ways that protect and build life. It deals with reality instead of checking boxes. A guy might not steal because he is afraid of getting caught or punished. That does not say much about whether he actually cares about people. But another man who works hard, provides, and gives of himself for others, that is coming from a different place. He is operating out of an understanding of what is genuinely good, not just external compliance.
This is where the whole accusation that grace leads to loose living starts to fall apart. People who really grasp grace usually see sin more clearly, not less. They see it for what it is: not just breaking a rule, but an attack on life, on relationships, on the things that make human flourishing possible. Sexual sin illustrates this with particular force. That is why those of us who preach grace are often so firm about it. It is not about abstract rule-breaking, but about taking something that God designed to give life and twisting it into something destructive. The fallout does not stay with the individual, but spreads into families, churches, and the whole fabric of society itself. A group of believers who understand this cannot treat it casually. When they confront it or even remove someone who refuses to repent from it, it's not us slipping back into legalism. On the contrary, its us protecting life and relationships inside the body. It is not an act of law but of love.
The believer’s motivation for their own actions changes at a deep level. You are not trying to earn acceptance anymore. You are not constantly measuring yourself against a performance standard. You start from acceptance, and that freedom lets you face reality honestly. You do not have to defend or minimize your sin because the fear of condemnation is gone. What you get instead is a life of real responsibility instead of mere rule-following. It's discernment instead of checklists and a kind of love that is rooted in truth and aimed at what is actually good.
Here's something that our accusers never seem to notice. Paul himself faced the exact same accusation. People said he was teaching that we should sin so that grace could abound even more. The critics twisted his message of free grace into license. In that sense, those of us who hold a Mid-Acts position are in very good company! We are hearing the same charge that was leveled at the apostle Paul. On the other hand, those who insist that believers must obey the Ten Commandments and who accuse us of teaching that we can sin with impunity will never, ever face that accusation themselves. No one has ever accused them of preaching sin that grace may abound. It wouldn't ever occur to anyone to make such an accusation. Their message simply does not lend itself to that kind of misunderstanding. That fact alone ought to make our accusers pause and ask which message is actually closer to the one Paul proclaimed.
The idea that you can sin freely under grace only makes sense if you have a shallow view of both sin and grace. Sin has built-in consequences that are baked into reality: damaged relationships, broken trust, personal destruction, even physical death. Grace does not magically erase those consequences. It removes condemnation before God and restores fellowship with Him, but it also lets you see sin clearly for the first time, without all the excuses. A man who knows he is fully forgiven does not have to hide his sin or dress it up. He can call it what it is. And that kind of honesty usually produces seriousness, not carelessness. Where the law could only bring the fear of punishment, but we have not been given a Spirit of fear but of love! Faith works by love! (
Galatians 5:6)
Righteousness is not something you build by keeping commandments. Morality is not created by having a code. Righteousness is a Person, the Lord Jesus Christ. And real morality flows from the kind of life He embodies. When you put all this together, the supposed contradiction vanishes. People who are not under the law can still be deeply committed to righteousness, not because they are ruled by a list of rules, but because they have been given life in the One who is the source of it, and they understand what aligns with that life.
So why is this accusation so commonly where discussions about Mid-Acts Dispensationalism is being debated? It's because this kind of clarity does not just happen in generic Christianity. It comes from seeing certain distinctions in Scripture that a lot of people either miss or deliberately blur. What I have laid out here fits most naturally and consistently inside a Mid-Acts dispensational understanding. Not because other views cannot say some of the same things, but because they do not have the structural foundation that lets all the pieces fit together without there being a constant tension that is produced by a subtle double-mindedness (sometimes not so subtle).
A lot of believers will agree that righteousness is in Christ alone, that forgiveness is total, and that love fulfills the moral life. They will even sound a lot like what I have written here at times. But then they will turn around and still insist that the believer is somehow under the law, especially the moral law, as if parts of the Mosaic system still have authority over the Body of Christ. That creates this quiet, ongoing inconsistency. On one side they say righteousness is apart from the law and all in Christ. On the other, they keep pointing people back to the law as the measuring stick for daily living. It is like affirming grace in theory while sneaking law back in through the side door. The tension never really goes away.
Mid-Acts cuts that tension off at the root. It recognizes Paul’s unique apostleship and the distinct identity of the Body of Christ. The program given to Israel, including the Mosaic Law in its entirety, was never addressed to the Body, nor was it intended to function as its governing rule of life. It belonged to a different covenant, with a different people, under different promises, in a different dispensation. Once you make that distinction, the question about whether we are under the Ten Commandments or any part of the law pretty much answers itself. The law does not apply to us, not in part, not in some spiritualized version, not as a moral guide. It was a complete system that served its purpose and has now been set aside for those who are in Christ. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness sake. (Romans 10:4)
This is where it gets uncomfortable for a lot of people. Many are happy to drop the ceremonial parts of the law but want to keep the moral parts, as if you can slice it up neatly. But Scripture does not treat the law that way. It is one unified covenant. You cannot put yourself under part of it without putting yourself under the whole thing. (
Galatians 5:3) The Mid-Acts view refuses to make that artificial split. It says the believer’s relationship to the law is not partial obedience. It is complete freedom from it. And that freedom does not weaken morality. It actually clarifies where morality really comes from.
Those who do not make this distinction often end up trying to explain how we can be free from the law and still bound to it at the same time. They will call it a guide, or a reflection of God’s character, or a standard that does not condemn but still directs. All of those attempts try to keep the law’s authority while using grace language, but the tension is still there because the law as a system was never fully released. Because of that, when they do sound like what I have written here, it is in spite of their theological framework, not because of it. Their conclusions might be good, but the foundation underneath them stays shaky. That instability shows up every time law and grace get pushed hard.
By contrast, the Mid-Acts framework gives these truths a solid place to stand. The believer’s relationship to the law is not one of partial obligation, but of complete release. Our freedom from the law is total and is not presented merely as a nice theological idea. It flows directly from who we are: members of a distinct body, under a distinct apostleship, living in a distinct dispensation. Removing the law does not leave a moral vacuum, because morality was never dependent on the law to begin with. That lets everything I said earlier stand without having to add qualifiers or workarounds. Righteousness is entirely in Christ. Morality reflects the nature of life as God designed it. Love acts in line with that reality. Sin destroys, whether there is a commandment against it or not.
This is not just a clever defense of grace against the old antinomian charge. It is a demonstration that when we understand the believer’s position rightly, and when we let the law stay where Scripture actually puts it, we do not get confusion or contradiction. We get clarity.
And instead of moral indifference, we get a deeper, more honest commitment to what is genuinely good.
