Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7067 Easy believism describes a presentation of the gospel in which salvation is reduced to intellectual acknowledgment of certain facts about Jesus, with no genuine repentance, no change of direction, and no expectation of transformation. It is not a label its proponents normally accept for themselves, but it describes a real tendency that has…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7062 Judas Iscariot is one of the most disturbing figures in Scripture. He spent three years in Jesus’ company, witnessed miracles, heard the Sermon on the Mount, was numbered among the Twelve and sent out to preach and heal, and then sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver. The question of whether he…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7065 The term “Lordship salvation” describes the view that genuine saving faith necessarily includes recognition of and submission to Jesus as Lord, not merely reception of Him as Saviour. It entered widespread evangelical debate primarily through John MacArthur’s 1988 book The Gospel According to Jesus, which argued that a generation of evangelicalism had been…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7066 Few theological debates have generated as much heat within conservative evangelicalism as the question of whether genuine saving faith necessarily includes acknowledgment of Christ’s lordship. On one side stands the position that a Jesus who is not received as Lord has not truly been received at all. On the other stands the concern…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07054 The word “conversion” does not appear with great frequency in English Bibles, but the reality it describes is at the heart of everything the New Testament calls people to. To be converted is to be turned, and the New Testament presents this turning as simultaneously something that happens to a person and something…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07055 This question matters pastorally far more than it might appear to at first. People who have grown up in Christian homes sometimes wrestle with the absence of a dramatic conversion moment. Others, who came to faith through a long process of questioning and gradual conviction, wonder whether their apparently slow arrival counts. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07056 Few questions in evangelical Christianity have generated more pastoral confusion than this one. Some teachers present repentance and faith as sequential requirements, as if repentance must first reach a sufficient depth before faith becomes possible. Others minimise repentance to the point of near-irrelevance, presenting faith alone as the single condition with nothing else…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07057 There is perhaps no account in the Gospels that more plainly displays the grace of God in salvation than the exchange between Jesus and one of the criminals crucified alongside Him. It has been used in Christian preaching and pastoral care for two thousand years, and rightly so, because what takes place in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07058 The question of deathbed conversions tends to provoke two quite different reactions. For some, the thought that a person can turn to Christ in the final moments of life and receive full forgiveness and eternal life is an expression of the gospel’s astonishing generosity. For others, it raises uncomfortable questions about fairness, about…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07059 The word “apostasy” comes from the Greek apostasia, meaning a departure, a standing away from. In Christian theology it refers to a decisive, final abandonment of the faith, not a season of backsliding or spiritual coldness, but a definitive renunciation of Christ. The question of whether a genuine, truly converted believer can commit…