Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1140. Filthy rags is the phrase most Christians know from Isaiah 64:6, quoted in countless evangelistic sermons, including plenty of my own over the years, to prove that even our best efforts before salvation are worthless to God. “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment,” the ESV renders it. We use it…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1139. Equipped for every good work is the phrase Paul uses to describe the purpose of Scripture in the life of a believer, and it comes at the climax of one of the most personal and urgent letters in the New Testament. Second Timothy was written from a Roman prison cell, likely during Nero’s…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1138. Rightly handling Scripture is what the apostle Paul commands every believer who teaches or studies the Bible to do, and the phrase comes from one of the most important verses in the New Testament for how we approach the text. Paul writes to Timothy, “Do your best to present yourself to God as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1137. The doctrine of Scripture is the foundation everything else in Christian theology is built upon, and most believers use the word Bibliology without ever having had it properly explained to them. See my sermon on this subject here: The Word of God, Our Growing Guide. So what does Bibliology actually mean, and why…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 1136. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections most Christians run into once they start talking about their faith outside the safety of church, and I have lost count of the number of conversations that started with someone reciting a list they found online. Two different genealogies for Jesus. Two different numbers for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 14. Spiritual discernment is what allows a believer to tell true teaching from false, and it does not arrive automatically the moment someone trusts Christ. Scripture treats it as a capacity that grows through use, deliberately trained by exposure to sound doctrine and honest practice at telling the difference between what is genuinely from…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1135. Women teaching and preaching generates more heat in contemporary Christianity than almost any other practical question I am asked, and I understand why. Positions range from full egalitarianism, where no ministry distinctions exist between men and women at all, to a strict complementarianism that some apply so broadly it silences women’s voices well…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1134. Holy books are not in short supply. Islam has the Quran, Hinduism has the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism has the Pali Canon, and Mormonism has the Book of Mormon, to name only the most obvious examples of the many holy books competing for allegiance around the world today. So what makes…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1133. The deconstruction movement has become impossible to ignore in Christian conversation, whether you first met the word on social media, in a bestselling memoir, or in the empty seat of someone who used to sit near you on a Sunday. Social media is full of stories of people, often raised in evangelical homes,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1132. Wooden literalism is the caricature that gets thrown at every Bible believing Christian sooner or later, usually by someone convinced that anyone who trusts Scripture must also believe the four winds are held by four literal angels at the four literal corners of a flat earth. I do not believe that, and neither…