Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11090 Habitual sin is the pastoral problem that will not go away. Almost every believer has something that keeps returning, and almost every pastor has sat with someone who has confessed the same thing for the fifth time and asked, with real desperation, why nothing changes. The question of whether habitual sin is primarily…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11089 The law of Christ is the phrase Paul uses when he wants to say that a believer released from the Mosaic covenant is not therefore released from moral obligation. It appears in Galatians 6:2 and again, in a slightly different form, in 1 Corinthians 9:21, where Paul describes himself as not being outside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11088 Discerning sin is one of the ordinary tasks of the Christian life, and it is a good deal harder than the lists suggest. Scripture names a great many things plainly, and then leaves us with hundreds of daily decisions it never mentions: this job, that programme, this investment, that friendship, this way of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11087 Do I need to forgive myself? The question arrives constantly in pastoral conversation, usually from someone who believes God has forgiven them and still cannot get free of something they did. They have confessed it, sometimes for years, and the weight has not lifted. I want to say two things that sound contradictory…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11085 Sinful dreams trouble sincere Christians far more often than anyone admits from a pulpit. A believer wakes with the residue of something adulterous, violent or blasphemous still vivid, and spends the morning wondering whether he has offended God in his sleep and what it says about him that his mind produced it. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent image appears while holding a baby. A believer who loves God finds his mind producing material that horrifies him. The people who ask me about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11083 The sin of gluttony is the one item on the traditional list of deadly sins that the modern church has quietly dropped. We preach against drunkenness, greed and lust with reasonable confidence, and then we hold a fellowship lunch. I include myself in that observation and I am not writing from a position…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11082 The disease model of addiction has become the default explanation in medicine, in the media and increasingly in the church. Addiction, we are told, is a chronic brain disorder rather than a moral failing, and to speak of sin in the same sentence is unhelpful at best and cruel at worst. The question…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11081 Cross-cultural ministry has a founding case study in Acts 8, and it is not the one most people expect. Before Peter went to Cornelius and long before Paul set out for Asia, a deacon named Philip walked into Samaria and preached to people his own nation had despised for centuries. What happened there…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11080 Material wealth is one of those subjects on which the Bible says a great deal more than most congregations want to hear, and it says it in both directions. Anyone hoping for a simple verdict, either that riches are a blessing to be pursued or that poverty is inherently holy, will be disappointed…