Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7094 Whether water baptism is necessary for salvation is a question that has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by quoting one verse loudly. There are passages which appear at first glance to make baptism part of the transaction, and any honest treatment has to deal with them rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7093 Union with Christ is the most frequent way the New Testament describes a Christian, and one of the least discussed in ordinary church life. Paul uses the phrase in Christ, or its equivalents, well over a hundred times. It is his shorthand for what a believer is. Yet ask most Christians to explain…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7092 The doctrine of adoption is one of those truths that gets quietly folded into justification and lost. Preachers mention it in passing, systematic theologies give it a short paragraph, and the believer walks away with the impression that being adopted is simply another way of saying being forgiven. It is not, and the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7091 The question of assurance of salvation is one I am asked more often than almost any other, and it is usually asked by people who are already believers. That in itself is telling. The person living happily in unrepentant sin rarely loses sleep over whether they belong to God. It is the tender…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 7090 Few situations in pastoral work are as uncomfortable as sitting with someone who has come forward at three separate meetings, prayed the same prayer each time, and can point to no genuine change of any kind. They are not play-acting. The tears were real. The desire was real. And yet a year on,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 8019 Among the most striking descriptions in all of prophetic Scripture are the living creatures of Ezekiel’s inaugural vision and John’s throne-room vision in Revelation 4. They defy easy description, they surround the immediate presence of God, and they have provoked more theological reflection than almost any other category of angelic being. Mercifully, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 55. Creeds, confessions and catechisms often get lumped together as though they were interchangeable, three names for the same kind of document, when in fact each one does a genuinely different job. A creed states the bare essentials of the faith in the fewest possible words. A confession expands considerably on that core, addressing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays out with striking clarity: what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men, who will be able to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 53. A statement of faith and a systematic theology serve genuinely different purposes even though both attempt to summarise Christian doctrine, and confusing the two leads to unrealistic expectations of documents that were never designed to do the other one’s job. It is deliberately brief, functioning as a boundary marker defining who belongs within…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7089. Born again has become one of the most misused phrases in religious English. In the press it functions as a label for a certain kind of enthusiastic Christian, usually American and usually presented with a raised eyebrow. In some churches it has become shorthand for having made a decision at a particular meeting….