Practical guidance for following Christ daily—prayer, Bible reading, spiritual disciplines, and growing in godliness.
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6059. When Jesus says of the offending hand, cut it off, He is not opening a clinic. He is using deliberate overstatement to say something about sin that gentler language would never get past our defences. The words come in the Sermon on the Mount. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6049. Christians still sin after conversion, and the honest recognition of that fact is one of the more important things a new believer can be told early. Nobody is helped by a version of the gospel that promises what the New Testament does not. The question is why, and the answer has to do…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God is angry. Jesus was angry. The Psalms are full of it. What Scripture does is draw a line, and it draws it in a place…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence appears twice in the New Testament because it needed saying twice. It is also the sin nobody thinks they have. Everybody can name their temper…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6018. Paul says that godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. That is a startling sentence, because it means two people can weep over the same sin and end up in entirely different places. Knowing which one you are experiencing is not a matter of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6015. Ask what the Bible means by the world and the answer is that it means three different things, and the one that causes all the trouble is the world system. God so loved the world, John writes, and then he tells us not to love the world. The knot unties the moment you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been asked it in hospital corridors and in the church car park, and it always carries a certain weariness with it. It deserves a straight answer…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06035 The word “backsliding” has an old-fashioned ring to it in some quarters, but the reality it describes is anything but historical. It names something that believers in every generation have experienced and that the biblical writers addressed with both pastoral honesty and theological seriousness. The Biblical Origins of the Term The word comes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6013. A besetting sin is the sin that knows your address: the particular temptation that returns again and again long after other struggles have faded, the one you have confessed more times than you can count. The phrase itself comes from the Authorised Version of a single verse in Hebrews, and understanding what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5038. The purpose of life is the question every human being carries, whether they ever say it aloud or not. It surfaces at three in the morning, at gravesides, at milestone birthdays, and sometimes in the middle of success, which is often when it bites hardest. What is it all for? The modern world…