Practical guidance for following Christ daily—prayer, Bible reading, spiritual disciplines, and growing in godliness.
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11085 Many believers wake troubled by the contents of a dream, carrying a sense of guilt or shame about what their sleeping mind produced. The question of whether dreams can constitute sin requires both theological clarity and pastoral honesty, because anxious people deserve real answers rather than reassurance that skirts the issue. The Nature…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6049 This question troubles new Christians and experienced ones alike. If Christ has truly dealt with sin, if we are new creations, if the Spirit now lives within us, why does the pull toward sin remain so real and so persistent? Some teachers have suggested that genuine conversion should produce a point of complete…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06060 John Owen’s seventeenth-century treatise on mortification of sin remains one of the most searching pieces of practical theology in the English language. But the concept did not originate with Owen. It is rooted in the apostle Paul’s instruction to “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Colossians 3:5), and it names…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06061 Every honest believer knows what it is to return to the same sin again and again. Not the single stumble but the repeated pattern, the familiar failure that reasserts itself regardless of how many times it has been confessed and resolved against. Scripture is remarkably honest about this reality, and understanding what habitual…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06062 The category of secret sin is as old as the fall itself. Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God, hid themselves among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8). The desire to conceal wrongdoing is one of the most instinctive expressions of a guilty conscience, and it has operated in every human life since…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11090 Few pastoral questions produce more confusion, guilt, and genuine suffering than this one. The Christian who has wrestled with an addictive or compulsive pattern of sin — whether that involves alcohol, pornography, drugs, food, gambling, or any other form — frequently encounters competing frameworks. Some Christian traditions treat it as purely spiritual: a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06072 This is one of those pastoral questions where a great deal of unnecessary guilt and confusion has accumulated because the distinction between two very different things has been blurred. Many sincere Christians live under a burden of condemnation about their own normal human responses, whilst the genuinely problematic territory of lust goes unaddressed…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06067 The practice of confession sits at the intersection of theology and daily Christian experience. Most believers know they should confess sin to God, but questions arise about whether that private prayer is all that is ever required — or whether Scripture sometimes calls for something more. The answer is more layered than a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6018 Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians contains one of the most practically searching distinctions in the New Testament. Writing about the response of the Corinthian church to a previous letter of correction, he draws a line between two kinds of sorrow over sin that feel superficially similar but move in completely opposite directions….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6015 The word “world” appears hundreds of times across the New Testament, and it does not always mean the same thing. Reading it as if it did produces significant confusion, particularly in passages that seem to say contradictory things. John 3:16 says God loved the world; 1 John 2:15 says do not love the…