The doctrine of sin—its origin, nature, consequences, and the different ways Scripture describes human rebellion against God.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 06070. The Old Testament has many words for sin, and three of them turn up together so often that it is worth knowing exactly what each one means. They are usually translated sin, transgression and iniquity. In English they can sound like three ways of saying the same thing, rather like a legal document…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 6166. The Hebrews 10 warning has probably cost more sleep among sincere believers than any other paragraph in the New Testament. “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.” Read that at two in the morning after a bad week…
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 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 11068. Feeling angry troubles conscientious Christians more than almost any other emotion, partly because we have been taught that gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit and have concluded that anger must therefore be its opposite. Many believers carry a low grade guilt about an emotion they cannot switch off. Scripture takes a different…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, and the abuses have been real enough to justify the flinch. So most churches quietly do nothing, and serious sin goes unaddressed until it does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08084 Satan’s role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything from adultery to a lost temper in traffic. Others speak as though he barely exists and every failure is nothing more than psychology and bad…