The doctrine of sin—its origin, nature, consequences, and the different ways Scripture describes human rebellion against God.
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6062. Secret sin is the sin nobody knows about except you and God. It has no witnesses, no consequences that anyone can trace, and no cost that shows up on the surface of your life. That is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Every believer I have known well has had some version of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6061. Habitual sin is sin that has stopped being an event and become a pattern. It is no longer the thing you did on a bad Tuesday. It is the groove your life runs in, and you could set your calendar by it. Two questions come with this subject, and they need different answers….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6060. The mortification of sin is Paul’s blunt name for the daily work of putting sin to death, and it is the least fashionable idea in modern Christian vocabulary. We prefer to speak of growth, journey and process. Paul reaches for a word that belongs in an execution yard. If by the Spirit you…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6058. Is all suffering a result of personal sin? No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. This is one of the few questions where the Bible hands us an entire book to make sure we do not get it wrong. The instinct to trace every affliction back to personal sin runs deep in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something has gone badly wrong and the sufferer wants to know whether they brought it on themselves. I want to answer that carefully, because Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6022. Paul warns Timothy about teachers with a seared conscience, and the image he chooses is a surgical one. He is describing a moral sense that has been burned until the nerve endings no longer report anything at all. It is one of the bleakest phrases in the New Testament, and it is worth…
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 6044. When Paul speaks of the old man he is not describing a sinister lodger who lives in the believer’s spare room. He is describing the person you used to be, considered as a whole, in Adam and under condemnation. Getting that right changes a great deal about how the Christian life is fought,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks like the same sin, and they need entirely different responses. Scripture handles them differently throughout, and so should we. Two different conditions Weakness is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because Scripture knows nothing of a tier of offences that need not trouble anybody. Every congregation has its list, and the list is usually invisible to…