Exploring the doctrine of salvation—how sinners are saved by grace through faith in Christ.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07011. Soteriology is the theological name for the doctrine of salvation, and it is the part of Christian teaching that answers the question every one of us eventually has to face: how can a guilty person be made right with a holy God? The word comes from the Greek soteria, meaning rescue or deliverance,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07010. If salvation is by faith alone, why does James say that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone? That is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a shuffle. James 2:24 is the only place in the Bible where the words faith alone appear together,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07009. The sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17 is one of those phrases that people trip over at the very end of a letter otherwise full of comfort, and it stops them dead. John has spent five chapters telling his readers how they may know that they have eternal life, and then, almost…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07008. Hebrews 6:4-6 is the passage people reach for when they want to argue that a genuine believer can be lost, and the language about falling away is undeniably severe. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I have no patience with treatments that wave the difficulty away. If you have been troubled…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07007. Paul’s command to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling has frightened more Christians than almost any other sentence he wrote, and the fright is entirely unnecessary once you see where the sentence sits. Read on its own it sounds as though salvation is a project we complete under threat. Read…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07006. Few passages have caused more private agony than the one about the unforgivable sin, and I have lost count of the number of believers who have come to me convinced that they have committed it. They are almost always the last people on earth who could have done so, and I want to…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07005. The difference between saving faith and intellectual belief is one of the most practically urgent distinctions in the whole of Scripture, and it is one that a great many church attenders have never had explained to them. A person can hold every article of the Christian faith to be true, defend it in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07004. If you have ever gone to bed at night troubled because you do not feel saved, you are in far larger company than you imagine. I have sat with believers who could explain the gospel more clearly than I could, who loved their Bibles, who served their church week after week, and who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7003. Can a person be saved and have a lack of assurance about it? Yes, and that is not the same thing as a lack of salvation. Many genuine believers have lived for long stretches without the settled confidence that they belonged to God. This question usually arrives from someone in real distress, so…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7002. Genuine salvation leaves marks. Scripture says so plainly, and the first letter of John was written largely to describe them so that believers could know where they stood. I want to handle this carefully, because the same evidences that steady a careless person can crush a sensitive one. So before the marks of…