Exploring the doctrine of salvation—how sinners are saved by grace through faith in Christ.
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…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7001. Assurance of salvation is the settled confidence that you belong to God and will not be lost. It is not the same thing as being saved, and keeping those two apart is the first step to understanding the whole subject. Security is objective and rests on God. Assurance is subjective and rests in…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7000. Paul calls our salvation the gift of God in one of the best known sentences he ever wrote, and generations of readers have argued about which part of it he meant. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,…
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 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: 17 minutesQuestion 7199. If Jesus fulfilled the law, why did Paul still offer temple sacrifices in Acts 21, why will sacrifices return in the millennial temple, and why do certain things carry on from one age to the next? The question of temple sacrifices after the cross is one of the genuinely hard knots in Scripture,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is law and yet we plainly do not keep all of it. The believer is not under the Old Testament law as a binding covenant, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and wonders if they still apply. The short answer is that the Christian is not bound to obey the Levitical law, because it was part of…