Exploring the doctrine of salvation—how sinners are saved by grace through faith in Christ.
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07072 Sanctification is one of those theological terms that gets used in different ways without people always realising it, which can produce genuine confusion about what the Christian life actually involves and what the New Testament expects of believers. The distinction between definitive and progressive sanctification is not academic hairsplitting but a genuinely important…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07075 The word “gospel” appears so frequently in Christian conversation that it can begin to lose its force through familiarity. But the gospel is not a general category of good religious news or a vague sense of divine goodwill toward humanity. It has a specific content, and that content can be stated with considerable…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07076 James 2:19 contains one of the most arresting sentences in the New Testament: “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe — and shudder!” It is a sentence designed to stop the reader in their tracks, and it does. If demons believe, and they are not saved, then…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07077 The role of confession in salvation is a question that touches on both the nature of saving faith and the relationship between inward reality and outward declaration. Some traditions have treated verbal confession as a necessary and distinct condition for salvation, placing considerable weight on Romans 10:9-10. Others have treated it as effectively…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07078 When the Philippian gaoler, shaken by an earthquake that had opened every prison door, asked Paul and Silas “What must I do to be saved?”, the answer he received was this: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:30-31). It is one of the most concise summaries of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7022 This is one of the most pastorally urgent questions anyone can ask, and it deserves an answer that is both theologically honest and deeply compassionate. The grief surrounding suicide is compounded by fear, and that fear is often intensified by poorly grounded teaching that confidently declares suicide an unforgivable sin. What does Scripture…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07030 The question of whether there is a point beyond which the gospel can no longer reach a person is one that pastoral ministry cannot avoid. It surfaces in conversations about hardened relatives who have heard the gospel repeatedly and seem impervious to it, about people who once appeared to be close to faith…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07031 The hardening of the human heart is rarely a sudden event. Most people do not arrive at a settled state of spiritual insensibility in a single moment of dramatic rebellion. What Scripture describes, and what pastoral observation confirms, is a process — gradual, largely unnoticed by the person experiencing it, and with each…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7064 In 1937, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship. Writing against a German church that had largely surrendered its integrity in the face of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer drew a distinction that has echoed through Christian thinking ever since. Cheap grace, he argued, is the preaching…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7061 At Christian camps, conferences, and evangelistic meetings, the call to re-dedication is a familiar one. A believer who has drifted steps forward to renew their commitment, making promises they genuinely intend to keep. A question sometimes surfaces in that moment, and it is a serious one: does this mean I was never truly…