Exploring the doctrine of salvation—how sinners are saved by grace through faith in Christ.
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 4086 One of the most significant pastoral and theological questions in evangelism concerns what actually happens in a person when they hear the gospel. Is the Spirit’s work of conviction something that genuinely opens the possibility of response, or is it an irresistible divine action that produces a predetermined outcome? And if the conviction…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4087 The question of how to distinguish a genuine prompting from the Holy Spirit from one’s own reasoning or from an external spiritual influence is one of the most practically pressing questions in the Christian life. It is easy to claim, and equally easy to dismiss — and both errors have consequences. Claiming the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4080 Among the questions that unsettle believers who take their spiritual life seriously is whether their current experience of the Spirit bears any relation to the security of their standing before God. When the filling of the Spirit fluctuates — as it undeniably does — and when seasons of spiritual vitality give way to…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04027 Assurance of salvation is not a luxury reserved for the theologically confident. It is something the New Testament presents as genuinely available to every believer, and the Holy Spirit plays a central role in making it real. This is not a matter of working oneself up to a sufficient level of emotional certainty;…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04024 One of the most misunderstood aspects of the Holy Spirit’s ministry is His work of conviction. Popular usage often treats conviction as a vague feeling of spiritual unease, something close to guilt. But Jesus’ description in John 16 is far more specific, and far more searching. Understanding what the Spirit actually does when…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04040 When Jesus told Nicodemus that no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit (John 3:5), Nicodemus was baffled. The idea that a grown man could somehow be born again struck him as absurd. But Jesus was pointing to something far more radical than a…
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…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7060 The word “backslider” carries more weight in older Christian usage than it does in most modern translations, but the reality it describes is woven through the entire New Testament. It refers to a genuine believer who has withdrawn from active fellowship with God, whose spiritual life has contracted, whose once-warm faith has grown…