Soteriology (Salvation)

Question 07048 The question of whether the Christian is under the Mosaic Law is one of the most practical questions in the whole of Christian doctrine, and one of the ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real ...

Question 07061 Christian re-dedication is not being saved again, and the difference matters more than it might sound. Salvation happens once and cannot be repeated, because the new birth is ...

Question 07060 A backsliding Christian is a believer who has drifted away from close fellowship with God, and yes, they can come back. In fact the whole of Scripture is ...

Question 7085. If God has already set me apart, why pursue holiness at all? It is a fair question and a common one, and it usually arrives from somebody who ...

Question 7073. Positional sanctification describes where you stand before God; practical sanctification describes how you are getting on. Both are scriptural, both matter, and a great many discouraged Christians are ...

Question 7074. Sinless perfection in this present life is taught by a number of sincere traditions, and I want to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves rather than ...

Question 60048. The prosperity gospel is the teaching that God wills every believer to be materially wealthy and physically well, and that faith is the mechanism by which those benefits ...

Question 60020. Mormonism presents itself as restored Christianity, and it does so with real confidence. Two young men in white shirts arrive at the door with Bibles under their arms, ...

Question 60021. Scientology is one of the most recognised new religions in the world and one of the least understood, which is not an accident. Most people know the celebrities, ...

Question 07037. The phrase eternal covenant appears at several points in Scripture, and the question it raises is a fair one: what makes a covenant eternal, and which covenant is ...

Question 07051 True repentance is one of those words the church uses constantly and explains rarely, which is a pity, because a great deal of unnecessary misery grows in that ...

Question 07052 Saving faith is the hinge on which everything in the Christian life turns, and it is also the thing people most commonly misunderstand. Some treat it as a ...

Question 1011. Few pastoral questions trouble thoughtful Christians more than this one, and at its heart sits the matter of general revelation. Can a person be saved simply by looking ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 06035 The word "backsliding" has an old-fashioned ring to it in some quarters, but the reality it describes is anything but historical. It names something that believers in every ...

Question 07050 Few things trouble a tender conscience quite like the fear of falling away. I have sat with believers who could recite the promises of God perfectly well and ...

Question 11087 Do I need to forgive myself? The question arrives constantly in pastoral conversation, usually from someone who believes God has forgiven them and still cannot get free of ...

Question 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God's moral commands no longer have any claim on ...

Question 07012. God's salvation is a rescue, and that single word does more work than any other in explaining what Christians mean when they use the term. We are not ...

Question 07013. How can a person be saved? It is the oldest question in the book, quite literally, since the Philippian jailer asked it in almost those words at midnight ...

Question 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have ...

Question 07018. God's grace is favour shown to people who have earned the opposite, and that definition is worth memorising because almost every popular version of it is softer than ...

Question 07019. Can you lose your salvation? I do not believe you can, and I want to give you the reasons rather than simply the conclusion, because this question deserves ...

Question 07015. Sanctification means being set apart, and if you grasp that one idea you have the doctrine in your hand. The word group behind it in Hebrew and Greek ...

Question 07016. Glorification is the final stage of salvation, the point at which the believer receives a glorified body and is made entirely like Jesus, with sin not simply restrained ...

Question 07017. Regeneration is the theological word for the new birth, the act by which God gives spiritual life to someone who was spiritually dead. Jesus introduced the idea to ...

Question 07014. Justification is the moment a guilty sinner is declared righteous by God, and I want to be precise about that word declared, because everything hangs on it. God ...

Question 07029. Redemption in Christ is a word borrowed from the slave market and the auction block, and I think we lose most of its force because we have never ...

Question 07027. Adoption as sons is, to my mind, the warmest word in the whole vocabulary of salvation, and it is the one most often skated over. Justification tells me ...

Question 07028. Reconciliation with God presupposes something most people would rather not admit, which is that a real estrangement exists in the first place. You cannot reconcile parties who were ...

Question 07025. The relationship between faith and works is where a great many Christians tie themselves in knots, and I understand why. Paul says a person is justified by faith ...

Question 07026. Imputed righteousness is the answer to a question that ought to keep every honest person awake: how can a guilty man stand in front of a holy God ...

Question 07023. Is water baptism necessary for salvation? My answer is no, and I hold it firmly, but I want to reach it the long way round because there are ...

Question 07024. The sinner's prayer has introduced more people to the vocabulary of conversion than almost any other set of words in modern evangelicalism, and yet you will not find ...

What is eternal security? Can we lose our salvation? No! is the emphatic answer ...

Question 7090 Few situations in pastoral work are as uncomfortable as sitting with someone who has come forward at three separate meetings, prayed the same prayer each time, and can ...

Question 7091 The question of assurance of salvation is one I am asked more often than almost any other, and it is usually asked by people who are already believers ...

Question 7092 The doctrine of adoption is one of those truths that gets quietly folded into justification and lost. Preachers mention it in passing, systematic theologies give it a short ...

Question 7093 Union with Christ is the most frequent way the New Testament describes a Christian, and one of the least discussed in ordinary church life. Paul uses the phrase ...

Question 7094 Whether water baptism is necessary for salvation is a question that has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by quoting one verse loudly. There ...

Question 7046. Union with Christ is the doctrine that a believer is not simply forgiven by Jesus and helped by Jesus but is genuinely joined to Him, so that what ...

Question 7047. Being in Christ is Paul's favourite way of describing a Christian, and I suspect most of us read straight past it. He uses the phrase, or one of ...

Question 7041. The perseverance of the saints, or final perseverance, is the fifth point of the Calvinist system, and it teaches that everyone God has chosen will certainly continue in ...

Question 7043. Unlimited atonement is my answer to the oldest question in this discussion: for whom did Jesus die? Did He die for every human being who has ever lived, ...

Question 7045. Scripture says plainly that Jesus died for all, and just as plainly that not everyone will be saved. Put those two statements next to each other and many ...

Question 07039. Limited atonement, also called particular redemption or definite atonement, is the third point of the Calvinist system and the one that causes most trouble even inside Calvinism itself ...

Question 7040. Prevenient grace is a term drawn mainly from Wesleyan and Arminian theology, and the word prevenient simply means going before. It describes a work of God in a ...

Question 07036. The argument between Calvinism and Arminianism has been running for four centuries and shows no sign of tiring, which tells you either that the questions are unanswerable or ...

Question 07038. Irresistible grace, sometimes called efficacious or effectual grace, is the fourth point of the Calvinist system. It teaches that when God sets out to save one of His ...

Question 07034. Predestination and foreknowledge are two words that make many Christians flinch, and the flinching usually has more to do with what they have heard about the words than ...

Question 07035. Effectual calling is the Reformed teaching that alongside the outward call of the gospel, which goes to everybody who hears a sermon, there is an inward call which ...

Question 07032. The ordo salutis is Latin for order of salvation, and it refers to the logical sequence in which the various parts of salvation relate to one another. It ...

Question 07033. The doctrine of election is one of those subjects where people arrive with their minds already made up and their defences already raised, and I do not blame ...

Question 08103 If you are carrying past occult involvement and wondering what to do about it, I want to say the most important thing at the very start. Jesus is ...

Question 7108 Arminian theology is the other great system in the English-speaking Protestant world, and it is almost as frequently misrepresented as Calvinism. Many who reject Calvinism assume they must ...

Question 7096 The Calvinist system is the most influential account of salvation in English-speaking evangelicalism, and it is also the one most often described inaccurately by both its friends and ...

Question 13005. The five points of Calvinism are usually met for the first time as an acrostic, TULIP, and I have watched more than one young believer fall in love ...

Question 7087. The Five Solas are the five Latin slogans that summarise what the Reformers recovered from Scripture in the sixteenth century: Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, ...

Question 07068 The Free Grace movement is a loose body of teachers who insist that salvation is received by faith alone, entirely apart from works, commitment or any promise of ...

Question 2009. Several passages promise that God forgets our sins, and I find that people respond to this in two opposite ways. Some find it the most comforting language in ...

Question 4100.The Spirit in salvation does far more work than most believers realise, and most of it happens before we are even aware anything is happening at all. Salvation is ...

Question 04200. Conviction of sin is the doorway every one of us has to walk through before the gospel can mean anything at all, because good news only sounds like ...

Question 7070. Biblical apostasy is a word we reach for quickly and understand slowly. I have heard it applied to a friend who stopped attending church, to a denomination that ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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, ...

Question 3039. How were Old Testament believers saved, when the cross lay centuries in their future? It is one of the best questions a thoughtful reader of Scripture can ask ...

Question 10019. The Mosaic law occupies six hundred and thirteen commandments, three biblical books, and a fair amount of Christian confusion, and the confusion usually begins with a wrong assumption: ...

Question 7081. Law and grace are usually discussed as though they were opponents, with the Christian obliged to pick a side. That framing has produced two centuries of unhelpful argument ...

Question 7095 Freedom from shame is one of the least advertised benefits of the doctrine of justification, and for many believers it is the one they need most. Guilt and ...

Question 7097 The atonement of Christ is the centre of the Christian faith, and the word itself is one of the few great theological terms that began life in English ...

Question 7099 The question of why Jesus died rather than God simply issuing a pardon is one of the most honest questions anyone can ask, and it is usually asked ...

Question 7098 Substitutionary atonement is the teaching that Jesus died in the place of sinners, bearing what they deserved so that they need not bear it themselves. Add the word ...

Question 7100 The theories of atonement are the church's various attempts to answer one question: what exactly happened when Jesus died? Everybody agrees that the cross saves. The disagreement is ...

Question 7101 Propitiation and expiation are two words that most Christians have met in a hymn and few could define. They are not interchangeable, and the difference between them was ...

Question 7103 Whether Jesus is the only way to God is the question that makes Christians most uncomfortable in polite company, and it is the one the New Testament answers ...

Question 7102 When Jesus said that the Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many, He was using a word His hearers understood immediately and we ...

Question 7104 The phrase personal relationship with Jesus is everywhere in evangelical speech and nowhere in the Bible, which is worth noticing before we go any further. That does not ...

Question 7105 Belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not an advanced doctrine for keen Christians. Paul makes it part of the confession by which a person is saved: ...

Question 7106 A great many people believe in God and want nothing much to do with Jesus. They are not hostile. They pray occasionally, they think there is Someone there, ...

Question 7107 To be seated at the right hand of God is the New Testament's favourite way of describing where Jesus is now, and it is quoted or alluded to ...

Question 07067 Easy believism is a label applied to any presentation of the gospel that reduces saving faith to a bare mental agreement and leaves out repentance, the identity of ...

Question 07062 Judas Iscariot was never saved. I hold that with more confidence than I hold most things, because Jesus Himself said so in several ways, and the alternative would ...

Question 07065 Lordship salvation is the teaching that saving faith necessarily includes a submission to Jesus as Lord, and that a profession of faith without submission is not saving faith ...

Question 07066 Receiving Jesus as Lord is not a second step that follows conversion, and it is not an extra condition attached to it either. When a sinner trusts Jesus, ...

Question 07054 Christian conversion is the moment a person changes hands. It is not a church membership process, it is not a decision card, and it is not the gradual ...

Question 07055 There is always a moment of salvation, even when nobody can identify it. That is the short answer, and it holds two things together that people often set ...

Question 07056 Faith and repentance are two words for one turn. That is the heart of the answer, and getting it right saves a great deal of unnecessary anxiety, because ...

Question 07057 The dying thief is the single clearest illustration in Scripture that salvation is by grace through faith and nothing else. He had no time to be baptised, no ...

Question 07058 Deathbed conversions are genuine when the faith behind them is genuine, and the New Testament gives us no reason whatever to treat a late turning as second class ...

Question 07059 Can a true Christian commit apostasy? My answer is no, and the reason is not that believers are strong but that God is faithful. A person who genuinely, ...

Question 07021. What happens to those who have never heard the gospel is one of the hardest questions anyone asks me, and it is usually asked with real feeling rather ...

Question 7083. Old Testament believers were saved in exactly the same way we are, by grace through faith, and it is worth saying that plainly at the outset because a ...

Question 7084. Whether the worst sinners imaginable could be forgiven is a question people ask in two very different tones of voice, and the tone matters. Some ask it as ...

Question 7088. Ongoing forgiveness and the forgiveness received at conversion are related but not identical, and failing to distinguish them causes two opposite problems. Some Christians live in fear that ...

Question 7089. Born again has become one of the most misused phrases in religious English. In the press it functions as a label for a certain kind of enthusiastic Christian, ...

Question 7072. Progressive sanctification is the part of this doctrine most Christians have heard about, and it is the part that feels true to experience. We are being changed, slowly, ...

Question 7075. The gospel message can be stated in a sentence, and it needs to be, because most of the conversations in which it matters will not give you twenty ...

Question 7076. That demons believe correct theology and remain lost is one of the more unsettling statements in the New Testament, and James makes it deliberately. He is arguing with ...

Question 7077. The place of confession in salvation is one of those subjects where a single verse has been made to carry more weight than it can bear. Romans 10:9 ...

Question 7078. To believe on Jesus is the single condition Scripture attaches to salvation, and it is worth being precise about it, because the English word believe has grown thin ...

Question 07022. Where do those who commit suicide go? I have been asked this question across a kitchen table more often than from a pulpit, usually by someone whose face ...

Question 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 ...

Question 4086. Spirit's conviction of sin is one of the most significant realities in the whole business of evangelism, and the question of what it actually does inside a person ...

Question 4087. Distinguishing spirit prompting from your own reasoning is one of the most practically pressing skills a Christian needs to develop, because the stakes of getting it wrong run ...

Question 4080. Does the filling and assurance of a believer's salvation genuinely connect to one another, or are they two entirely separate matters that should never be confused. I want ...

Question 04024. Few aspects of the Spirit's ministry are as misunderstood as the conviction of sin. In common Christian speech it has shrunk to a vague feeling of spiritual unease, ...

Question 04040.The work of the Spirit in regeneration is the hidden hinge on which the whole of conversion turns. Behind every genuine coming to Jesus there lies a deeper miracle ...

Question 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis ...

Question 2074. The prayers of unbelievers raise a question I get asked often, usually by someone recalling a moment of crisis, a hospital corridor, a plane hitting turbulence, when they ...

Question 60082. Word of Faith teaching reaches more people worldwide today than most historic denominations do, which is one reason I think it deserves a careful answer rather than a ...

Question 7086. The scapegoat theory of atonement is a way of understanding the cross that draws on the ritual of Leviticus 16 and, in its modern form, on sociological accounts ...

Question 3013. Christ our advocate is one of those short phrases that manages to be both deeply pastoral and precisely theological all in a single breath. John writes, "My little ...

Question 2018. If unlimited atonement really means Christ's death was sufficient for every person, why doesn't an all-loving God simply save everyone? This is one of the oldest objections to ...

Question 5008.Spiritual perception is a real capacity, and the Bible is remarkably precise about how much of it an unregenerate person actually has. Get this question wrong in one direction ...

Question 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 ...

Question 07063 Common grace is the undeserved kindness God shows to everybody without exception, and saving grace is the undeserved kindness by which He rescues those who trust Jesus. Both ...

Question 3076 Few words in all of Scripture carry the weight of those spoken by Jesus from the cross in John 19:30: “It is finished.” In the original Greek, this ...

Question 7080. The Mosaic law is one of the places where careless answers do the most damage in either direction. Say that Christians are free from it and somebody will ...

Question 7079. Physical healing as a guaranteed benefit of the atonement is taught confidently in a good many places, and the proof text is almost always the same. Isaiah says ...

Question 09000. Believer's baptism is the immersion in water of a person who has already trusted Jesus, as their public identification with His death, burial and resurrection. That sentence contains ...

Question 8. Which doctrines are essential for salvation is a question that deserves great care, because the wrong answer in either direction is dangerous. Make the list too long and ...

Question 07053 The elementary doctrines of Christ are listed in Hebrews 6:1-3, and the passage has puzzled readers for a long time. The writer tells his readers to leave these ...

Question 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 ...

Question 7999 The question of what a person must do to be saved is the most important question anyone ever asks, and Scripture gives an answer so short that people ...