Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 shame are not the same thing, and a gospel presentation that deals only with guilt will leave a great many Christians still bowed under something…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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. That in itself is telling. The person living happily in unrepentant sin rarely loses sleep over whether they belong to God. It is the tender…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 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 point to no genuine change of any kind. They are not play-acting. The tears were real. The desire was real. And yet a year on,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 unconfessed sin has undone their salvation. Others conclude that since everything was forgiven at the cross, confession is unnecessary. Both have collapsed a distinction Scripture…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 somebody who thinks that holding the right ideas about God is sufficient, and he produces the most damaging counter example available: the demonic realm is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 discouraged precisely because they have been measuring the first by the second. If you have ever wondered how Paul could call the Corinthians saints with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 future obedience. It came into focus in the 1980s as a reaction against Lordship salvation, and it contains a great deal I agree with alongside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 Jesus, and any expectation that a converted person will be different afterwards. It is a criticism rather than a movement, and hardly anyone claims the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 at all. It became one of the sharpest evangelical arguments of the last forty years, and the dust has still not entirely settled. I want…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 not the kind of thing that can be undone and redone. Re-dedication is the renewal of a commitment that has gone cold, and that can…