Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 7004 Few experiences are more distressing for Christians than the absence of spiritual feeling. You’ve trusted Jesus, you believe the Gospel, you’re trying to follow Him—yet something is missing. There’s no warmth, no joy, no sense of God’s presence. You go through the motions but feel nothing. You wonder if you’re even saved at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7007 Philippians 2:12-13 is one of those passages that has puzzled believers and been misused by those who want to introduce works into salvation. Paul writes: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 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 generation have experienced and that the biblical writers addressed with both pastoral honesty and theological seriousness. The Biblical Origins of the Term The word comes…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11087 The phrase “forgive yourself” is frequently offered as pastoral advice to people struggling with guilt, shame, or regret. Its absence from Scripture is not a trivial observation. The framework a question uses determines the answer it receives, and the question of whether you need to forgive yourself places you as both the offended…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07082 If legalism is the error of adding to what God requires, antinomianism is the error of subtracting from it. The word comes from the Greek anti (against) and nomos (law): the view that Christians are so thoroughly freed from the law by grace that the moral law has no ongoing relevance or binding…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07071 The word legalism gets used in at least two quite different ways in contemporary Christianity. Sometimes it means what it should mean: the error of trying to earn righteousness before God through law-keeping, or of adding human rules to Scripture and binding consciences where God has not. Other times it is used as…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04122 Paul’s letter to the Romans contains one of the most extraordinary declarations in the entire New Testament: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). This single verse introduces a concept that reshapes how believers understand their…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04019 Paul writes to the Corinthian church and tells them, pointedly, that he cannot address them as spiritual people but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ (1 Corinthians 3:1). The church at Corinth was genuine enough that Paul wrote to it as a church and addresses them as brothers and sisters…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 05011 “Follow your heart” has become the governing moral instruction of contemporary culture, offered as wisdom in everything from self-help literature to children’s films. The assumption behind it is that the inner life is essentially reliable, that personal feeling constitutes a trustworthy guide to what is right and true. Scripture does not share that…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6022 The conscience is one of God’s remarkable gifts to human beings: an internal moral faculty that registers the difference between right and wrong and alerts the person to the gravity of their choices. What happens when that faculty is persistently overridden and ultimately silenced is one of the most alarming descriptions in the…