Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because Scripture knows nothing of a tier of offences that need not trouble anybody. Every congregation has its list, and the list is usually invisible to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6040. Why the wicked prosper while decent people are ground down is not a question invented by modern sceptics. It is asked, at length and with considerable heat, by the writers of Scripture themselves. That fact alone should reassure anyone who has felt guilty for asking it. The Bible does not treat this as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6032. The sin of lust is one of the areas where believers most often feel defeated, and part of the defeat is caused by a misunderstanding. A great many Christians are confessing as lust something that Scripture does not call lust at all. So let me try to define it accurately first, because a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God is angry. Jesus was angry. The Psalms are full of it. What Scripture does is draw a line, and it draws it in a place…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6030. Envy and jealousy get used interchangeably in ordinary speech, and Scripture is more careful than we are. One of them is always sinful. The other can be a virtue, and is even used of God Himself. Sorting them out is worth the effort, because the confusion has made a good many believers anxious…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence appears twice in the New Testament because it needed saying twice. It is also the sin nobody thinks they have. Everybody can name their temper…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6024. The sins of parents do affect their children, and anyone who has done pastoral work for a fortnight knows it. What Scripture will not allow is the conclusion people usually draw from that, which is that the child somehow carries the parent’s guilt. Two things are true at once here, and holding them…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 people can weep over the same sin and end up in entirely different places. Knowing which one you are experiencing is not a matter of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6015. Ask what the Bible means by the world and the answer is that it means three different things, and the one that causes all the trouble is the world system. God so loved the world, John writes, and then he tells us not to love the world. The knot unties the moment you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been asked it in hospital corridors and in the church car park, and it always carries a certain weariness with it. It deserves a straight answer…