Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07054 The word “conversion” does not appear with great frequency in English Bibles, but the reality it describes is at the heart of everything the New Testament calls people to. To be converted is to be turned, and the New Testament presents this turning as simultaneously something that happens to a person and something…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07055 This question matters pastorally far more than it might appear to at first. People who have grown up in Christian homes sometimes wrestle with the absence of a dramatic conversion moment. Others, who came to faith through a long process of questioning and gradual conviction, wonder whether their apparently slow arrival counts. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07056 Few questions in evangelical Christianity have generated more pastoral confusion than this one. Some teachers present repentance and faith as sequential requirements, as if repentance must first reach a sufficient depth before faith becomes possible. Others minimise repentance to the point of near-irrelevance, presenting faith alone as the single condition with nothing else…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07057 There is perhaps no account in the Gospels that more plainly displays the grace of God in salvation than the exchange between Jesus and one of the criminals crucified alongside Him. It has been used in Christian preaching and pastoral care for two thousand years, and rightly so, because what takes place in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07058 The question of deathbed conversions tends to provoke two quite different reactions. For some, the thought that a person can turn to Christ in the final moments of life and receive full forgiveness and eternal life is an expression of the gospel’s astonishing generosity. For others, it raises uncomfortable questions about fairness, about…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04111 Few topics in practical Christian theology generate more pastoral confusion than the relationship between water baptism and Spirit baptism. Acts appears to offer contradictory evidence: Samaritans were baptised in water before the Spirit came; Cornelius and his household received the Spirit before any water was applied; the Ephesian disciples received the Spirit only…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04119 When Paul writes to the Ephesian believers that they were “sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13), he reaches for language drawn from the commercial and legal world of his day. A seal was not decorative. It was a mark of ownership that identified what belonged to whom, and a binding guarantee…