Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 good news to someone who already knows they need it. Nobody arrives at that awareness by clever argument alone, and nobody talks themselves into it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04120. The Spirit’s illuminating work inside a believer and His convicting work upon an unbeliever are close cousins in Scripture, yet they are not the same ministry, and mixing them up has left more than one Christian either doubting a salvation that is perfectly secure or misreading how God deals with people who do…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4084. Few questions are as heavy as this one, and I never treat it lightly: is there a point of no return, a place where a person has so hardened themselves against God that they can no longer respond to the gospel at all? My settled answer, drawn carefully from Scripture, is that yes,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04039. The relationship between the Spirit and unbelievers touches something basic about who the Holy Spirit is and what He came into the world to do. If His indwelling is the very mark of belonging to Jesus, as Romans 8:9 insists, does that mean the Spirit has no dealings at all with those who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4017. What is resisting the Holy Spirit, and is it something a Christian can do? The phrase comes to us from a tense and dramatic moment in the book of Acts, and it carries a sharp edge. To understand resisting the Holy Spirit we have to watch where the Bible actually uses the language,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7040 “Prevenient grace” is a term drawn primarily from Wesleyan and Arminian theology, and it addresses a question that no serious theology of salvation can sidestep: given that the fall has seriously affected human nature, how is it possible for any person to respond to the gospel at all? Understanding what the doctrine claims,…