Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11024 The word “Christian” appears only three times in the New Testament. The word “disciple” appears over 260 times. That difference in frequency tells us something important about how the early church understood what it meant to follow Jesus. Being a disciple is not a higher level of commitment available to the especially serious….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11023 The Great Commission is the final instruction Jesus gave to His followers before ascending to heaven, and it defines the church’s mission until He returns. It is not one task among many. It is the task, the overarching purpose for which the church exists between the ascension and the Rapture. Understanding it properly…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11019 The word “disciple” appears far more often in the New Testament than the word “Christian.” That alone should tell us something about what the early church understood the normal Christian life to look like. Discipleship is not an advanced course for the especially committed. It is the basic shape of what it means…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11020 Jesus did not command His followers to make converts. He commanded them to make disciples. The distinction matters enormously, because it shapes how we understand the church’s mission and what success looks like. A convert has made a decision. A disciple is being transformed. The Great Commission calls us to the longer, harder,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1058 Family devotions. Family worship. Family Bible reading. Whatever you call it, most Christian parents feel a mixture of guilt and aspiration about this practice. We know we should be doing it. We’ve heard about the Puritan families who gathered daily around Scripture. We’ve read the statistics about children raised in spiritually engaged homes…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 09111 We live in a consumer culture. Everything is evaluated by what it does for us, how it makes us feel, whether it meets our needs. And tragically, this mindset has infiltrated the church. Religious consumerism treats Christianity as a product to be selected, evaluated, and consumed according to personal preference rather than as…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7067 Easy believism describes a presentation of the gospel in which salvation is reduced to intellectual acknowledgment of certain facts about Jesus, with no genuine repentance, no change of direction, and no expectation of transformation. It is not a label its proponents normally accept for themselves, but it describes a real tendency that has…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7065 The term “Lordship salvation” describes the view that genuine saving faith necessarily includes recognition of and submission to Jesus as Lord, not merely reception of Him as Saviour. It entered widespread evangelical debate primarily through John MacArthur’s 1988 book The Gospel According to Jesus, which argued that a generation of evangelicalism had been…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7066 Few theological debates have generated as much heat within conservative evangelicalism as the question of whether genuine saving faith necessarily includes acknowledgment of Christ’s lordship. On one side stands the position that a Jesus who is not received as Lord has not truly been received at all. On the other stands the concern…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7064 In 1937, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship. Writing against a German church that had largely surrendered its integrity in the face of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer drew a distinction that has echoed through Christian thinking ever since. Cheap grace, he argued, is the preaching…