Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09000. Believer’s baptism is the immersion in water of a person who has already trusted Jesus, as their public identification with His death, burial and resurrection. That sentence contains the whole argument, and every phrase in it is doing work. I want to open it up properly, because baptism is one of those subjects…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08072 Whether any Christian can cast out demons is a question that usually arrives with a good deal riding on it. Someone is frightened, or someone has been told they should be able to do this and nothing has happened, or someone has watched a ministry team at work and wondered whether they are…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7104 The phrase personal relationship with Jesus is everywhere in evangelical speech and nowhere in the Bible, which is worth noticing before we go any further. That does not make it wrong. The reality it points to is thoroughly biblical. But the wording has caused a fair amount of confusion, and clearing that up…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays out with striking clarity: what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men, who will be able to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07066 Receiving Jesus as Lord is not a second step that follows conversion, and it is not an extra condition attached to it either. When a sinner trusts Jesus, they receive the whole Person, and He does not come in sections. The question is whether submission belongs in the terms of the gospel or…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07065 Lordship salvation is the teaching that saving faith necessarily includes a submission to Jesus as Lord, and that a profession of faith without submission is not saving faith at all. It became one of the sharpest evangelical arguments of the last forty years, and the dust has still not entirely settled. I want…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real thing. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it also needs handling carefully, because it can be pushed until it turns grace into a purchase. Let…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6067. Confession of sin to God is always sufficient for forgiveness. There is no human intermediary, no priest, no queue and no waiting period. That needs saying first and plainly, because a great deal of religious machinery has been built on denying it. And yet Scripture also tells believers to confess to one another….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, which is rather like apologising for having been shot at. So where does the line fall? And if Jesus was tempted in every respect as…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6062. Secret sin is the sin nobody knows about except you and God. It has no witnesses, no consequences that anyone can trace, and no cost that shows up on the surface of your life. That is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Every believer I have known well has had some version of…