Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6061. Habitual sin is sin that has stopped being an event and become a pattern. It is no longer the thing you did on a bad Tuesday. It is the groove your life runs in, and you could set your calendar by it. Two questions come with this subject, and they need different answers….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6060. The mortification of sin is Paul’s blunt name for the daily work of putting sin to death, and it is the least fashionable idea in modern Christian vocabulary. We prefer to speak of growth, journey and process. Paul reaches for a word that belongs in an execution yard. If by the Spirit you…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6059. When Jesus says of the offending hand, cut it off, He is not opening a clinic. He is using deliberate overstatement to say something about sin that gentler language would never get past our defences. The words come in the Sermon on the Mount. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks like the same sin, and they need entirely different responses. Scripture handles them differently throughout, and so should we. Two different conditions Weakness is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10154. Practical eschatology is not a phrase you will find in Scripture, but it describes something the New Testament does constantly: it tells us about the future and then immediately tells us how to behave on Monday. Prophecy in the Bible almost never arrives without an application attached. That is worth saying, because end-times…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 19. Why are so many Christians still spiritual infants after years of faith? It troubles me, and I suspect it troubles you, that so many believers remain spiritual infants long after they should have grown up. They have been in church for a decade or more, they love the Lord in their way, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 35. Learning doctrine can feel like standing at the bottom of a mountain when you are new to the faith, aware that entire libraries have been written about the Trinity, the atonement, eschatology, and a dozen other subjects you barely know how to pronounce, let alone explain. That feeling is completely normal, and 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: 6 minutesQuestion 0034 When people ask me what resources will help their doctrinal growth, I always start in the same place, because the answer matters more than any book list. The single most important resource for doctrinal growth is the Bible itself, read carefully, prayerfully and often. Every other tool is a servant of that one,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0033 If you long for an appetite for doctrine that you do not yet feel, take heart, because that very longing is already a seed of the thing you want. Nobody is born hungry for theology. I was not. The desire to know God deeply is something the Spirit grows in a believer over…