Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07008. Hebrews 6:4-6 is the passage people reach for when they want to argue that a genuine believer can be lost, and the language about falling away is undeniably severe. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I have no patience with treatments that wave the difficulty away. If you have been troubled…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7003. Can a person be saved and have a lack of assurance about it? Yes, and that is not the same thing as a lack of salvation. Many genuine believers have lived for long stretches without the settled confidence that they belonged to God. This question usually arrives from someone in real distress, so…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7001. Assurance of salvation is the settled confidence that you belong to God and will not be lost. It is not the same thing as being saved, and keeping those two apart is the first step to understanding the whole subject. Security is objective and rests on God. Assurance is subjective and rests in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6063. Wilful sin is sin committed with open eyes. Not the sin that overtakes you, not the sin you regret before you have finished it, but the sin you knew was wrong and chose anyway. The phrase makes believers nervous because of one verse. If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10149. The book of life appears from the Pentateuch to the final chapters of Revelation, and it stands for something of enormous comfort and enormous seriousness at the same time. It is God’s register of those who belong to Him, and at the last judgement it is the book that decides everything. People often…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 04119. The sealing of the Spirit is the term Paul uses in Ephesians to describe something that happened to you the moment you believed and that nothing since has been able to undo. When he tells the Ephesian believers they were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13), he is reaching for language…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4101. Spirit indwelling and whether it can ever be lost is not an abstract puzzle for theologians to argue over on a wet afternoon. It reaches directly into how a believer sleeps at night. Someone who believes their salvation depends on sustained spiritual performance lives in a fundamentally different psychological and spiritual state from…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4080. Does the filling and assurance of a believer’s salvation genuinely connect to one another, or are they two entirely separate matters that should never be confused. I want to answer this carefully, because a wrong answer in either direction causes real pastoral damage. Get this connection wrong one way and you risk anxious…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4153. Can a true Christian commit the unforgivable sin? I want to answer that plainly at the very start, because leaving it hanging only prolongs the fear: no, a genuine believer in Jesus cannot commit the unforgivable sin. That answer needs explaining and grounding, but I do not want anyone reading on in needless…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 4199. The bond between the Spirit and resurrection is one of the richest truths the New Testament holds out to us, and it answers a question that sits quietly in the heart of every believer. What happens to me when I die, and how do I ever arrive at the glory God has promised?…