Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07067 Easy believism is a label applied to any presentation of the gospel that reduces saving faith to a bare mental agreement and leaves out repentance, the identity of Jesus, and any expectation that a converted person will be different afterwards. It is a criticism rather than a movement, and hardly anyone claims the…
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 07057 The dying thief is the single clearest illustration in Scripture that salvation is by grace through faith and nothing else. He had no time to be baptised, no opportunity to join a church, no chance to make restitution to anyone he had robbed, and no prospect of a single good work. He had…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07056 Faith and repentance are two words for one turn. That is the heart of the answer, and getting it right saves a great deal of unnecessary anxiety, because a good deal of pastoral damage has been done by treating them as two separate transactions that must be completed in the correct order. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07054 Christian conversion is the moment a person changes hands. It is not a church membership process, it is not a decision card, and it is not the gradual improvement of a decent life. It is the point at which someone stops trusting themselves and starts trusting Jesus, and everything after that flows from…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 07052 Saving faith is the hinge on which everything in the Christian life turns, and it is also the thing people most commonly misunderstand. Some treat it as a leap in the dark. Some treat it as a feeling they have to work up. Some treat it as agreeing with a list of propositions…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7045. Scripture says plainly that Jesus died for all, and just as plainly that not everyone will be saved. Put those two statements next to each other and many people feel a contradiction opening up. Either the death of Jesus did not accomplish what it set out to do, or the all is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07032. The ordo salutis is Latin for order of salvation, and it refers to the logical sequence in which the various parts of salvation relate to one another. It is a theologian’s framework rather than a phrase you will find in Scripture, and I want to be honest about that from the outset. No…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07025. The relationship between faith and works is where a great many Christians tie themselves in knots, and I understand why. Paul says a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law. James says faith without works is dead. Put those two sentences side by side without care and you have…