Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07014. Justification is the moment a guilty sinner is declared righteous by God, and I want to be precise about that word declared, because everything hangs on it. God does not pretend that we are better than we are, and he does not wait until we have improved enough to deserve the verdict. He…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07013. How can a person be saved? It is the oldest question in the book, quite literally, since the Philippian jailer asked it in almost those words at midnight with an earthquake still settling around him. Paul’s answer to him was one sentence long, and I have never been able to improve on it:…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07012. God’s salvation is a rescue, and that single word does more work than any other in explaining what Christians mean when they use the term. We are not describing self-improvement, or moral effort, or the gradual refinement of a decent person into a slightly better one. We are describing somebody being pulled out…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07010. If salvation is by faith alone, why does James say that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone? That is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a shuffle. James 2:24 is the only place in the Bible where the words faith alone appear together,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07005. The difference between saving faith and intellectual belief is one of the most practically urgent distinctions in the whole of Scripture, and it is one that a great many church attenders have never had explained to them. A person can hold every article of the Christian faith to be true, defend it in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07004. If you have ever gone to bed at night troubled because you do not feel saved, you are in far larger company than you imagine. I have sat with believers who could explain the gospel more clearly than I could, who loved their Bibles, who served their church week after week, and who…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7000. Paul calls our salvation the gift of God in one of the best known sentences he ever wrote, and generations of readers have argued about which part of it he meant. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3039. How were Old Testament believers saved, when the cross lay centuries in their future? It is one of the best questions a thoughtful reader of Scripture can ask. Abraham died roughly two thousand years before Calvary. David never heard the name Jesus. If salvation is only through Christ’s death, as the New Testament…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2078. Abel’s offering is where the whole tragic story of Cain and Abel turns, and the question people bring to me most often is simply why. Cain and Abel both brought something to the LORD. Only one offering was accepted. Understanding why gets to the very heart of what worship has always actually been…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1133. The deconstruction movement has become impossible to ignore in Christian conversation, whether you first met the word on social media, in a bestselling memoir, or in the empty seat of someone who used to sit near you on a Sunday. Social media is full of stories of people, often raised in evangelical homes,…