Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7046 Union with Christ is one of the richest and most comprehensive concepts in the New Testament, and it functions as the theological foundation on which virtually every other aspect of salvation rests. It is also among the most underappreciated. Believers who have sat under solid Bible teaching for years can sometimes be unfamiliar…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7047 The phrase “in Christ” appears in Paul’s letters more frequently than almost any other expression, and yet it tends to wash over readers without registering its full weight. It is not filler language or pious decoration. It is Paul’s most concentrated shorthand for the most fundamental thing that is true of a person…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04019 Paul writes to the Corinthian church and tells them, pointedly, that he cannot address them as spiritual people but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ (1 Corinthians 3:1). The church at Corinth was genuine enough that Paul wrote to it as a church and addresses them as brothers and sisters…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04100 Salvation is the work of the triune God: the Father who planned it, the Son who accomplished it, and the Holy Spirit who applies it. The Spirit’s role in bringing everything the Father purposed and the Son secured into the actual experience of the individual is perhaps the most practically immediate dimension of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6023 The teaching about generational curses has become widespread in charismatic and Pentecostal circles, typically claiming that sins committed by ancestors create spiritual bondages that pass through family lines and require specific prayer to break. The idea is appealing in its apparent explanatory power, and it draws on real biblical language. The question is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11082 This question is framed as though it must be one or the other, and most of the energy in contemporary discourse goes into arguing for the disease model. Addiction, we are told, is a brain disorder rather than a moral failing, and framing it as sin is unhelpful at best and cruel at…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06030 Envy and jealousy are two of the most uncomfortable emotions to admit to, perhaps because they expose something we would rather keep hidden: a deeply personal resentment of what someone else has, or a wounded sense that something we value has been threatened or taken. The Bible treats these two words differently, and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06031 Anger is one of the most contested emotional territories in Christian life. Some believers are taught that any expression of anger is sinful and unspiritual, a failure of self-control that a more mature person would have overcome. Others, reacting against that, treat anger as essentially neutral, requiring no particular scrutiny. Scripture does not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6049 This question troubles new Christians and experienced ones alike. If Christ has truly dealt with sin, if we are new creations, if the Spirit now lives within us, why does the pull toward sin remain so real and so persistent? Some teachers have suggested that genuine conversion should produce a point of complete…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06060 John Owen’s seventeenth-century treatise on mortification of sin remains one of the most searching pieces of practical theology in the English language. But the concept did not originate with Owen. It is rooted in the apostle Paul’s instruction to “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Colossians 3:5), and it names…