Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07051 True repentance is one of those words the church uses constantly and explains rarely, which is a pity, because a great deal of unnecessary misery grows in that gap. Some people think it means grovelling. Some think it means getting your life sorted before God will have you. Some have been told it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07021. What happens to those who have never heard the gospel is one of the hardest questions anyone asks me, and it is usually asked with real feeling rather than as a debating point. A student wants to know whether her Hindu grandmother is lost. A man wants to know what God does with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07018. God’s grace is favour shown to people who have earned the opposite, and that definition is worth memorising because almost every popular version of it is softer than the real thing. Grace is not God being lenient. Leniency overlooks the offence. Grace deals with the offence at enormous cost and then treats the…
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: 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 6003. The consequences of sin reach further than most people ever suspect, and understanding them is essential if we are to grasp what the Lord Jesus actually accomplished on the cross. God warned Adam plainly: “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam ate, and did not…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6001. The nature of sin is the first thing we must get clear if the gospel is ever going to make sense, and yet our culture has almost lost the word. People speak of mistakes, poor choices, unhealthy patterns, or trauma responses, anything but sin. Even Christians can grow vague here. So what exactly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6000. The doctrine of sin, known formally as hamartiology, is the branch of theology that asks what sin is, where it came from, what it has done to us, and why the answer shapes everything else we believe. The name comes from the Greek hamartia, the New Testament’s most common word for sin, joined…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3053. How is Jesus different from other religious leaders? It is one of the most common questions a thoughtful unbeliever asks, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a slogan. The world has produced many revered religious leaders: Moses and Muhammad, Buddha and Confucius, gurus and philosophers beyond counting. Popular culture likes to…