Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7051 Repentance is one of the most misunderstood concepts in Christianity today, yet it’s absolutely central to the Gospel message. The confusion often comes from our modern understanding of the word versus what Scripture actually teaches. Is repentance merely feeling sorry for sin? Must we turn from all our sins before God will save…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7052 Of all the words we use in the Christian life, faith is surely one of the most common and yet one of the most misunderstood. We sing about it, we preach about it, we’re told we need more of it, but what actually is it? Is it a feeling? A leap in the…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 7000 Few passages in Scripture have generated as much theological discussion as Ephesians 2:8-9. The debate centres on a grammatical question with enormous theological implications: when Paul writes “and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,” what exactly is the gift? Is it faith itself that God gives us? Is it…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7010 At first glance, James 2:14-26 seems to contradict Paul’s teaching on justification by faith alone. James writes: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?… So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead… You…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7007 Philippians 2:12-13 is one of those passages that has puzzled believers and been misused by those who want to introduce works into salvation. Paul writes: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07082 If legalism is the error of adding to what God requires, antinomianism is the error of subtracting from it. The word comes from the Greek anti (against) and nomos (law): the view that Christians are so thoroughly freed from the law by grace that the moral law has no ongoing relevance or binding…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07071 The word legalism gets used in at least two quite different ways in contemporary Christianity. Sometimes it means what it should mean: the error of trying to earn righteousness before God through law-keeping, or of adding human rules to Scripture and binding consciences where God has not. Other times it is used as…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07012 Salvation is the word Scripture uses for what God has done about the human predicament. It is not a religious concept invented by the church; it is the great answer to the great problem that runs through every page of the Bible from Genesis 3 onwards. The word itself means rescue, and it…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07018 Grace is perhaps the most distinctive word in the Christian vocabulary, and also one of the most misused. It is not a vague spiritual niceness, nor a technical system requiring specialist knowledge to access. In Scripture it is something breathtakingly concrete: the favour of God given freely to those who have no claim…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07014 Justification is the word the New Testament uses to describe what happens legally and relationally when a sinner is accepted before God. It is not the whole of salvation, but it is its judicial heart. Getting a clear understanding of it matters enormously, because what you believe about justification determines what you believe…