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…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06061 Every honest believer knows what it is to return to the same sin again and again. Not the single stumble but the repeated pattern, the familiar failure that reasserts itself regardless of how many times it has been confessed and resolved against. Scripture is remarkably honest about this reality, and understanding what habitual…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06062 The category of secret sin is as old as the fall itself. Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God, hid themselves among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8). The desire to conceal wrongdoing is one of the most instinctive expressions of a guilty conscience, and it has operated in every human life since…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06063 There is a difference between a person who stumbles into sin through weakness or momentary failure of judgement, and a person who looks at what they know to be wrong and chooses it anyway, with full awareness and deliberate intent. Scripture recognises this distinction, and Hebrews 10:26 addresses it in terms that have…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11090 Few pastoral questions produce more confusion, guilt, and genuine suffering than this one. The Christian who has wrestled with an addictive or compulsive pattern of sin — whether that involves alcohol, pornography, drugs, food, gambling, or any other form — frequently encounters competing frameworks. Some Christian traditions treat it as purely spiritual: a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06065 The relationship between temptation and sin is one of the most practically important questions in Christian theology, precisely because every believer is tempted and every believer needs to understand what temptation is, what it is not, and how it relates to sin. The discussion is considerably deepened — and genuinely complicated — by…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 06066 This question touches one of the deepest fault lines in all of theology — the relationship between God’s purposes and the existence of evil in His creation. Scripture affirms with remarkable plainness that God can and does bring good out of evil. It also affirms with equal plainness that God is not the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06071 This question is one of the more practically pressing ones in Christian sexual ethics, and it is one Scripture does not answer directly. The word masturbation does not appear in the Bible. Any honest answer has to begin there, because the temptation — in both directions — is to pretend more certainty than…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06072 This is one of those pastoral questions where a great deal of unnecessary guilt and confusion has accumulated because the distinction between two very different things has been blurred. Many sincere Christians live under a burden of condemnation about their own normal human responses, whilst the genuinely problematic territory of lust goes unaddressed…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06069 The question of whether some sins are worse than others touches something most people intuitively sense but find difficult to reason through biblically. Instinctively, most people feel that murder is worse than petty dishonesty, that premeditated cruelty is worse than a moment of impatience. But there is also the uncomfortable teaching that all…