Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks like the same sin, and they need entirely different responses. Scripture handles them differently throughout, and so should we. Two different conditions Weakness is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because Scripture knows nothing of a tier of offences that need not trouble anybody. Every congregation has its list, and the list is usually invisible to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6032. The sin of lust is one of the areas where believers most often feel defeated, and part of the defeat is caused by a misunderstanding. A great many Christians are confessing as lust something that Scripture does not call lust at all. So let me try to define it accurately first, because a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God is angry. Jesus was angry. The Psalms are full of it. What Scripture does is draw a line, and it draws it in a place…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6030. Envy and jealousy get used interchangeably in ordinary speech, and Scripture is more careful than we are. One of them is always sinful. The other can be a virtue, and is even used of God Himself. Sorting them out is worth the effort, because the confusion has made a good many believers anxious…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence appears twice in the New Testament because it needed saying twice. It is also the sin nobody thinks they have. Everybody can name their temper…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6025. Corporate sin is the biblical recognition that groups, not only individuals, can be guilty before God. Nations, cities and churches are addressed and judged as bodies throughout Scripture, and pretending otherwise requires ignoring a great deal of the Old Testament. The difficulty is that this doctrine has been enlisted recently to support ideas…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6024. The sins of parents do affect their children, and anyone who has done pastoral work for a fortnight knows it. What Scripture will not allow is the conclusion people usually draw from that, which is that the child somehow carries the parent’s guilt. Two things are true at once here, and holding them…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6021. To harden your heart, in biblical language, is to make yourself progressively less responsive to God. It is not usually a decision anyone announces. It is the cumulative effect of small refusals, each one making the next refusal a little easier and a little quieter. The Bible treats it as one of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6019. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and the doctrine of the deceitful heart has been used to prove a great deal that Jeremiah never said. It has been quoted to shut down every intuition, every emotion and every conviction a believer has ever had. That is not what the…