Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6007. Sinless perfection has been promised by more than one movement in church history: the claim that a Christian can reach a point in this life where sinning stops altogether. Others swing to the opposite corner and treat ongoing sin so casually that holiness hardly seems worth pursuing. Can Christians live without sinning or…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2077. The death of Uzzah is one of those Old Testament episodes that stops readers cold: a man reaches out to steady the ark of the covenant when the oxen stumble, and God strikes him dead on the spot (2 Samuel 6:6-7). It looks, at first read, like a wildly disproportionate response to an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2062. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Those words from 1 John 1:5 are among the most compact and striking theological statements in all of Scripture. They arrive without qualification, without hedging, and without any parallel phrase to soften them. I want to work through what John actually…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2010. The fear of the Lord is, in Solomon’s words, “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood ideas in the whole Bible. Two errors keep turning up whenever I teach on this. The first sentimentalises it, reducing it to polite respect or quiet admiration, emptying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04045. To call your body the Spirit’s temple is one of the most startling things the New Testament says about you, and Paul says it without flinching in 1 Corinthians 6:19: do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? That a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4021. How does the Spirit sanctifies us? I love the question because the answer takes us straight to the heart of how God changes a person. To say that the Spirit sanctifies us is to say that holiness is not something I wring out of myself by gritted teeth and willpower, but something God…