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: 9 minutesQuestion 7002 How can we tell the difference between genuine salvation and mere religious profession? This question is not merely academic; it has eternal consequences. Jesus Himself warned that many will say “Lord, Lord” on the day of judgement, only to hear Him declare, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:21-23). The Apostle Paul urged the…
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: 3 minutesQuestion 07025 This question sits at the very heart of the Protestant Reformation, and it is not merely a historical or academic debate. How a person answers it shapes how they understand the gospel, how they relate to God, and what they think Christian discipleship actually involves. The apparent tension in the New Testament between…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07090 Every pastor encounters this pastoral challenge eventually: someone who has walked to the front of a church, raised a hand, prayed a sinner’s prayer, or signed a decision card on multiple occasions, yet whose life shows no discernible evidence that anything real happened. The temptation is to call them forward again, to repeat…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6029 Pride occupies a unique place in the catalogue of human sin. The Christian tradition has long regarded it not merely as one sin among others but as the root from which most other sins grow. Scripture is remarkably consistent in its treatment of pride, addressing it across virtually every genre and period of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06032 When Jesus addressed lust in the Sermon on the Mount, He was not introducing a new standard. He was revealing the standard that had always been there, the one that an outward-focused reading of the law had managed to obscure. By reaching behind the act to the intention of the heart, He made…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06030 Envy and jealousy are two of the most uncomfortable emotions to admit to, perhaps because they expose something we would rather keep hidden: a deeply personal resentment of what someone else has, or a wounded sense that something we value has been threatened or taken. The Bible treats these two words differently, and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06031 Anger is one of the most contested emotional territories in Christian life. Some believers are taught that any expression of anger is sinful and unspiritual, a failure of self-control that a more mature person would have overcome. Others, reacting against that, treat anger as essentially neutral, requiring no particular scrutiny. Scripture does not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6041 Churches are generally clear about what sins are unacceptable: sexual immorality, drunkenness, theft, violence. These are named, condemned, and, when they surface, addressed. But there is another category of sin that passes almost without comment in most congregations, sins that are just as real and just as damaging but that carry no social…