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 07038 Irresistible grace — sometimes called effectual grace or efficacious grace — is the fourth point of the Calvinist TULIP system. It is the doctrine that God’s saving work in the elect cannot fail and cannot be resisted: when God determines to bring a person to salvation, He works in them in such a…
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 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…
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: 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 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: 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…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06067 The practice of confession sits at the intersection of theology and daily Christian experience. Most believers know they should confess sin to God, but questions arise about whether that private prayer is all that is ever required — or whether Scripture sometimes calls for something more. The answer is more layered than a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09024 Few pastoral situations are more delicate or more important than the question of what the church should do when a member sins publicly. Get it wrong in one direction — moving too quickly, too harshly, or with the wrong spirit — and the church becomes a place of fear rather than grace. Get…