Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07015 Sanctification is what God does in the believer after conversion. If justification answers the question of the believer’s standing before God, sanctification answers the question of their state, the actual moral and spiritual condition of their inner life. The two must be carefully distinguished; confusing them is the source of considerable theological muddle…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07016 Glorification is the final act of God’s saving work. It is the moment when everything that salvation promised is fully and finally delivered, when the believer receives a resurrection body, is freed at last from the presence and possibility of sin, and is completely conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. It is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11083 Gluttony is perhaps the most consistently ignored sin in contemporary evangelical culture. Behaviours that would draw immediate pastoral concern in relation to other appetites are routinely overlooked when the appetite in question involves food. Yet Scripture addresses it with surprising directness, and the underlying principle it violates is one that touches the whole…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11085 Many believers wake troubled by the contents of a dream, carrying a sense of guilt or shame about what their sleeping mind produced. The question of whether dreams can constitute sin requires both theological clarity and pastoral honesty, because anxious people deserve real answers rather than reassurance that skirts the issue. The Nature…
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 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: 4 minutesQuestion 10200 What happens to a person in the time between death and the resurrection? It is a question that has occupied Christian thinkers across the centuries, and it is one that touches everyone who has stood at a graveside. Scripture gives more guidance on this than is often realised, though it does not answer…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11069 The Bible contains more than three hundred commands not to fear, which might suggest that every experience of fear or anxiety is a failure of faith. That reading, however, misunderstands what those commands are actually doing, and it places an additional burden on sincere believers that they were never meant to carry. Scripture…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7066 Few theological debates have generated as much heat within conservative evangelicalism as the question of whether genuine saving faith necessarily includes acknowledgment of Christ’s lordship. On one side stands the position that a Jesus who is not received as Lord has not truly been received at all. On the other stands the concern…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07072 Sanctification is one of those theological terms that gets used in different ways without people always realising it, which can produce genuine confusion about what the Christian life actually involves and what the New Testament expects of believers. The distinction between definitive and progressive sanctification is not academic hairsplitting but a genuinely important…