Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 7003 This might seem a strange question at first. How could someone possess eternal life and be unaware of it? Yet pastoral experience and Scripture both suggest this is not only possible but relatively common. Many sincere believers struggle with assurance, wondering whether their conversion was genuine, whether they truly belong to God. The…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 7004 Few experiences are more distressing for Christians than the absence of spiritual feeling. You’ve trusted Jesus, you believe the Gospel, you’re trying to follow Him—yet something is missing. There’s no warmth, no joy, no sense of God’s presence. You go through the motions but feel nothing. You wonder if you’re even saved at…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11087 The phrase “forgive yourself” is frequently offered as pastoral advice to people struggling with guilt, shame, or regret. Its absence from Scripture is not a trivial observation. The framework a question uses determines the answer it receives, and the question of whether you need to forgive yourself places you as both the offended…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6021 The hardened heart is one of Scripture’s most sobering images. From Pharaoh’s repeated resistance to Moses through to the stern warnings of Hebrews, the biblical writers return again and again to the danger of a heart that has become impervious to God’s voice. Understanding what this means, and how it happens, is not…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6042 When a Christian fails morally, are they in the same position as someone who has deliberately turned their back on God and done evil with full intent? Every honest believer has experienced the frustration of Romans 7, doing what they did not want to do, failing in ways they genuinely hated, confessed, and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02014 The phrase “God hates the sin but loves the sinner” has become so familiar in Christian circles that most people assume it must be in the Bible somewhere. It is not. The reality the Bible presents is more complex, more demanding, and ultimately more searching than that popular summary allows. Getting this right…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6040 Few questions press harder on faith than this one. A faithful believer loses a child to cancer while a corrupt businessman retires in comfort. A woman who has served God for decades is consumed by chronic pain, while someone who gives no thought to God at all seems to sail through life without…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06062 The category of secret sin is as old as the fall itself. Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God, hid themselves among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8). The desire to conceal wrongdoing is one of the most instinctive expressions of a guilty conscience, and it has operated in every human life since…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06063 There is a difference between a person who stumbles into sin through weakness or momentary failure of judgement, and a person who looks at what they know to be wrong and chooses it anyway, with full awareness and deliberate intent. Scripture recognises this distinction, and Hebrews 10:26 addresses it in terms that have…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what sin actually is than any single word could capture. Three of those terms recur throughout the Hebrew Scriptures — and significantly, they appear together in…