Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7074. Sinless perfection in this present life is taught by a number of sincere traditions, and I want to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves rather than waving it away. The people who hold it are usually not careless Christians. They are often the opposite, people with a high view of holiness…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7073. Positional sanctification describes where you stand before God; practical sanctification describes how you are getting on. Both are scriptural, both matter, and a great many discouraged Christians are discouraged precisely because they have been measuring the first by the second. If you have ever wondered how Paul could call the Corinthians saints with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7072. Progressive sanctification is the part of this doctrine most Christians have heard about, and it is the part that feels true to experience. We are being changed, slowly, unevenly, over a lifetime. What fewer believers have been taught is that Scripture also speaks of sanctification as something already accomplished, finished, and never to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have never met a Christian who was entirely free of it, including the one writing this. We know that we are saved by grace, we say…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 7070. Biblical apostasy is a word we reach for quickly and understand slowly. I have heard it applied to a friend who stopped attending church, to a denomination that has drifted, to a preacher whose theology went sideways, and once or twice to somebody who had simply irritated the person speaking. Scripture handles the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07068 The Free Grace movement is a loose body of teachers who insist that salvation is received by faith alone, entirely apart from works, commitment or any promise of future obedience. It came into focus in the 1980s as a reaction against Lordship salvation, and it contains a great deal I agree with alongside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07067 Easy believism is a label applied to any presentation of the gospel that reduces saving faith to a bare mental agreement and leaves out repentance, the identity of Jesus, and any expectation that a converted person will be different afterwards. It is a criticism rather than a movement, and hardly anyone claims the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07066 Receiving Jesus as Lord is not a second step that follows conversion, and it is not an extra condition attached to it either. When a sinner trusts Jesus, they receive the whole Person, and He does not come in sections. The question is whether submission belongs in the terms of the gospel or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real thing. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it also needs handling carefully, because it can be pushed until it turns grace into a purchase. Let…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07063 Common grace is the undeserved kindness God shows to everybody without exception, and saving grace is the undeserved kindness by which He rescues those who trust Jesus. Both are grace, because neither is earned. They differ in scope, in purpose and in what they accomplish. The distinction is worth getting straight, because a…