Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5159. Bodily redemption is the hope Paul is straining towards in Romans 8:23, and I think it is one of the most neglected promises in the whole of Christian teaching. We speak a great deal about the saving of the soul. We say far less about what God intends to do with the ageing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5199. The final destiny of the human person is one of those questions that people think they have already answered until you press them on it. Ask a congregation where they are going and most will say heaven. Ask what they will be doing there and the answers thin out considerably. Ask whether they…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11178. Overcoming jealousy first requires understanding that not all jealousy is the same thing, and Scripture is more nuanced on this than we sometimes assume. Jealousy over a relationship, a marriage, a friendship, a position we fear losing to someone else, is different from envy over a possession or achievement, though the two overlap…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11177. Overcoming envy is a battle most Christians fight quietly, largely because envy is embarrassing to admit. Nobody wants to say out loud that a friend’s new job, a sibling’s easier marriage, or a fellow believer’s answered prayer made them feel worse rather than glad. Yet Scripture names envy plainly and repeatedly as a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11176. Overcoming resentment is a task most of us underestimate, right up until we notice how much mental energy a single unresolved grievance can quietly consume. Resentment is bitterness’s close cousin: a low, simmering sense of grievance against someone, often someone close to us, for a wrong that was never properly addressed, apologised for,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11175. Overcoming bitterness is one of the slower, less glamorous battles of the Christian life, and I say that as someone who has fought it personally, not only counselled others through it from a safe distance. Bitterness rarely arrives all at once. It creeps in quietly after a wound, an injustice, a betrayal, or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11174. What, then, is true reconciliation, and is it always genuinely possible to achieve? Biblical reconciliation is, at its heart, the restoration of a broken relationship, and it sits at the very centre of the gospel message itself, since our reconciliation with God through Christ is the pattern Scripture holds up for how estranged…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11173. Forgiving the unrepentant is genuinely one of the hardest instructions in the whole Christian life to apply well, precisely because so much popular teaching on forgiveness quietly assumes the other person has already said sorry first. What do you do when they never do, when the person who hurt you shows no remorse…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11172. How do I apologise well? A biblical apology is considerably more specific than the vague, deflecting non-apologies that pass for repentance in so much of ordinary life, phrases like ‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ which manage to sound apologetic while accepting no actual responsibility. I want to walk through what a genuinely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11171. How, then, do I respond when I have genuinely and clearly wronged someone else? Making amends is one of the most concrete, practical demands the whole Christian life places on us, and it is also one of the areas where I see believers struggle most, often substituting vague guilt or private prayer alone…