Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07010. If salvation is by faith alone, why does James say that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone? That is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a shuffle. James 2:24 is the only place in the Bible where the words faith alone appear together,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07009. The sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17 is one of those phrases that people trip over at the very end of a letter otherwise full of comfort, and it stops them dead. John has spent five chapters telling his readers how they may know that they have eternal life, and then, almost…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07007. Paul’s command to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling has frightened more Christians than almost any other sentence he wrote, and the fright is entirely unnecessary once you see where the sentence sits. Read on its own it sounds as though salvation is a project we complete under threat. Read…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07005. The difference between saving faith and intellectual belief is one of the most practically urgent distinctions in the whole of Scripture, and it is one that a great many church attenders have never had explained to them. A person can hold every article of the Christian faith to be true, defend it in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07004. If you have ever gone to bed at night troubled because you do not feel saved, you are in far larger company than you imagine. I have sat with believers who could explain the gospel more clearly than I could, who loved their Bibles, who served their church week after week, and who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7003. Can a person be saved and have a lack of assurance about it? Yes, and that is not the same thing as a lack of salvation. Many genuine believers have lived for long stretches without the settled confidence that they belonged to God. This question usually arrives from someone in real distress, so…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7001. Assurance of salvation is the settled confidence that you belong to God and will not be lost. It is not the same thing as being saved, and keeping those two apart is the first step to understanding the whole subject. Security is objective and rests on God. Assurance is subjective and rests in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6076. Paul’s thorn in the flesh is one of the great unanswered questions of the New Testament, and I have come to think the silence is deliberate. We are told what it did, why it was given and what God said about it. We are never told what it was. That combination is unusual…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6073. Unintentional sin is a genuine biblical category, and the answer to whether we are responsible for it is yes, with a very large mercy attached. Scripture is clear that ignorance does not simply cancel guilt. It is equally clear that God made specific provision for the person who sinned without realising it, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6072. Lust and attraction are not the same thing, and a great many sincere Christians have been tormented by the assumption that they are. Noticing that someone is beautiful is not adultery. Jesus never said it was. The difference between lust and attraction is one of those distinctions that sounds academic until you meet…