Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6071. Scripture defines sexual sin with considerable care, and masturbation is never named among the things it defines. That silence is the first fact any honest answer has to reckon with. This is a question people are ashamed to ask and desperate to have answered, so I want to be careful and direct. What…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6069. Are there degrees of sin? Yes and no, and both halves of that answer need holding at once or you will end up in one of two ditches. All sin makes a person guilty before a holy God, so in the matter of guilt there are no degrees of sin worth counting on….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6067. Confession of sin to God is always sufficient for forgiveness. There is no human intermediary, no priest, no queue and no waiting period. That needs saying first and plainly, because a great deal of religious machinery has been built on denying it. And yet Scripture also tells believers to confess to one another….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, which is rather like apologising for having been shot at. So where does the line fall? And if Jesus was tempted in every respect as…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6063. Wilful sin is sin committed with open eyes. Not the sin that overtakes you, not the sin you regret before you have finished it, but the sin you knew was wrong and chose anyway. The phrase makes believers nervous because of one verse. If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6062. Secret sin is the sin nobody knows about except you and God. It has no witnesses, no consequences that anyone can trace, and no cost that shows up on the surface of your life. That is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Every believer I have known well has had some version of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6061. Habitual sin is sin that has stopped being an event and become a pattern. It is no longer the thing you did on a bad Tuesday. It is the groove your life runs in, and you could set your calendar by it. Two questions come with this subject, and they need different answers….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6060. The mortification of sin is Paul’s blunt name for the daily work of putting sin to death, and it is the least fashionable idea in modern Christian vocabulary. We prefer to speak of growth, journey and process. Paul reaches for a word that belongs in an execution yard. If by the Spirit you…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6059. When Jesus says of the offending hand, cut it off, He is not opening a clinic. He is using deliberate overstatement to say something about sin that gentler language would never get past our defences. The words come in the Sermon on the Mount. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6058. Is all suffering a result of personal sin? No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. This is one of the few questions where the Bible hands us an entire book to make sure we do not get it wrong. The instinct to trace every affliction back to personal sin runs deep in…