Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11075 Walk into almost any Christian bookshop or open a church website and you will find no shortage of Bible reading plans on offer. Chronological plans, canonical plans, thematic plans, plans that pair Old and New Testaments, plans that take you through in a year, plans that take you through in ninety days. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11076 It sounds like a simple question, but it carries a pastoral complication: depending on how it is answered, it is very likely to produce more guilt than growth. Whatever number is given, someone will feel they are already failing. So before giving any kind of practical answer, it is worth beginning not with…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7064 In 1937, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship. Writing against a German church that had largely surrendered its integrity in the face of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer drew a distinction that has echoed through Christian thinking ever since. Cheap grace, he argued, is the preaching…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7061 At Christian camps, conferences, and evangelistic meetings, the call to re-dedication is a familiar one. A believer who has drifted steps forward to renew their commitment, making promises they genuinely intend to keep. A question sometimes surfaces in that moment, and it is a serious one: does this mean I was never truly…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7060 The word “backslider” carries more weight in older Christian usage than it does in most modern translations, but the reality it describes is woven through the entire New Testament. It refers to a genuine believer who has withdrawn from active fellowship with God, whose spiritual life has contracted, whose once-warm faith has grown…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60086 Genesis 19:8 records one of the most disturbing episodes in Scripture. The men of Sodom have surrounded Lot’s house demanding that he hand over his two angelic visitors so that they can “know” them sexually. Lot’s response stops readers in their tracks: “Behold, I have two daughters who have not known any man….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11077 The promise appears several times in John’s Gospel and has been both a source of genuine encouragement and, in certain contexts, a source of real confusion and disappointment. “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11078 Few sayings of Jesus have generated more theological confusion, or more outright misuse, than His statement about speaking to mountains. Prosperity preachers have turned it into a spiritual technique. Sceptics have treated it as evidence of failed promises. Neither response does justice to what Jesus was actually saying, or the rich background from…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11079 It is a question that rewards careful attention precisely because it is unexpected. The prayer Jesus gave His disciples as a model for how they ought to pray contains adoration, submission, petition, and confession, yet it contains nothing that reads straightforwardly as “thank you.” Given that gratitude is woven throughout the rest of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7085 The question arises naturally for anyone who takes the New Testament seriously. Paul can write to the Corinthians and call them “those sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:2), and yet the same letter spends considerable energy addressing a congregation with serious moral and relational problems. If they are already sanctified, what is…