Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07018. God’s grace is favour shown to people who have earned the opposite, and that definition is worth memorising because almost every popular version of it is softer than the real thing. Grace is not God being lenient. Leniency overlooks the offence. Grace deals with the offence at enormous cost and then treats the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07017. Regeneration is the theological word for the new birth, the act by which God gives spiritual life to someone who was spiritually dead. Jesus introduced the idea to a highly religious man in the dark, and Nicodemus found it completely baffling, which should encourage the rest of us. What makes the new birth…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07016. Glorification is the final stage of salvation, the point at which the believer receives a glorified body and is made entirely like Jesus, with sin not simply restrained but permanently absent. It is the third tense of salvation. I have been saved from sin’s penalty, I am being saved from sin’s power, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07015. Sanctification means being set apart, and if you grasp that one idea you have the doctrine in your hand. The word group behind it in Hebrew and Greek does not primarily mean to become morally impressive. It means to be marked off for a particular use, taken out of general circulation and reserved…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07014. Justification is the moment a guilty sinner is declared righteous by God, and I want to be precise about that word declared, because everything hangs on it. God does not pretend that we are better than we are, and he does not wait until we have improved enough to deserve the verdict. He…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07013. How can a person be saved? It is the oldest question in the book, quite literally, since the Philippian jailer asked it in almost those words at midnight with an earthquake still settling around him. Paul’s answer to him was one sentence long, and I have never been able to improve on it:…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07012. God’s salvation is a rescue, and that single word does more work than any other in explaining what Christians mean when they use the term. We are not describing self-improvement, or moral effort, or the gradual refinement of a decent person into a slightly better one. We are describing somebody being pulled out…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07011. Soteriology is the theological name for the doctrine of salvation, and it is the part of Christian teaching that answers the question every one of us eventually has to face: how can a guilty person be made right with a holy God? The word comes from the Greek soteria, meaning rescue or deliverance,…
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…