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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something has gone badly wrong and the sufferer wants to know whether they brought it on themselves. I want to answer that carefully, because Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6022. Paul warns Timothy about teachers with a seared conscience, and the image he chooses is a surgical one. He is describing a moral sense that has been burned until the nerve endings no longer report anything at all. It is one of the bleakest phrases in the New Testament, and it is worth…