Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07031. Hardness of heart rarely arrives in a single moment. Most people do not wake up one morning settled in unbelief. What Scripture describes, and what any pastor sees, is a slow process, largely unnoticed by the person going through it, in which each refusal makes the next one easier. Understanding how it works…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11172. How do I apologise well? A biblical apology is considerably more specific than the vague, deflecting non-apologies that pass for repentance in so much of ordinary life, phrases like ‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ which manage to sound apologetic while accepting no actual responsibility. I want to walk through what a genuinely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11171. How, then, do I respond when I have genuinely and clearly wronged someone else? Making amends is one of the most concrete, practical demands the whole Christian life places on us, and it is also one of the areas where I see believers struggle most, often substituting vague guilt or private prayer alone…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9003. The question of who should be baptised has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by asserting a tradition loudly. It is settled, if it can be settled at all, by looking at what the New Testament actually does and why it says baptism means what it means. My answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11087 Do I need to forgive myself? The question arrives constantly in pastoral conversation, usually from someone who believes God has forgiven them and still cannot get free of something they did. They have confessed it, sometimes for years, and the weight has not lifted. I want to say two things that sound contradictory…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, and the abuses have been real enough to justify the flinch. So most churches quietly do nothing, and serious sin goes unaddressed until it does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08103 If you are carrying past occult involvement and wondering what to do about it, I want to say the most important thing at the very start. Jesus is enough. Whatever you did, however deeply you went in, the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin, and there is no category of sin marked…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8058. Scripture forbids occult practices in the strongest language it uses about anything, and the reason is not that they are silly. The reason is that they are real. God does not warn His people away from empty superstitions with the word abomination, and He does not prescribe the death penalty for parlour games….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7999 The question of what a person must do to be saved is the most important question anyone ever asks, and Scripture gives an answer so short that people often refuse to believe it. When the Philippian jailer asked it, Paul and Silas said, believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 7090 Few situations in pastoral work are as uncomfortable as sitting with someone who has come forward at three separate meetings, prayed the same prayer each time, and can point to no genuine change of any kind. They are not play-acting. The tears were real. The desire was real. And yet a year on,…