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 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks like the same sin, and they need entirely different responses. Scripture handles them differently throughout, and so should we. Two different conditions Weakness is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6025. Corporate sin is the biblical recognition that groups, not only individuals, can be guilty before God. Nations, cities and churches are addressed and judged as bodies throughout Scripture, and pretending otherwise requires ignoring a great deal of the Old Testament. The difficulty is that this doctrine has been enlisted recently to support ideas…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6018. Paul says that godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. That is a startling sentence, because it means two people can weep over the same sin and end up in entirely different places. Knowing which one you are experiencing is not a matter of…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 6017. It is tempting to blame the devil for our sins, and the temptation is almost as old as sin itself. Adam blamed the woman and by implication the God who gave her, the woman blamed the serpent, and the pattern has been running ever since. Scripture takes our enemy entirely seriously. It also…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6008. Confession of sin is one of those practices every Christian knows they should maintain and many quietly find confusing. What exactly are we doing when we confess? Is it grovelling? A ritual formula? Informing God of things He somehow missed? And if the cross has already dealt with my sin, why confess at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4197. We usually think it is possible to grieve the Spirit only as individuals, in the privacy of our own hearts, but Paul’s warning was written to a whole church and aimed at the way its members treated one another. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04024. Few aspects of the Spirit’s ministry are as misunderstood as the conviction of sin. In common Christian speech it has shrunk to a vague feeling of spiritual unease, something close to guilt with the lights off. But the way Jesus describes conviction of sin in John 16 is far more specific and far…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 9003 Baptism is one of the two ordinances that Jesus gave to the Church, and yet it has been a source of disagreement among Christians for centuries. One of the most fundamental questions is simply this: who is a proper candidate for baptism? Should everyone be baptised? Only adults? What about children? Let us…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07031 The hardening of the human heart is rarely a sudden event. Most people do not arrive at a settled state of spiritual insensibility in a single moment of dramatic rebellion. What Scripture describes, and what pastoral observation confirms, is a process — gradual, largely unnoticed by the person experiencing it, and with each…