Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06075 “Total depravity” is a term that has generated enormous confusion, largely because the word “total” sounds as if it means human beings are incapable of any good at all. The biblical truth the phrase is trying to express is both more precise and more important than that caricature suggests – and it is…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7051 Repentance is one of the most misunderstood concepts in Christianity today, yet it’s absolutely central to the Gospel message. The confusion often comes from our modern understanding of the word versus what Scripture actually teaches. Is repentance merely feeling sorry for sin? Must we turn from all our sins before God will save…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7052 Of all the words we use in the Christian life, faith is surely one of the most common and yet one of the most misunderstood. We sing about it, we preach about it, we’re told we need more of it, but what actually is it? Is it a feeling? A leap in the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7010 At first glance, James 2:14-26 seems to contradict Paul’s teaching on justification by faith alone. James writes: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?… So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead… You…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07050 This question touches the foundations of Christian assurance, and it deserves a direct answer: no, a genuinely born-again believer cannot ultimately and finally fall away from salvation. But reaching that conclusion responsibly requires engaging honestly with the passages that have led many sincere people to a different answer. The Foundation of Eternal Security…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11087 The phrase “forgive yourself” is frequently offered as pastoral advice to people struggling with guilt, shame, or regret. Its absence from Scripture is not a trivial observation. The framework a question uses determines the answer it receives, and the question of whether you need to forgive yourself places you as both the offended…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07082 If legalism is the error of adding to what God requires, antinomianism is the error of subtracting from it. The word comes from the Greek anti (against) and nomos (law): the view that Christians are so thoroughly freed from the law by grace that the moral law has no ongoing relevance or binding…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07012 Salvation is the word Scripture uses for what God has done about the human predicament. It is not a religious concept invented by the church; it is the great answer to the great problem that runs through every page of the Bible from Genesis 3 onwards. The word itself means rescue, and it…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07013 The question of how a person is saved is the most urgent question any human being can face, and the good news of the gospel is that Scripture answers it with remarkable clarity. God has not hidden the way of salvation. The provision is real, the invitation is genuine, and the terms are…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07071 The word legalism gets used in at least two quite different ways in contemporary Christianity. Sometimes it means what it should mean: the error of trying to earn righteousness before God through law-keeping, or of adding human rules to Scripture and binding consciences where God has not. Other times it is used as…