Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4100. The Spirit in salvation does far more work than most believers realise, and most of it happens before we are even aware anything is happening at all. Salvation is the work of the whole Trinity: the Father who planned it, the Son who accomplished it at the cross, and the Holy Spirit who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4086. Spirit’s conviction of sin is one of the most significant realities in the whole business of evangelism, and the question of what it actually does inside a person when they hear the gospel deserves a careful answer. Does it genuinely open the possibility of a real response, or does it produce some kind…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 8. Which doctrines are essential for salvation is a question that deserves great care, because the wrong answer in either direction is dangerous. Make the list too long and you start barring from heaven people the Lord has welcomed. Make it too short and you empty the gospel of its content until almost anything…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08093 In Ephesians 2:2, Paul describes the spiritual condition of unbelievers before conversion, stating that they “followed the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” The title “prince of the power of the air” is applied…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08092 Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:4 that “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” The phrase “god of this world” is a startling title, and it raises immediate questions. In what sense is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07037 The phrase “eternal covenant” appears at several points in Scripture and raises an important question: what does it mean for a covenant to be described as eternal, and how does this concept relate to the broader storyline of God’s dealings with humanity? The answer reaches into the deepest foundations of biblical theology, touching…
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: 4 minutesQuestion Q07091 Few things matter more to a believer’s daily Christian life than the question of assurance. Whether someone can know with genuine confidence that they belong to God shapes everything: how they pray, how they face difficulty, how they relate to the prospect of death, how they live. The New Testament takes this question…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07092 In evangelical circles, the doctrine of justification rightly receives enormous attention. It is the declaration by which a sinful person is pronounced righteous before God on the basis of Christ’s atoning work received through faith. But there is a danger that in rightly emphasising justification, other dimensions of what happens at salvation receive…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07093 Of all the soteriological categories the New Testament uses, union with Christ may be the most comprehensive and the least understood. Justification describes the believer’s legal standing; sanctification describes their moral transformation; adoption describes their relational status. Union with Christ underlies all of these without being reducible to any one of them. Whether…