Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7003. Can a person be saved and have a lack of assurance about it? Yes, and that is not the same thing as a lack of salvation. Many genuine believers have lived for long stretches without the settled confidence that they belonged to God. This question usually arrives from someone in real distress, so…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7002. Genuine salvation leaves marks. Scripture says so plainly, and the first letter of John was written largely to describe them so that believers could know where they stood. I want to handle this carefully, because the same evidences that steady a careless person can crush a sensitive one. So before the marks of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7001. Assurance of salvation is the settled confidence that you belong to God and will not be lost. It is not the same thing as being saved, and keeping those two apart is the first step to understanding the whole subject. Security is objective and rests on God. Assurance is subjective and rests in…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7000. Paul calls our salvation the gift of God in one of the best known sentences he ever wrote, and generations of readers have argued about which part of it he meant. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6044. When Paul speaks of the old man he is not describing a sinister lodger who lives in the believer’s spare room. He is describing the person you used to be, considered as a whole, in Adam and under condemnation. Getting that right changes a great deal about how the Christian life is fought,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5008. Spiritual perception is a real capacity, and the Bible is remarkably precise about how much of it an unregenerate person actually has. Get this question wrong in one direction and you will assume the lost can reason their way to God unaided; get it wrong in the other direction and you will treat…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2074. The prayers of unbelievers raise a question I get asked often, usually by someone recalling a moment of crisis, a hospital corridor, a plane hitting turbulence, when they cried out to a God they were not otherwise sure they believed in. Did God hear that? I want to answer honestly rather than with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2018. If unlimited atonement really means Christ’s death was sufficient for every person, why doesn’t an all-loving God simply save everyone? This is one of the oldest objections to the Christian faith, and I think it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissive one, because the logic behind it feels tight. If God…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2009. Several passages promise that God forgets our sins, and I find that people respond to this in two opposite ways. Some find it the most comforting language in the whole Bible. Others find it puzzling: if God knows everything, how can He forget anything at all? Getting this right matters, because misunderstanding it…
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…