Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis of what Jesus has done, or is gradually made righteous through a process the church administers. Everything else in the debate follows from that. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07068 The Free Grace movement is a loose body of teachers who insist that salvation is received by faith alone, entirely apart from works, commitment or any promise of future obedience. It came into focus in the 1980s as a reaction against Lordship salvation, and it contains a great deal I agree with alongside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07067 Easy believism is a label applied to any presentation of the gospel that reduces saving faith to a bare mental agreement and leaves out repentance, the identity of Jesus, and any expectation that a converted person will be different afterwards. It is a criticism rather than a movement, and hardly anyone claims the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07066 Receiving Jesus as Lord is not a second step that follows conversion, and it is not an extra condition attached to it either. When a sinner trusts Jesus, they receive the whole Person, and He does not come in sections. The question is whether submission belongs in the terms of the gospel or…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07065 Lordship salvation is the teaching that saving faith necessarily includes a submission to Jesus as Lord, and that a profession of faith without submission is not saving faith at all. It became one of the sharpest evangelical arguments of the last forty years, and the dust has still not entirely settled. I want…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real thing. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it also needs handling carefully, because it can be pushed until it turns grace into a purchase. Let…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07063 Common grace is the undeserved kindness God shows to everybody without exception, and saving grace is the undeserved kindness by which He rescues those who trust Jesus. Both are grace, because neither is earned. They differ in scope, in purpose and in what they accomplish. The distinction is worth getting straight, because a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07062 Judas Iscariot was never saved. I hold that with more confidence than I hold most things, because Jesus Himself said so in several ways, and the alternative would require us to believe that a man could be chosen, indwelt and forgiven and still be described as one who was lost from the beginning….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07061 Christian re-dedication is not being saved again, and the difference matters more than it might sound. Salvation happens once and cannot be repeated, because the new birth is not the kind of thing that can be undone and redone. Re-dedication is the renewal of a commitment that has gone cold, and that can…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07060 A backsliding Christian is a believer who has drifted away from close fellowship with God, and yes, they can come back. In fact the whole of Scripture is arranged to tell them so, and I have never yet met a returning believer whom God turned away at the door. The word backslider is…