Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have never met a Christian who was entirely free of it, including the one writing this. We know that we are saved by grace, we say…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 7070. Biblical apostasy is a word we reach for quickly and understand slowly. I have heard it applied to a friend who stopped attending church, to a denomination that has drifted, to a preacher whose theology went sideways, and once or twice to somebody who had simply irritated the person speaking. Scripture handles the…
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….