Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 07023. Is water baptism necessary for salvation? My answer is no, and I hold it firmly, but I want to reach it the long way round because there are passages that appear to say otherwise and they deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved past. Anyone who tells you this question is simple…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07022. Where do those who commit suicide go? I have been asked this question across a kitchen table more often than from a pulpit, usually by someone whose face tells me the answer matters more than any other thing in the world just now. So I want to answer it plainly and gently, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07021. What happens to those who have never heard the gospel is one of the hardest questions anyone asks me, and it is usually asked with real feeling rather than as a debating point. A student wants to know whether her Hindu grandmother is lost. A man wants to know what God does with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesWhat is eternal security? Can we lose our salvation? No! is the emphatic answer.
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07019. Can you lose your salvation? I do not believe you can, and I want to give you the reasons rather than simply the conclusion, because this question deserves better than a slogan. It is asked by frightened people far more often than by curious ones, and a frightened person needs argument, not reassurance…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07018. God’s grace is favour shown to people who have earned the opposite, and that definition is worth memorising because almost every popular version of it is softer than the real thing. Grace is not God being lenient. Leniency overlooks the offence. Grace deals with the offence at enormous cost and then treats the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07017. Regeneration is the theological word for the new birth, the act by which God gives spiritual life to someone who was spiritually dead. Jesus introduced the idea to a highly religious man in the dark, and Nicodemus found it completely baffling, which should encourage the rest of us. What makes the new birth…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07016. Glorification is the final stage of salvation, the point at which the believer receives a glorified body and is made entirely like Jesus, with sin not simply restrained but permanently absent. It is the third tense of salvation. I have been saved from sin’s penalty, I am being saved from sin’s power, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07015. Sanctification means being set apart, and if you grasp that one idea you have the doctrine in your hand. The word group behind it in Hebrew and Greek does not primarily mean to become morally impressive. It means to be marked off for a particular use, taken out of general circulation and reserved…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07014. Justification is the moment a guilty sinner is declared righteous by God, and I want to be precise about that word declared, because everything hangs on it. God does not pretend that we are better than we are, and he does not wait until we have improved enough to deserve the verdict. He…