Salvation

After three years of walking with Jesus the disciples were about to face their greatest trial. God would strike the Shepherd and scatter his sheep (Matt. 26:31). Spiritual darkness would place the disciples under extreme pressure. They would not completely fail. But they would falter. Knowing all...

Our lives are filled with “but God” moments. Perhaps it was an addiction in which we were ensnared, but God delivered us. Maybe it was a place where we almost compromised our purity, but God restrained us. We may have thought a relationship was irreparable, but God restored it. Failures in...

In this series on the Ordo Salutis, we come to progressive sanctification, where we consider how God works in us and what he requires of us. In justification and adoption God acts on our behalf. We see this in the answers to Questions 33 and 34 in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (WSC), which note...

Nothing but the sight of death impresses on us so viscerally a sense of finality. As Christians, we are comforted by faith in the resurrection and the life to come, but death nevertheless strikes our limited and sin-affected minds with definitiveness. Do we think of our being made holy in Christ as...

Justification is not the gospel in its entirety. It was not enough for God to only justify us in Christ. He has also insisted on adopting us in Christ: “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ,…” (Eph. 1:5). The final purpose of divine election has always been...

Westminster divine, Anthony Burges, contended that “of all points of Divinity, there is none that with more profit and comfort we may labour in, then in that of Justification, which is stiled by some articulus stantis & cadentis ecclesiae, the Church stands or fals[ sic ], as the truth of this...

Our English term conversion is not often used in our translations of the Bible. But lest we commit a word-concept fallacy, we should not conclude from this that the concept captured by our term conversion is infrequently found in Scripture. Far from it. Peter in his sermon recorded in Acts 3...

Many believers misunderstand God’s grace, and therefore lack assurance of it. They wonder if they are really saved. They live thinking they are never enough. They wonder if they forget to confess some of their sins if they will be kept from the kingdom of heaven. They may look at mature Christians...

Of all the particular doctrines which fall within the realm of the ordo salutis of salvation, perhaps none are less understood than the doctrine of effectual calling. This seems ironic since the doctrine is referenced many times in the New Testament alone. Because of its common usage then, this...

In our theological lexicon, two words in particular stand out as notoriously confusing, potentially offensive, critically important, and profoundly comforting all at the same time. The terms ‘election’ and ‘predestination’ – which have nothing to do with political decision-making and very little to...