By Curt Nelson I couldn’t believe it—I was sitting in my very first class at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary and the professor was teaching some strange doctrine I had never heard before. He was telling us that the only condition for salvation is belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ. I knew immediately what I

As we have seen in our last two articles in Grace in Focus, Luke 15 is not at all about the repentance of unsaved people. On the contrary, the chapter is about the repentance and restoration of Christians who have wandered away from their Shepherd and His flock (15:4-7), from their place and role in

There are two ways to be saved: believe in Christ or keep the commandments. Yes, I mean what I just said. A person could be saved by keeping God’s commandments. The passage we look at today makes this crystal clear. An expert in the Law of Moses came to Jesus to test Him (Luke 10:25)

By Charlie Bing When President Clinton admitted immorality in the White House, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention and a seminary president called for Clinton’s home church in Arkansas to exercise “biblical church discipline.” The Associated Press article that reported this added, “The practice is seldom used in the modern church.”1 That is unfortunate

Luke 15 is the classic NT chapter on repentance. Here, if anywhere, we should meet the fundamental teaching on NT repentance. As we saw in our study of Luke 15:1-10 (last issue), the first two parables of the chapter—The Lost Sheep and The Lost Coin—very clearly refer to the repentance of a born-again person who

In the first article of this series, we maintained that the silence of John in his Gospel on the subject of repentance is a powerful argument that he did not regard repentance as necessary for eternal life. In the second article, we showed that John’s frequent reference to repentance in the book of Revelation reveals

Many people today believe in what I call agnostic assurance. According to this understanding, no one can know for sure that he or she is saved prior to death. They believe this because they think that election is a secret activity by God that is unknown by man prior to death. Some pastors and theologians