Some truths are inconvenient but absolutely necessary to our salvation, believed not because we’re gullible but because Scripture reveals them clearly. Consider Hebrews’ insistence that Christ had to become fully human to save fully human sinners.

If you learned you’d be burned at the stake tomorrow, what would your first response be? Dread, fear, sorrow, anger at the injustice? Consider James’s closing call to prayer as the church’s actual response to suffering and sin.

This opens a short series tackling the hard questions unbelievers raise, turning to Jeremiah’s prophecy of judgment and exile. Where is God in suffering? And why is the God who judges nations still the God worth trusting through it?

What is patience? Start with the dictionary definition: bearing provocation and misfortune without complaint. Consider James’s call to wait patiently for the Lord’s coming, like a farmer waiting on the rain.

Why do people today find it impossible to believe in Jesus? Common stumbling blocks range from a literal Adam and Eve to Jesus’s own teaching on hell. Consider Hebrews’ unflinching claim that God himself willed the Son’s suffering to bring many sons to glory.

How much thought have you actually put into how you use your money? It’s an awkward subject precisely because it’s a window into the heart. Consider James’s condemnation of wealth hoarded and gained through injustice.

Suffering, with all its raw nerve endings, is one of the most common things that causes believers to doubt, partly because pain demands all our attention. Consider Hebrews’ call to see Jesus, crowned with glory through his own suffering, as the answer to that doubt.

Living like God isn’t real is the default setting of every sinful heart, what could be called practical atheism: serving our own will and calling our own thoughts truth even while claiming to believe in God. Consider James’s warning against planning our futures as though God doesn’t factor in.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love, as the hymn Come Thou Fount puts it. Consider Hebrews’ first warning against drifting away from what we’ve heard, addressed to a fickle, wandering human heart.

If you found out you had a life-threatening disease, what would you be willing to pay, or walk, or sacrifice to get better? Consider James’s call to humble ourselves before God, the only cure for a soul-threatening disease far worse than any physical one.