Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1028. The Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with a passage I have read a dozen times before, and suddenly it is not the same passage any more. Nothing has changed on the page,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4087. Distinguishing spirit prompting from your own reasoning is one of the most practically pressing skills a Christian needs to develop, because the stakes of getting it wrong run in both directions. Claim the Spirit’s leading for what is really just personal preference dressed up in spiritual language, and you end up living by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4086. Spirit’s conviction of sin is one of the most significant realities in the whole business of evangelism, and the question of what it actually does inside a person when they hear the gospel deserves a careful answer. Does it genuinely open the possibility of a real response, or does it produce some kind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4082. Spirit’s intercession is one of the most quietly comforting truths in the whole of Romans 8, and it is worth asking directly whether grieving the Spirit through unconfessed sin switches it off. If it did, the very moments when we most need the Spirit interceding for us, our weakest and most compromised seasons,…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4081. Grieving the Spirit is one of two warnings Paul gives about how believers can disrupt their relationship with the Holy Spirit, and the other, quenching the Spirit, gets confused with it so often that most Christians I talk to treat the two as interchangeable. They are not. I want to show you why…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1027. The unity of Scripture across sixty-six books, more than forty authors and roughly fifteen hundred years of composition is, on reflection, a genuinely remarkable fact, and it is worth pausing to ask directly how a collection this large and this diverse manages to read as a single, coherent book rather than a loosely…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1026. The continuity of Scripture across the Old and New Testaments is one of those questions that sounds academic until you actually try to read the Bible straight through and hit the jarring transition from Malachi’s closing warnings to Matthew’s opening genealogy, and find yourself wondering how these two halves of one book actually…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1025. Biblical perspicuity, the historic term for Scripture’s own clarity, asks a genuinely practical question every ordinary reader eventually faces: is the Bible clear enough for me to understand on my own, or does its meaning stay locked behind specialist training and expert interpretation. The classic Reformation answer, and the one I hold, is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1024. What happened to the original manuscripts of Scripture is a question that catches many believers off guard the first time it occurs to them, since no autograph, no original document written by Moses, Isaiah, Paul or John, survives anywhere in the world today. That fact unsettles some readers when they first encounter it,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1020. The Bible’s main message gets lost surprisingly easily under the sheer size and apparent diversity of Scripture, sixty-six books, more than forty authors, several languages, a story stretching across roughly fifteen hundred years, and I want to state that central message plainly rather than leaving it buried under all that surrounding detail. Getting…