Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4076. Second blessing language has circulated in evangelical churches for well over a century, usually describing a dramatic, identifiable post-conversion experience in which a believer receives a fuller measure of the Spirit than they had at conversion. The phrase carries real emotional weight for many Christians who have had a genuinely significant spiritual experience…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4075. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related but distinct realities, and confusing the two has caused more pastoral trouble in Baptist churches than almost any other misunderstanding in this area of doctrine. One is an invisible act performed by the Spirit at the moment a person believes. The other is a visible, physical…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4074. The counsel of God is not a phrase Scripture uses lightly. It describes the settled purpose and plan that God formed within Himself before He ever spoke creation into being, and the question of what part the Holy Spirit plays within that counsel takes us into some of the most careful thinking the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4073. The Spirit’s distinct personhood is one of those doctrines that sounds like abstract technical furniture until you try to pray, worship, or teach without a clear grasp of it, at which point you discover how much rests on getting it right. Scripture presents Father, Son, and Spirit as three who relate to one…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4072. The deep things of God are the subject of one of Paul’s boldest claims about the Holy Spirit, made in passing in a letter to a fractious, spiritually immature congregation in Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 2:10 he writes that God has revealed these things to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4070. Trinitarian pneumatology is not an optional specialism sitting alongside the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is the frame within which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit must be studied at all, because the Spirit is not a topic that can be understood correctly in isolation from who He is as the third…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4069. The Spirit before Pentecost operated on a genuinely different basis from His ministry today, and understanding that difference clears up a great deal of confusion about how Old Testament believers related to God’s Spirit. The Holy Spirit was active throughout the Old Testament, not absent until Acts chapter 2. What changed at Pentecost…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4068. The gift of healing has not ceased, but it has also never operated the way the New Testament describes at every point in church history since Pentecost, and those two statements are not actually in tension once the New Testament’s own pattern is examined closely. Even within the pages of Acts, healing clusters…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4066. A prophetic word is never simply accepted on the strength of someone’s confidence in delivering it. Paul is explicit about this: when someone speaks a word of prophecy in the gathered church, others are to weigh what has been said, testing it rather than receiving it uncritically. That single instruction from 1 Corinthians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4065. Spiritual gifts are not an aspiration to work towards but a settled fact about every believer in Christ. That is a statement of what has already happened, grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament, not a target you have yet to reach. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit…