Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 04047. The variety of spiritual gifts in the New Testament is wider and richer than most believers realise, and learning what Scripture actually lists is one of the most freeing studies a Christian can undertake. When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:7 that to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04046. When Paul calls the Spirit’s guarantee a deposit on our inheritance, he reaches for a word straight out of the ancient marketplace, and once you see what it meant, something genuinely wonderful opens up. He uses it three times. In 2 Corinthians 1:22 God has put His Spirit in our hearts as a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04045. To call your body the Spirit’s temple is one of the most startling things the New Testament says about you, and Paul says it without flinching in 1 Corinthians 6:19: do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? That a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04044. Becoming more sensitive to the Spirit’s leading is something many believers long for and few feel they have grasped. The phrase itself can sound mystical, as though some Christians possess a spiritual sixth sense the rest of us lack, and I want to take the mystery out of it without taking away the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04042. Paul tells us not to grieve the Spirit, and I have noticed over the years that most believers nod at that instruction without ever asking what it actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The command sits in Ephesians 4:30, tucked into a passage about how we speak to one another and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01002. Textual variations exist in the Bible because for some fifteen centuries the Scriptures were copied out entirely by hand, and hand copying, however careful and prayerful, inevitably leaves its small traces behind. When a believer first learns that the thousands of surviving New Testament manuscripts do not all read in exactly the same…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01001. KJV Onlyism is the conviction, held in various strengths by various people, that the King James Version of 1611 is the only Bible English-speaking Christians ought to use, and in its harder forms that it alone is the preserved, error-free word of God in the English tongue. I want to handle this whole…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01000. To say that Scripture is infallible means that it cannot fail, cannot deceive, and cannot lead astray in anything it sets out to teach us. The word itself reaches back to the Latin for that which does not deceive or fall short, and applied to the Bible it makes the bold claim that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 00049. It is entirely possible to be doctrinally correct and spiritually dead at the very same time, and the Bible says so without flinching for a moment. A person can hold the right positions on the Trinity, the cross, and the resurrection, can argue them ably against all comers, and can still carry a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 00048. The claim that doctrine divides but Jesus unites is one of the most quoted slogans in the modern church, and one of the most quietly corrosive things a believer can be handed. It sounds humble, it sounds loving, and it lands a soft blow against anyone who dares to care about precise belief….