Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11066. Unconfessed sin is one of the quietest problems in the Christian life, precisely because it makes no noise. Nothing dramatic happens. There is no thunderclap and no obvious discipline. There is simply a slow flattening, a sense that prayer has become mechanical and Scripture has gone grey. I get asked how a believer…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11074 Doctrinal conviction and humility are usually presented as rivals, as though a man could have one only by giving ground on the other. The confident believer is assumed to be arrogant, and the humble believer is assumed to be vague. I have met both caricatures in the flesh, and I have also met…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11065. The three enemies of the Christian life have been named in that order for centuries, the world, the flesh and the devil, and the grouping is not a piece of ecclesiastical tidiness. It comes straight out of the New Testament and it is enormously useful for diagnosis. The reason it matters is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11073 Doctrine in suffering sounds, at first hearing, like the least useful thing on offer. When someone is sitting in a hospital corridor at two in the morning, a paragraph about the attributes of God can feel like being handed a manual while the house burns. I have sat in those corridors, and I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11064. Biblical stewardship is one of those phrases that has been reduced almost entirely to money, and usually to money at the point where a church needs some. That is a shame, because the idea is far larger and considerably more searching than an annual appeal. A steward in the ancient world was a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11072 Christian parents are the first theologians their children will ever meet, and most of us only realise it long after the lessons have started. Every answer given at bedtime, every reaction to bad news, every explanation of why we are going to church again this Sunday is doctrine being taught, whether we intended…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11063. Christians and poverty is a subject on which the church has swung wildly between two errors, and both of them are still with us. One says that God wants every believer wealthy and that poverty indicates a failure of faith. The other treats poverty itself as a spiritual achievement and regards money as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11062. Single Christians are frequently handed a mixture of unhelpful advice, ranging from the assurance that God has someone lined up to the suggestion that they should stop looking and then he will provide, which are two ways of saying that the situation is temporary and slightly embarrassing. Scripture does something much better than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11061. Dating unbelievers is a question the Bible never addresses directly, for the simple reason that dating as we know it did not exist when Scripture was written. That has allowed a good deal of creative reasoning over the years, most of it arriving at the conclusion the person wanted before they started. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11048. Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand. I understand the instinct and I do not entirely share it. The Bible contains a very large book of written prayers, God’s people have sung them for three thousand…