Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11060. Marrying an unbeliever is a question I have been asked in tears more often than almost any other, usually by someone who already knows the answer and is hoping I will find a way round it. So let me be honest and kind at the same time, because both are needed here. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11047. Ending prayers in Jesus’ name is a habit most Christians acquire before anyone explains it, and quite a few carry a low-level worry that they have been reciting a formula rather than doing something meaningful. The phrase comes straight from Jesus himself, repeated several times in the upper room discourse, so we are…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 11059. Psychology and Scripture is a subject that produces more heat than light in most Christian conversations, and I have watched believers land in two equally unhelpful ditches. On one side sits the Christian who treats every therapist as an enemy of the faith and every diagnosis as a failure of discipleship. On the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11046. Saying Amen at the end of a prayer is so automatic for most of us that we have stopped hearing it, which is a shame, because it is one of the few words that has travelled unchanged from Hebrew through Greek into English. Children ask about it and adults rarely have an answer…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11056. The geographical progression of Acts 1:8, from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and on to the end of the earth, is often read as a pleasant piece of missionary geography and then left there. I think that undersells it considerably, because Luke has built his entire second volume around that sentence and expects…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11044. Whether Christians should keep the Jewish festivals has moved from a fringe question to a live one, as the Hebrew Roots movement grows and believers who love Israel start wondering whether they have been missing something God commanded. It is a fair question and it deserves a full answer rather than a dismissal….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11055. Soul ties come up more often than you might expect, usually from a believer who has been told that a past relationship has left an invisible spiritual attachment which must be broken by a specific prayer before they can move on. The teaching arrives with real pastoral urgency and often with genuine distress…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11043. Praying for the dead is a practice most evangelicals have never considered and many bereaved believers have quietly done anyway, usually in the first raw weeks after a funeral when the instinct to keep speaking to God about someone is overwhelming. So this deserves a gentle answer as well as a clear one….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11054. Fasting and prayer appear together so often in Scripture that many believers assume the combination works like a spiritual amplifier, as though skipping meals turns up the volume on our requests until God can no longer ignore them. That instinct is understandable, and I think it is wrong in a way that matters….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11041. When Jesus said we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, he added a word that was not in the original commandment, and it is worth asking why. Deuteronomy 6:5 says heart, soul and might. In Mark 12:30 Jesus says heart, soul, mind and strength. The mind is…