Practical guidance for following Christ daily—prayer, Bible reading, spiritual disciplines, and growing in godliness.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11032. Asking how much is enough money is one of the few financial questions the Bible answers directly, and the answer is uncomfortable enough that most of us prefer to keep the question vague. We are far more willing to ask how to earn well, give wisely or invest sensibly. Those are good questions….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11031. The question of church liturgy divides evangelicals almost as neatly as music does, and usually for the same reason: we mistake our own habits for the biblical position. Baptists in particular tend to say we have no liturgy, which is never true. We have an order of service, a set of expected elements,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11020. Jesus told His followers to make disciples, and the church has spent two thousand years discovering how easy it is to do something else instead. We gather crowds, run courses, fill diaries, and quietly hope that formation happens somewhere in the middle. So this is a practical answer to a practical question. What…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11030. Whether Christians should be raising hands in worship is a question I have been asked more often by people who feel awkward about it than by people who want permission, and that itself tells you something about how tangled the issue has become. In some churches raising hands is so normal that not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11019. Christian discipleship has become a word we use for programmes: a course, a booklet, a six-week series for new believers. The New Testament uses it for something considerably larger, and considerably less optional. A disciple is a learner who follows a teacher in order to become like him. That is the whole idea,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11029. Arguments about worship styles have split more congregations in my lifetime than arguments about doctrine, which is a sobering thing for a Baptist minister to admit and an important thing to face honestly. Organ or band, hymnal or screen, choir or worship team, robes or jeans. These questions are not nothing, but they…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11018. Most Christians want to share the gospel and do not, and the reason is rarely a lack of conviction. It is that the moment arrives and they have no idea what to say, so they say something about church instead and spend the evening annoyed with themselves. So this is a practical answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11017. Biblical evangelism is the announcement of good news that has already happened. That is what the word means, and getting the definition right settles most of the anxiety that surrounds the subject. Say the word in a congregation and watch the shoulders tighten. People picture doorsteps, awkward conversations and the friend they alienated…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11028. Asking how we should worship God is a more dangerous question than it looks, because Scripture contains several accounts of people who worshipped God enthusiastically and wrongly, and it did not go well for them. Nadab and Abihu offered unauthorised fire. Uzzah steadied the ark with the best of intentions. Cain brought an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11000. How should Christians pray? It is one of the first questions a new believer asks and one that mature believers never entirely stop asking. The disciples had watched Jesus pray and their request was not teach us about prayer but teach us to pray, which tells us something about where the difficulty actually…