Practical guidance for following Christ daily—prayer, Bible reading, spiritual disciplines, and growing in godliness.
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04020 The Holy Spirit produces fruit in the believer and distributes gifts to the believer, and while both come from the same Spirit, they are doing entirely different things. Conflating them causes no end of confusion in the church, particularly when spiritual gifts are treated as evidence of spiritual maturity, or when character is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04045 There are few more striking statements in the New Testament than Paul’s declaration 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 human body — mortal, material, subject to hunger and tiredness and decay —…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11073 When suffering comes—and it will come—what we believe about God, about His purposes, and about His promises becomes either an anchor or an afterthought. Doctrine is not abstract theology for comfortable times; it is the solid ground beneath our feet when everything else gives way. Job understood this. After losing his children, his…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 11074 It is one of the most difficult balancing acts in the Christian life. On the one hand, we are called to contend for the faith, to hold fast to sound doctrine, to stand firm on the truth of God’s Word. On the other hand, we are called to clothe ourselves with humility, to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11075 Walk into almost any Christian bookshop or open a church website and you will find no shortage of Bible reading plans on offer. Chronological plans, canonical plans, thematic plans, plans that pair Old and New Testaments, plans that take you through in a year, plans that take you through in ninety days. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11076 It sounds like a simple question, but it carries a pastoral complication: depending on how it is answered, it is very likely to produce more guilt than growth. Whatever number is given, someone will feel they are already failing. So before giving any kind of practical answer, it is worth beginning not with…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7064 In 1937, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship. Writing against a German church that had largely surrendered its integrity in the face of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer drew a distinction that has echoed through Christian thinking ever since. Cheap grace, he argued, is the preaching…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7061 At Christian camps, conferences, and evangelistic meetings, the call to re-dedication is a familiar one. A believer who has drifted steps forward to renew their commitment, making promises they genuinely intend to keep. A question sometimes surfaces in that moment, and it is a serious one: does this mean I was never truly…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7060 The word “backslider” carries more weight in older Christian usage than it does in most modern translations, but the reality it describes is woven through the entire New Testament. It refers to a genuine believer who has withdrawn from active fellowship with God, whose spiritual life has contracted, whose once-warm faith has grown…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60086 Genesis 19:8 records one of the most disturbing episodes in Scripture. The men of Sodom have surrounded Lot’s house demanding that he hand over his two angelic visitors so that they can “know” them sexually. Lot’s response stops readers in their tracks: “Behold, I have two daughters who have not known any man….