Practical guidance for following Christ daily—prayer, Bible reading, spiritual disciplines, and growing in godliness.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say this from experience as much as from study. There have been stretches of ministry where my Bible reading thinned out, and without my quite noticing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1087. Scripture in worship is not decoration set around the edges of a service. It is the very substance of what we say, sing and pray when a church gathers before the Lord. I have led enough services now to know how easy it is to let worship drift into a performance of moods…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11116. Fasting and health are not competing concerns, whatever the intensity of some fasting teaching can suggest. Your body was made by God and belongs to Him, and caring for it wisely while fasting is not a lack of spiritual seriousness. It is simply taking seriously another thing Scripture plainly teaches: that the body…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11115. The length of fasting is nowhere fixed by Scripture as a single required duration, which frustrates believers looking for a straightforward rule but also frees the practice from becoming a legalistic box to tick. The Bible records fasts lasting anywhere from a single meal skipped in genuine distress to forty days of complete…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4083. Spiritual dryness is one of the most disorienting experiences a Christian can go through, the sense that yesterday’s warmth in prayer has gone cold overnight and nothing you do brings it back. The instinct to read that dryness as proof you have grieved the Holy Spirit is understandable, and sometimes it is exactly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11114. Scripture describes several genuinely distinct types of fasting, and knowing the differences between them will help you approach the discipline with realistic expectations rather than simply assuming every fast recorded in the Bible looked and functioned the same way. I want to walk through the main categories Scripture actually records in some detail,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1058. family Bible reading fails in most homes not because parents lack good intentions but because it is attempted with the wrong expectations, either too ambitious a plan collapsing within a fortnight, or too passive an approach that never moves past reading words aloud without any real engagement. I have tried and failed at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1057. public Scripture reading is commanded in the New Testament, not simply permitted as an optional liturgical flourish, and I think many churches, my own included at various points, have quietly let the practice shrink until Scripture is heard mainly in short snippets attached to a sermon rather than read at length in its…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1053. Study Bibles are everywhere you look. Walk into any Christian bookshop and you will find shelves of them, leather-bound, colour-coded, themed for men, women, teenagers and almost every niche imaginable, all promising to make the Bible more accessible and to answer your questions as you read. But are they actually helpful, and if…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11112. Biblical meditation is one of those phrases that makes some Christians nervous, because the word “meditation” calls to mind crossed legs, emptied minds and Eastern religion. Yet meditation is a thoroughly biblical idea, commanded and commended throughout Scripture, and it is something quite different from what the word usually suggests today. So I…