Biblical teaching on marriage, singleness, parenting, and family life.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11106 Christian singleness is a subject most churches handle badly, and I include myself in that criticism. We build our programmes around families, we preach on marriage several times a year and on singleness roughly never, and then we wonder why unmarried believers in their thirties quietly drift away from congregations where they have…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11105 Few phrases in Christian teaching have done as much good and as much harm as headship and submission. Used as Scripture uses them, they describe a marriage of extraordinary tenderness. Used as some men have used them, they have kept women in frightening situations and given the whole idea a stench it did…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11104 What Scripture asks of a husband and wife has become one of the hardest subjects to discuss calmly, partly because the words have been abused and partly because most people arrive at the conversation with a picture already in their heads. Some imagine a 1950s household with a silent woman and a man…
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 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 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: 9 minutesQuestion 11008. The question of remarriage after divorce is one of the few where I have watched churches cause real and lasting damage in both directions. Some have treated remarried believers as permanent second-class members. Others have waved the whole matter through as though Jesus had never spoken about it. I want to set out…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11007. Few questions reach my study with more pain attached than the question of the grounds for divorce. Somebody is usually sitting opposite me who did not want any of this, who has read the verses a hundred times at two in the morning, and who is frightened that God is against them as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11006. Christian dating is a phrase the Bible never uses, and that alone should shape how confidently we answer this question. Courtship as we practise it is a modern arrangement, and anyone who claims chapter and verse for a particular method is stretching the text. What Scripture does give us is a settled understanding…