Understanding the Person and ministry of the Holy Spirit—His deity, personality, baptism, filling, gifts, fruit, and ongoing work in believers.
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04123 Few topics in modern church life generate as much confusion, controversy, and pastoral difficulty as the question of speaking in tongues. For some believers, tongues is the defining mark of spiritual vitality, the indispensable evidence of the Spirit’s fullness. For others, it belongs entirely to the apostolic era and has no place in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04122 Paul’s letter to the Romans contains one of the most extraordinary declarations in the entire New Testament: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). This single verse introduces a concept that reshapes how believers understand their…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04019 Paul writes to the Corinthian church and tells them, pointedly, that he cannot address them as spiritual people but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ (1 Corinthians 3:1). The church at Corinth was genuine enough that Paul wrote to it as a church and addresses them as brothers and sisters…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04100 Salvation is the work of the triune God: the Father who planned it, the Son who accomplished it, and the Holy Spirit who applies it. The Spirit’s role in bringing everything the Father purposed and the Son secured into the actual experience of the individual is perhaps the most practically immediate dimension of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04105 Before a person can receive the gospel, something must happen to them. The good news of forgiveness is only recognisable as good news to someone who knows they need it, and that recognition, the deep, personal awareness of sin before a holy God, does not arise naturally in human beings. It is the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q04014 Few questions in Pneumatology generate more confusion or more heat. The baptism of the Holy Spirit has been claimed as the defining subsequent experience of the Christian life by some traditions, treated with suspicion by others, and misunderstood by many who hold it as central to their spirituality. What Scripture actually teaches is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4079 Every serious Christian has encountered the experience of doing something wrong — a sharp word, a deliberate compromise, an act of selfishness — and then wondering, sometimes with real anxiety, whether something has been lost with God. The question of what a single act of sin does to the Spirit’s filling is not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04038 Being ‘drunk in the Spirit’ is a phrase used within certain charismatic and neo-charismatic circles to describe a state of apparent spiritual intoxication, characterised by uncontrollable laughter, staggering, slurred speech, and behaviour that mimics physical drunkenness. The phenomenon gained global prominence during the so-called ‘Toronto Blessing’ of 1994 and continues to feature in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4077 The laying on of hands appears several times in Acts in connection with the Spirit’s reception, and it has been the subject of theological debate ever since. In some instances, the Spirit is received through the apostles’ laying on of hands; in others, the Spirit comes before any such action. Understanding what the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4078 The relationship between the filling of the Spirit and intercessory prayer is one of the more neglected connections in practical pneumatology, despite the fact that the New Testament draws the two together with some consistency. Intercessory prayer — praying on behalf of others — is not simply a spiritual discipline that believers undertake…