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 9109 The church has always struggled to hold two things together: genuine openness to the Spirit’s ongoing work in equipping believers with gifts, and the biblical insistence on order, intelligibility, and discernment in corporate worship. The history of charismatic Christianity is littered with the wreckage of communities that lost the second whilst pursuing the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4066 Someone approaches you after a church meeting, or perhaps contacts you privately, with a message they believe is from God for your life. They may have used the language of prophecy, or they may have phrased it more tentatively as something they felt they should share with you. How do you respond? The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10109 How does a believer grow in holiness? The question sounds simple and turns out to be one of the most contested in Christian thought. On one side stands the quietist: “Let go and let God” — spiritual growth is entirely His work, and the believer’s task is to get out of the way….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4065 Every believer in Christ has received at least one spiritual gift. This is not an aspiration or a target to aim for — it is a statement of fact grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04117 If you have spent any time in charismatic circles you will almost certainly have encountered the idea that God has been moving in successive waves of the Spirit across the twentieth century, each building on the last and preparing the church for what comes next. The language of a “Third Wave” of the…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 04118 The word “impartation” has become so standard in charismatic vocabulary that many Christians use it without pausing to ask whether it describes something the Bible actually teaches. The idea is deceptively simple: that a spiritual gift, anointing, or measure of the Spirit’s power can be transferred from one person to another through the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04119 When Paul writes to the Ephesian believers that they were “sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13), he reaches for language drawn from the commercial and legal world of his day. A seal was not decorative. It was a mark of ownership that identified what belonged to whom, and a binding guarantee…
Reading Time: 14 minutesQuestion 1008 The question of dreams, visions, and prophecy today generates considerable confusion and division in the church. Does God still speak through these means? Should Christians expect or seek these experiences? The answer requires careful biblical thinking that avoids two dangerous extremes: rigidly denying God can work beyond our categories, or elevating subjective experiences…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1017 Whether an unbeliever can understand the Bible has direct implications for evangelism, for how we engage with non-Christian friends around Scripture, and for how we understand the Holy Spirit’s work. The answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, and getting the nuance right matters both theologically and practically. What an…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10028 Most Bible readers have had the experience of a passage opening up with a clarity and personal directness it had never carried before — something has changed, though not in the text itself. And most have had the opposite experience too: reading words that are technically comprehensible but which carry no weight, no…