Understanding the Person and ministry of the Holy Spirit—His deity, personality, baptism, filling, gifts, fruit, and ongoing work in believers.
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4169. The Holy Spirit and ordination are joined together in the New Testament far more closely than our tidy modern ceremonies sometimes let on. We tend to picture ordination as a service of certificates, robes and a kind handshake from the deacons, and there is nothing wrong with marking the moment well. Yet when…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4188. Anyone who has preached for long comes to feel the weight of this question, because the work of the Spirit in preaching is the difference between words that only inform and words that actually save. I can prepare a sermon, choose my texts, order my arguments, and deliver them as clearly as I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4187. There is no hour in which the ministry of the Spirit is more precious than the last, and to ask how He will comfort a dying believer is to ask about the place where all our theology is finally tested. I have sat at many bedsides, holding the hand of a brother or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4186. The ministry of the Spirit in doubt is something I wish more Christians understood, because doubt frightens believers far more than it needs to. A question rises that you cannot answer. A wave of unbelief washes over you in the night. You wonder whether any of it is true, or whether you were…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4184. Most believers, if they walk with God long enough, come to know what I call the dry places, and the ministry of the Spirit in wilderness seasons is one of the least understood and most needed truths in the Christian life. By a wilderness season I mean those stretches when God feels distant,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4183. When we talk about the Spirit in suffering, we are touching one of the most tender places in the Christian life, because suffering is where our theology either becomes real or falls apart. It is one thing to confess that the Holy Spirit indwells the believer when life is calm. It is another…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4182. Almost every Christian I have ever pastored has had at least one sin that seems to cling closer than the rest, and the longing to overcome a besetting sin is one of the most painful and persistent struggles of the believing life. It may be a temper that flares before you can stop…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4181. The difference between being Spirit-led and impulse-led is one of the most practical things a Christian can learn, and one of the most commonly muddled. A sudden strong feeling rises up, an urge to speak, to give, to act, to walk away, and we baptise it with the language of guidance. We say…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4180. When people ask me how the Spirit and marriage decisions relate, they usually want one of two things. Either they are single and longing to know whether a particular person is the one God has for them, or they are already courting and want assurance that they are not making a terrible mistake….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4179. Few questions touch daily Christian living as closely as the relationship between the Spirit and the conscience, because both of them speak to us from within and we do not always find it easy to tell their voices apart. You feel a check before you say something unkind. You feel a weight after…