Understanding the Person and ministry of the Holy Spirit—His deity, personality, baptism, filling, gifts, fruit, and ongoing work in believers.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04034. Follow the Gospels closely and you cannot miss how often the Spirit and Jesus appear side by side. From the announcement of his conception to the power of his rising, the Holy Spirit is present at every hinge of the Lord’s earthly life. This is not a minor thread running quietly in the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04033. Ask where the Bible comes from and you cannot answer well without speaking of the Spirit and inspiration in the same breath. The Scriptures did not fall from the sky finished, nor were they invented by clever men who wanted to control others. They were breathed out by God through human writers whom…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04032. When I open the Bible at its first page I find that the Spirit in creation is already there, before light, before land, before a single living thing. We are used to speaking of the Father who decrees and the Son through whom all things were made, and that is right and good….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4185. I want to write about the Spirit in depression with great care, because this is a subject where careless words from a pulpit have wounded many sincere believers. Depression is not the same as ordinary sadness that lifts after a good night’s sleep. It is a heavy, often prolonged darkness of mind and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4021. How does the Spirit sanctifies us? I love the question because the answer takes us straight to the heart of how God changes a person. To say that the Spirit sanctifies us is to say that holiness is not something I wring out of myself by gritted teeth and willpower, but something God…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09022 Western Christianity has a persistent individualism problem. The dominant assumption in many evangelical and charismatic contexts is that the believer’s relationship with God is a private transaction, and that discerning the Spirit’s voice is primarily a personal skill to be developed in isolation. Scripture tells a different story. The gathered church is not…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7006 Few passages in Scripture have caused more anxiety among believers than Jesus’ solemn warning about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. People have come to me over the years, sometimes in tears, convinced they have committed this sin and are beyond hope. Before we even begin to unpack what this sin actually is, let…
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…