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 4086 One of the most significant pastoral and theological questions in evangelism concerns what actually happens in a person when they hear the gospel. Is the Spirit’s work of conviction something that genuinely opens the possibility of response, or is it an irresistible divine action that produces a predetermined outcome? And if the conviction…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4082 Romans 8:26-27 describes one of the most intimate and remarkable ministries the Holy Spirit performs on behalf of every believer: He intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and He does so according to the will of God. This intercession is not an occasional intervention but a constant reality — the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4083 Spiritual dryness is one of the most disorienting experiences in the Christian life. The person who yesterday felt the presence of God in prayer and worship finds today that their devotional life feels mechanical, prayer seems to bounce off the ceiling, and the Scriptures that once spoke with directness now seem opaque. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4080 Among the questions that unsettle believers who take their spiritual life seriously is whether their current experience of the Spirit bears any relation to the security of their standing before God. When the filling of the Spirit fluctuates — as it undeniably does — and when seasons of spiritual vitality give way to…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4081 Two commands in the New Testament describe ways believers can disrupt their relationship with the Holy Spirit: “do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30) and “do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). These are distinct warnings, and collapsing them into a single idea loses something important from each. Understanding…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04096 At first glance, the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 and the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 appear to be two separate lists, one from Jesus and one from Paul, addressing similar territory from different angles. The connections between them are real and theologically significant, though the two passages are not simply saying…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04097 The relationship between biblical sanctification and what contemporary psychology calls character formation or psychological maturity deserves careful handling. There are genuine points of contact, observations from psychology that illuminate what Scripture has always said, and areas where the two frameworks diverge at a fundamental level. The task is knowing which is which, rather…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04098 Paul had other options available to him when he wrote Galatians 5. He could have described the qualities he was commending as virtues, drawing on a framework that every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would have immediately recognised. He could have presented them as the disciplines of the Christian life, the practices…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04094 Gideon’s fleece has become a popular shorthand in contemporary Christianity for a particular approach to guidance: placing a condition before God and taking the outcome as a sign of His will. “I’ll put out a fleece” has entered the vocabulary of Christian decision-making as if it described an approved biblical method. Whether the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04095 Scripture does not specify which career a believer should pursue, which city to live in, or which of two apparently godly people to marry. The absence of direct biblical instruction on these matters is not an oversight. It is itself a form of teaching about the kind of relationship God intends to have…