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 4092. Elijah’s journey to Horeb is one of the most emotionally honest passages in the entire Old Testament, and I think that is exactly why so many believers find themselves drawn back to it. Here is a prophet who had just called down fire from heaven on Carmel, who had watched the prophets of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4089. I get asked about this more than almost anything else in pastoral conversation, so let me say plainly that guidance through dreams is something Scripture treats with real seriousness, without ever making it the normal channel for hearing from God. Dreams sit in an odd place in the Christian imagination. Some believers dismiss…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1028. The Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with a passage I have read a dozen times before, and suddenly it is not the same passage any more. Nothing has changed on the page,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4086. Spirit’s conviction of sin is one of the most significant realities in the whole business of evangelism, and the question of what it actually does inside a person when they hear the gospel deserves a careful answer. Does it genuinely open the possibility of a real response, or does it produce some kind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4082. Spirit’s intercession is one of the most quietly comforting truths in the whole of Romans 8, and it is worth asking directly whether grieving the Spirit through unconfessed sin switches it off. If it did, the very moments when we most need the Spirit interceding for us, our weakest and most compromised seasons,…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4081. Grieving the Spirit is one of two warnings Paul gives about how believers can disrupt their relationship with the Holy Spirit, and the other, quenching the Spirit, gets confused with it so often that most Christians I talk to treat the two as interchangeable. They are not. I want to show you why…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4080. Does the filling and assurance of a believer’s salvation genuinely connect to one another, or are they two entirely separate matters that should never be confused. I want to answer this carefully, because a wrong answer in either direction causes real pastoral damage. Get this connection wrong one way and you risk anxious…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4079. Whether losing the filling of the Spirit happens through a single, dramatic act of sin or through a slower, more gradual drift is a genuinely practical pastoral question, and Scripture’s answer turns out to be more nuanced than either a strict once-off model or a purely gradual one alone. I want to work…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4078. How the Spirit’s filling relates to intercessory prayer is a connection Scripture draws explicitly, and understanding it will change how you approach prayer for others, particularly when you genuinely do not know what to pray or how to pray it. Intercessory prayer, prayer offered on behalf of someone else, is not primarily a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4077. The laying on hands appears repeatedly in the Acts narratives connected to the Spirit’s reception, and I want to work through those specific passages carefully, because the pattern is genuinely more varied than a single, simplified formula for how believers receive the Spirit today. Getting this right matters, because some traditions have built…