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 4065. Spiritual gifts are not an aspiration to work towards but a settled fact about every believer in Christ. That is a statement of what has already happened, grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament, not a target you have yet to reach. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4063. Spirit filled living is commanded, not simply commended as an optional extra, in Ephesians 5:18, and Paul does not leave the command floating vaguely in the abstract for believers to guess at. Read the verses that surround it and three concrete conditions emerge clearly, conditions any believer can act on today rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4062. The relationship between prophecy and Scripture is often assumed rather than genuinely examined, and the assumption usually runs in one of two mistaken directions, either treating every prophetic word as functionally equal to the Bible itself, or dismissing prophecy altogether simply because it is not Scripture. Paul gives us a considerably better way…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4061. Whether spiritual gifts today continue to operate the way they did in the first century turns, for a great many cessationist writers, on a single disputed phrase tucked inside 1 Corinthians 13:10, and I want to examine that phrase carefully rather than simply asserting a conclusion and moving on. Paul writes that when…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has produced entire movements built on the idea that some believers possess the Spirit more fully than others. I want to set the two side by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4059. The Holy Spirit’s deity is not a matter of theological hair splitting, because how you answer it shapes how you pray, how you read the New Testament, and how seriously you take the words Jesus Himself spoke against dishonouring Him. I have met sincere Christians who speak of the Spirit as a kind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how we engage non-Christian friends around Scripture, and how we understand the Holy Spirit’s own work in a person’s life. Whether an unbeliever can understand the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4057. The Spirit and resurrection are linked in Scripture far more tightly than most Christians realise, and once you see the connection you will not read Romans 8 the same way again. It is easy to speak of the resurrection purely in terms of God’s raw power, and leave the Holy Spirit as a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4056. Few questions in contemporary church life generate more confusion, and in some quarters more dangerous claims, than whether apostles and prophets still function today with the same authority they carried in the first century. The rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, with its confident assertion that God is restoring apostles and prophets to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4055. The word of wisdom is easy to confuse with wisdom in the broad biblical sense, the kind James promises every believer may ask God for in James 1:5, but Paul has something more specific in mind when he lists it as a distinct gift in 1 Corinthians 12:8. Getting the distinction right matters…