Understanding the Person and ministry of the Holy Spirit—His deity, personality, baptism, filling, gifts, fruit, and ongoing work in believers.
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04023 Every Christian has moments of genuine uncertainty about their own spiritual condition. Am I acting out of the Spirit’s leading, or am I following my own desires and calling it God’s will? This is not an abstract theological question; it touches something very practical about self-knowledge, discernment, and honesty before God. Scripture provides…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04020 The Holy Spirit produces fruit in the believer and distributes gifts to the believer, and while both come from the same Spirit, they are doing entirely different things. Conflating them causes no end of confusion in the church, particularly when spiritual gifts are treated as evidence of spiritual maturity, or when character is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04039 The question of whether unbelievers can experience the Holy Spirit touches on something fundamental about the Spirit’s nature and mission. If the indwelling of the Spirit is the defining mark of belonging to Christ (Romans 8:9), does that mean the Spirit has no contact with unbelievers at all? The answer is more nuanced…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04036 The ‘second blessing’ doctrine has shaped entire movements within Christianity and continues to influence how millions of believers understand their spiritual life. At its core, it teaches that there is a definite spiritual experience subsequent to conversion, often called the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that elevates the believer to a higher level…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04037 Being ‘slain in the Spirit’ is one of the most recognisable and controversial phenomena in contemporary charismatic Christianity. The scene is familiar: a preacher lays hands on someone, or simply gestures toward them, and the person falls backward, apparently overcome by the Spirit’s power, often caught by designated catchers positioned behind them. This…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04034 The relationship between Jesus and the Holy Spirit during the earthly ministry is one of the most theologically significant and pastorally instructive areas of New Testament study. Jesus is fully God, the eternal second Person of the Trinity. And yet, during His incarnate life, He chose to live in dependence on the Spirit…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04035 Few areas of theology generate more confusion among ordinary believers than the various expressions the New Testament uses to describe the Spirit’s relationship to the Christian. ‘Born of the Spirit,’ ‘baptised in the Spirit,’ ‘filled with the Spirit,’ ‘sealed by the Spirit’: are these four different experiences? Do they happen at different times?…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04032 The Holy Spirit’s involvement in creation is stated in the opening lines of the Bible and yet is often overlooked. When we think of creation, we tend to think of the Father’s decree and the Son’s agency, and rightly so. But the Spirit was there at the very beginning, active and purposeful before…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04033 If the Bible is the Word of God, and if its authority depends on its divine origin, then the mechanism by which God produced it matters enormously. Scripture’s own testimony is that the Holy Spirit played the decisive role in the process of inspiration, ensuring that human authors writing in their own styles,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04030 The Holy Spirit is the same Person in both Testaments. He does not change in nature, character, or divine authority between Genesis and Revelation. What changes is the basis on which He relates to God’s people, the scope of His ministry, and the permanence of His presence in the life of the believer….