Christian Living

Question 11123. prayer for healing belongs at the heart of ordinary Christian life, not at the fringes of it, and I want to say that plainly because some believers, wary ...

Question 11120. Raising hands in worship is one of those things that can make an otherwise unremarkable Sunday morning feel suddenly loaded, because the moment someone's arms go up in ...

Question 11119. Kneeling in prayer is the picture most of us reach for when we imagine someone truly serious about talking to God, and I get asked fairly often whether ...

Question 11118. Postures of prayer vary widely across Scripture, and that variety itself is instructive, because it tells us that God has not bound genuine prayer to a single required ...

Question 11117. Fasting in secret is the standard Jesus sets for His disciples, and it is one of those instructions that sounds simple until you actually try to live it ...

Question 11116. Fasting and health are not competing concerns, whatever the intensity of some fasting teaching can suggest. Your body was made by God and belongs to Him, and caring ...

Question 11115. The length of fasting is nowhere fixed by Scripture as a single required duration, which frustrates believers looking for a straightforward rule but also frees the practice from ...

Question 11114. Scripture describes several genuinely distinct types of fasting, and knowing the differences between them will help you approach the discipline with realistic expectations rather than simply assuming every ...

Question 11113. lectio divina, Latin for divine reading, is an old monastic practice of slow, meditative Scripture reading that has found its way back into evangelical conversation in recent years, ...

Question 11112. Biblical meditation is one of those phrases that makes some Christians nervous, because the word "meditation" calls to mind crossed legs, emptied minds and Eastern religion. Yet meditation ...

Question 11111. Christian journalling is the practice of writing down what God is teaching us, what we are praying, and how we are responding to His Word, and it raises ...

Question 11110 The discipline of solitude is the deliberate practice of withdrawing from the company of others and the noise of daily life in order to be alone with God ...

The discipline of silence is the deliberate practice of quieting both our surroundings and our own restless talking so that we can attend to God and to His Word without ...

Question 11108 The spiritual disciplines are the ordinary, repeated practices through which believers place themselves in the way of God’s grace so that they may grow to know and love ...

Question 11107 Biblical parenting is a phrase that has sold a great many books, most of which contain considerably more method than the Bible does. Scripture is not a manual ...

Question 11105 Few phrases in Christian teaching have done as much good and as much harm as headship and submission. Used as Scripture uses them, they describe a marriage of ...

Question 11104 What Scripture asks of a husband and wife has become one of the hardest subjects to discuss calmly, partly because the words have been abused and partly because ...

Question 11005. Nothing brings people to my study door more often than the problem of knowing God's will. Should I take the job, marry this person, move to that city, ...

Question 11007. Few questions reach my study with more pain attached than the question of the grounds for divorce. Somebody is usually sitting opposite me who did not want any ...

Question 11006. Christian dating is a phrase the Bible never uses, and that alone should shape how confidently we answer this question. Courtship as we practise it is a modern ...

Question 11002. Biblical fasting is the deliberate setting aside of food, for a set time, in order to give undivided attention to God. That is the whole of it, and ...

Question 11001. Ask me how Christians should read the Bible and my first instinct is to ask what you expect to happen when you open it. Some people read the ...

Question 11000. How should Christians pray? It is one of the first questions a new believer asks and one that mature believers never entirely stop asking. The disciples had watched ...

Question 11088 Discerning sin is one of the ordinary tasks of the Christian life, and it is a good deal harder than the lists suggest. Scripture names a great many ...

Question 6059. When Jesus says of the offending hand, cut it off, He is not opening a clinic. He is using deliberate overstatement to say something about sin that gentler ...

Question 11009. Most Christians spend the largest waking portion of their lives in daily work, and a good many of them suspect it does not really count. The hours at ...

Question 11017. Biblical evangelism is the announcement of good news that has already happened. That is what the word means, and getting the definition right settles most of the anxiety ...

Question 11008. The question of remarriage after divorce is one of the few where I have watched churches cause real and lasting damage in both directions. Some have treated remarried ...

Question 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 ...

Question 12031 Christians and gambling is a question that cannot be settled by looking up a verse, because there is no verse. The Bible never names the lottery, the bookmaker ...

Question 12057. Is sex before marriage wrong? Yes, and I am aware that saying so plainly puts me at odds with almost everything a young person in Britain has ever ...

Question 12056. Physical discipline is the part of this question that gets argued about, though behind it sits a whole theology of children, of authority and of correction. I want ...

Question 12054. Family planning is one of the few subjects where Christians hold strong private convictions and say almost nothing publicly, which means couples often work it out alone, with ...

Question 11102 Therapy and counselling make some Christians uneasy, and I understand why. The suspicion is that a secular discipline will quietly relocate the problem from sin to circumstance, tell ...

Question 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has too often made things worse, and I say that as a pastor who has watched it happen ...

Question 11099 Should we expect persecution, or is that something that happens to Christians in other countries and other centuries? It is a fair question for a believer in Britain, ...

Question 11098 Christian suffering is the question that empties pews and fills prayer meetings, and anyone who answers it briskly has probably not sat long enough with somebody in the ...

Question 11103 Gender dysphoria is a subject on which the church has managed to be both too loud and too silent, and the people caught in the middle of it ...

Question 12026 Preferred pronouns have turned an ordinary part of speech into a test of allegiance, and believers are being asked to take that test at work, at university and ...

Question 12024 Sexual purity has become an embarrassing phrase in some circles, partly because it has been handled badly. A generation of young Christians was given rules, fear and a ...

Question 12023 The sin of pornography is the one I am asked about most often in private and preached about least often in public, and that imbalance tells you something ...

Question 12002 Situational ethics is the view that no act is right or wrong in itself, and that the loving thing in the particular circumstances is the only real moral ...

Question 11060. Marrying an unbeliever is a question I have been asked in tears more often than almost any other, usually by someone who already knows the answer and is ...

Question 11043. Praying for the dead is a practice most evangelicals have never considered and many bereaved believers have quietly done anyway, usually in the first raw weeks after a ...

Question 11016. Memorising Scripture strikes many Christians as a relic, something belonging to Sunday school prizes and an age before search engines. Why store what you can look up in ...

Question 12004 Christians and tattoos is a subject that produces a good deal of confident assertion and rather little careful reading. One verse gets quoted, the conversation stops, and a ...

Question 12036. Every discussion about Christian entertainment eventually arrives at the same awkward moment, when someone asks whether a particular film, box set or video game is acceptable and everyone ...

Question 12003 Few subjects generate more heat and less light among British believers than Christians and alcohol. Some congregations treat total abstinence as a settled biblical command. Others treat drinking ...

Question 12059. Should Christians attend gay weddings? This is one of the hardest practical questions I am asked, and it is hard precisely because the people asking are not culture ...

Question 12058. Cohabiting before marriage is now the ordinary route into marriage in Britain, which means that when a couple starts attending church and someone eventually raises it, the conversation ...

Question 12064. The phrase love the sinner and hate the sin has become one of those sayings that everybody quotes and nobody examines. It is not in the Bible, which ...

Question 11097 The phrase alternative medicine covers such an enormous range of things that treating it as one subject is the first mistake most of us make. It stretches from ...

Question 11096 Should Christians use doctors, or does going to the surgery show a shortage of faith? I have been asked this more often than you might expect, usually in ...

Question 11101 Should Christians take medication, particularly the sort that works on the mind? I get asked this quietly, often after a service, usually by someone who has already been ...

Question 11106 Christian singleness is a subject most churches handle badly, and I include myself in that criticism. We build our programmes around families, we preach on marriage several times ...

Question 12009 White lies are so woven into ordinary life that most of us have never stopped to examine them. "You look wonderful in that." "The meal was lovely." "I ...

Question 12008 The sin of lying looks like the easiest ethical question in the Bible. God says do not lie, so do not lie. Case closed. Then somebody asks about ...

Question 12007 Biblical self-defence stops being an abstract question the moment you hear glass breaking downstairs at two in the morning. I have been asked about this by fathers, by ...

Question 12001 Most moral decisions a Christian faces are not the dramatic ones. They are whether to say something about a colleague's expenses claim, whether the tax return is entirely ...

Question 12000 Christian ethics is the study of how followers of Jesus ought to live, and that sounds dull until you notice that almost every difficult decision you will make ...

Question 11024. Being a disciple is not a rank within Christianity; it is what a Christian is. The New Testament uses the word for the whole company of believers, and ...

Question 11019. Christian discipleship has become a word we use for programmes: a course, a booklet, a six-week series for new believers. The New Testament uses it for something considerably ...

Question 11018. Most Christians want to share the gospel and do not, and the reason is rarely a lack of conviction. It is that the moment arrives and they have ...

Question 11020. Jesus told His followers to make disciples, and the church has spent two thousand years discovering how easy it is to do something else instead. We gather crowds, ...

Question 11062. Single Christians are frequently handed a mixture of unhelpful advice, ranging from the assurance that God has someone lined up to the suggestion that they should stop looking ...

Question 11061. Dating unbelievers is a question the Bible never addresses directly, for the simple reason that dating as we know it did not exist when Scripture was written. That ...

Question 11055. Soul ties come up more often than you might expect, usually from a believer who has been told that a past relationship has left an invisible spiritual attachment ...

Question 11049. Few things wound a believer more quietly than unanswered prayer. You have prayed for the marriage, the diagnosis, the wayward son, the job, and heaven has felt like ...

Question 11073 Doctrine in suffering sounds, at first hearing, like the least useful thing on offer. When someone is sitting in a hospital corridor at two in the morning, a ...

Question 11074 Doctrinal conviction and humility are usually presented as rivals, as though a man could have one only by giving ground on the other. The confident believer is assumed ...

Question 11075 A Bible reading plan is a tool, and like every tool it is only as good as the job you are asking it to do. People usually ask ...

Question 11076 Daily Bible reading raises a question of quantity almost immediately, and the question is usually asked with a slightly guilty face. How long is long enough? Fifteen minutes? ...

Question 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real ...

Question 07061 Christian re-dedication is not being saved again, and the difference matters more than it might sound. Salvation happens once and cannot be repeated, because the new birth is ...

Question 07060 A backsliding Christian is a believer who has drifted away from close fellowship with God, and yes, they can come back. In fact the whole of Scripture is ...

Question 60086. Lot's daughters are the subject of one of the ugliest sentences in the Bible. The men of Sodom have surrounded the house demanding that Lot hand over his ...

Question 11077 Asking in my name is one of the most quoted promises Jesus ever made and one of the most consistently mishandled. Whatever you ask in my name, this ...

Question 11078 Speaking to this mountain has become one of the standard phrases of a certain kind of Christian teaching, usually meaning that a believer may address a problem out ...

Question 11079 The Lord’s Prayer contains adoration, submission, petition, confession and a request for protection, and somebody always notices that it contains no thanksgiving. For a prayer given by Jesus ...

Question 7085. If God has already set me apart, why pursue holiness at all? It is a fair question and a common one, and it usually arrives from somebody who ...

Question 11092 Saturday or Sunday is a question that arrives in two very different tones. Sometimes it comes from a believer who has been challenged by a Seventh-day Adventist or ...

Question 11044. Whether Christians should keep the Jewish festivals has moved from a fringe question to a live one, as the Hebrew Roots movement grows and believers who love Israel ...

Question 11089 The law of Christ is the phrase Paul uses when he wants to say that a believer released from the Mosaic covenant is not therefore released from moral ...

Question 7073. Positional sanctification describes where you stand before God; practical sanctification describes how you are getting on. Both are scriptural, both matter, and a great many discouraged Christians are ...

Question 7074. Sinless perfection in this present life is taught by a number of sincere traditions, and I want to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves rather than ...

Question 12055. A Christian immigration ethic has to do something the newspapers never manage, which is to hold together a genuine concern for the stranger and a genuine concern for ...

Question 60028. Christian political involvement makes many believers uneasy, and the unease usually runs in one of two directions. Some feel that any engagement with public life is a distraction ...

Question 60047. Can you be a pro-choice Christian? I want to answer the pro-choice Christian question carefully, because it is almost never asked in the abstract. Behind it there is ...

Question 08111. What actually happens under hypnosis is less mysterious than most people assume, and getting that clear is the first step to answering whether it opens doors to demonic ...

Question 08108. The question of whether Eastern meditation can open doors to demons needs a definition before it needs an answer, because the word meditation is now doing duty for ...

Question 08110. Whether martial arts are spiritually dangerous depends almost entirely on which martial arts you mean and who is teaching them, which is why a blanket answer will always ...

Question 08107. Protecting children from spiritual attack is one of those parental concerns that can either drive you to prayer or drive you slightly mad, and I have watched it ...

Question 08101 Whether horror films can invite demonic activity is a question I get asked more often around the end of October than at any other time of year, and ...

Question 08102 The question of whether Christians should read occult books needs one distinction made before anything useful can be said. There is an enormous difference between a Christian book ...

Question 08100 The way the enemy attacks churches tells you a great deal about what he fears, and it is rarely what we expect. In my experience he is far ...

Question 08098 Understanding how the enemy attacks marriages begins with understanding why he bothers. Marriage was God's idea before sin entered the world, and Paul tells us it pictures something ...

Question 08099 When the enemy attacks families he is going after the oldest institution God ever made. Before there was a nation, a temple or a church, there was a ...

Question 08097 Asking whether something is demonic or psychological is one of the most delicate questions a pastor gets, and getting it wrong in either direction causes real damage. I ...

Question 08096 Knowing whether you are under spiritual attack is harder than most books on the subject admit, and I want to be honest about that before offering anything more ...

Question 08109. Whether yoga practice is spiritually dangerous is a question that divides thoughtful Christians, and I want to handle it in a way that respects both sides rather than ...

Question 08088 When James tells us to resist the devil, he is not handing us a slogan to shout at the ceiling. He is describing a settled posture that has ...

Question 11080 Material wealth is one of those subjects on which the Bible says a great deal more than most congregations want to hear, and it says it in both ...

Question 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is ...

Question 11094 Ask ten Christians what music in worship is for and you will get ten answers, several of them contradictory and at least two delivered with some heat. Some ...

Question 11014. People usually ask about worship outside church for one of two reasons. Either they have felt God on a hillside more powerfully than they ever have in a ...

Question 11015. Private worship is what happens between a believer and God when nobody else is in the room and nobody is going to ask about it afterwards. It is ...

Question 11095 Whether we should use instruments in worship is one of those questions that sounds trivial until you meet someone for whom it is anything but. There are sincere, ...

Question 11029. Arguments about worship styles have split more congregations in my lifetime than arguments about doctrine, which is a sobering thing for a Baptist minister to admit and an ...

Question 11027. Biblical worship is far larger than the hour we spend singing on a Sunday morning, and that single misunderstanding has probably done more damage to the church's worship ...

Question 11028. Asking how we should worship God is a more dangerous question than it looks, because Scripture contains several accounts of people who worshipped God enthusiastically and wrongly, and ...

Question 11030. Whether Christians should be raising hands in worship is a question I have been asked more often by people who feel awkward about it than by people who ...

Question 11031. The question of church liturgy divides evangelicals almost as neatly as music does, and usually for the same reason: we mistake our own habits for the biblical position ...

Question 11053. Praying aloud feels natural to some believers and excruciating to others, and I have met plenty of Christians who quietly assume they are doing it wrong whichever way ...

Question 11054. Fasting and prayer appear together so often in Scripture that many believers assume the combination works like a spiritual amplifier, as though skipping meals turns up the volume ...

Question 11052. Intercessory prayer is simply praying for somebody who is not you. That definition sounds almost disappointingly plain, and yet the practice behind it runs through Scripture from Abraham ...

Question 11048. Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand. I understand the instinct ...

Question 11051. The length of prayer is one of those questions that makes people squirm before they even ask it. Somewhere in the back of most Christian minds sits a ...

Question 11046. Saying Amen at the end of a prayer is so automatic for most of us that we have stopped hearing it, which is a shame, because it is ...

Question 11047. Ending prayers in Jesus' name is a habit most Christians acquire before anyone explains it, and quite a few carry a low-level worry that they have been reciting ...

Question 12060. Borrowing money is not always wrong, and the short answer to this question is no, though borrowing money carries warnings in Scripture that most Christians in Britain have ...

Question 12061. Scripture does not endorse any of the economic systems human beings have devised, and I think that disappoints people on all sides. Christians keep hoping the Bible will ...

Question 11039. Estate planning feels like a subject for solicitors rather than sermons, and that assumption is precisely why so many Christians die intestate and leave their families a mess ...

Question 11038. Leaving an inheritance is commended in Proverbs and complicated by almost everything else Scripture says about money, which is why sincere Christians land in very different places on ...

Question 12012 Christian landlords are asked to justify themselves far more often than they used to be. In a country where housing costs cause real hardship, the suggestion that profiting ...

Question 11034. Student loans raise a genuine question of conscience for believers, because Scripture has strong things to say about debt and yet many young Christians cannot train for the ...

Question 11035. Cryptocurrency investing is one of those subjects where Christians want a verse and there is not one, which means the answer has to be built from principles rather ...

Question 11032. Asking how much is enough money is one of the few financial questions the Bible answers directly, and the answer is uncomfortable enough that most of us prefer ...

Question 11033. Saving for retirement troubles some Christians because it looks suspiciously like the rich fool in Luke 12, who built bigger barns and heard God call him a fool ...

Question 11063. Christians and poverty is a subject on which the church has swung wildly between two errors, and both of them are still with us. One says that God ...

Question 11003. Ask about Christian tithing in most evangelical churches and you will get a confident answer: ten per cent, off the top, and the Bible says so. Ask for ...

Question 11004. Christian giving is one of the few subjects where almost everyone agrees in principle and disagrees in practice. We all know we should be generous. Most of us ...

Question 11093 Christian giving is one of those subjects that makes a congregation shuffle in its seats, and I understand why. Money is private, budgets are tight, and most of ...

Question 06035 The word "backsliding" has an old-fashioned ring to it in some quarters, but the reality it describes is anything but historical. It names something that believers in every ...

Question 11087 Do I need to forgive myself? The question arrives constantly in pastoral conversation, usually from someone who believes God has forgiven them and still cannot get free of ...

Question 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God's moral commands no longer have any claim on ...

Question 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have ...

Question 4019. What is the difference between carnal and spiritual Christians? The contrast between carnal and spiritual believers comes straight out of Paul's letter to a church that was behaving ...

Question 11083 The sin of gluttony is the one item on the traditional list of deadly sins that the modern church has quietly dropped. We preach against drunkenness, greed and ...

Question 11082 The disease model of addiction has become the default explanation in medicine, in the media and increasingly in the church. Addiction, we are told, is a chronic brain ...

Question 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence ...

Question 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent ...

Question 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God ...

Question 11085 Sinful dreams trouble sincere Christians far more often than anyone admits from a pulpit. A believer wakes with the residue of something adulterous, violent or blasphemous still vivid, ...

Question 6049. Christians still sin after conversion, and the honest recognition of that fact is one of the more important things a new believer can be told early. Nobody is ...

Question 6060. The mortification of sin is Paul's blunt name for the daily work of putting sin to death, and it is the least fashionable idea in modern Christian vocabulary ...

Question 6061. Habitual sin is sin that has stopped being an event and become a pattern. It is no longer the thing you did on a bad Tuesday. It is ...

Question 6062. Secret sin is the sin nobody knows about except you and God. It has no witnesses, no consequences that anyone can trace, and no cost that shows up ...

Question 11090 Habitual sin is the pastoral problem that will not go away. Almost every believer has something that keeps returning, and almost every pastor has sat with someone who ...

Question 6072. Lust and attraction are not the same thing, and a great many sincere Christians have been tormented by the assumption that they are. Noticing that someone is beautiful ...

Question 6067. Confession of sin to God is always sufficient for forgiveness. There is no human intermediary, no priest, no queue and no waiting period. That needs saying first and ...

Question 6018. Paul says that godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. That is a startling sentence, because it means two ...

Question 6015. Ask what the Bible means by the world and the answer is that it means three different things, and the one that causes all the trouble is the ...

Question 6013. A besetting sin is the sin that knows your address: the particular temptation that returns again and again long after other struggles have faded, the one you have ...

Question 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been ...

Question 1057. public Scripture reading is commanded in the New Testament, not simply permitted as an optional liturgical flourish, and I think many churches, my own included at various points, ...

Question 1058. family Bible reading fails in most homes not because parents lack good intentions but because it is attempted with the wrong expectations, either too ambitious a plan collapsing ...

Question 1128. Helping children love Scripture is, I think, one of the most important tasks any Christian parent takes on, and also one of the most quietly daunting. We want ...

Question 1126. A Bible reading approach is one of those decisions that sounds small until you actually sit down with your Bible and wonder where to begin. Should you start ...

Question 1127. A Bible reading plan started with such good intentions back in January. This would finally be the year you read through the whole thing. February arrived and you ...

Question 1123. Bible reading dryness is something every Christian I have ever pastored has experienced at some point, myself very much included. The pages seem flat. The words don't come ...

Question 12049. Is smoking a sin? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just come to faith and is quietly terrified that ...

Question 11065. The three enemies of the Christian life have been named in that order for centuries, the world, the flesh and the devil, and the grouping is not a ...

Question 11066. Unconfessed sin is one of the quietest problems in the Christian life, precisely because it makes no noise. Nothing dramatic happens. There is no thunderclap and no obvious ...

Question 11067. Awareness of the Spirit's presence is something many believers want and few know how to pursue without feeling they are either faking an experience or drifting into something ...

Question 11070. Depression and sin have been tangled together in Christian thinking for a very long time, and a great deal of harm has followed. I have sat with believers ...

Question 11069. Fear and anxiety are addressed in Scripture far more often than most people realise, and usually with a good deal more tenderness than the way we quote those ...

Question 11071. Truth and love are set against each other so routinely in Christian conversation that many believers assume they must be balanced, as though every increase in one required ...

Question 4087. Distinguishing spirit prompting from your own reasoning is one of the most practically pressing skills a Christian needs to develop, because the stakes of getting it wrong run ...

Question 4083. Spiritual dryness is one of the most disorienting experiences a Christian can go through, the sense that yesterday's warmth in prayer has gone cold overnight and nothing you ...

Question 11056. The geographical progression of Acts 1:8, from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and on to the end of the earth, is often read as a pleasant piece of ...

Question 11081 Cross-cultural ministry has a founding case study in Acts 8, and it is not the one most people expect. Before Peter went to Cornelius and long before Paul ...

Question 04022. When Paul tells us to walk by the Spirit in Galatians 5:16, he is not handing us a slogan or a mood. "Walk by the Spirit, and you ...

Question 04023. Almost every honest believer eventually asks whether they are walking in the Spirit or the flesh, and means it as a real question and not a rhetorical one ...

Question 04020. The difference between the fruit and gifts of the Spirit is one of those quiet distinctions that keeps a church honest about itself. Both the fruit and gifts ...

Question 04045. To call your body the Spirit's temple is one of the most startling things the New Testament says about you, and Paul says it without flinching in 1 ...

Question 9114. Touch not my anointed is one of the most misused sentences in the English Bible, and I have heard it deployed to shut down every kind of legitimate ...

Question 11068. Feeling angry troubles conscientious Christians more than almost any other emotion, partly because we have been taught that gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit and have concluded ...

Question 5038. The purpose of life is the question every human being carries, whether they ever say it aloud or not. It surfaces at three in the morning, at gravesides, ...

Question 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 ...

Question 4066. A prophetic word is never simply accepted on the strength of someone's confidence in delivering it. Paul is explicit about this: when someone speaks a word of prophecy ...

Question 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 ...

Question 1091. Claiming verses is something I have watched sincere believers do in genuine faith, and something I have also watched leave people confused and hurt when the outcome they ...

Question 1087. Scripture in worship is not decoration set around the edges of a service. It is the very substance of what we say, sing and pray when a church ...

Question 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say ...

Question 1092. Meditating on Scripture is one of the oldest disciplines in the Christian life, and one of the most misunderstood, because the word "meditation" now carries associations that have ...

Question 1093. AI Bible study is something I get asked about often now, usually by people who are not sure whether using a tool like this on their Bible reading ...

Question 1053.Study Bibles are everywhere you look. Walk into any Christian bookshop and you will find shelves of them, leather-bound, colour-coded, themed for men, women, teenagers and almost every niche ...

Question 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt ...

Question 0029. Sooner or later every believer who takes both truth and relationships seriously has to ask whether a disagreement is worth breaking fellowship over. You find yourself genuinely at ...

Question 00049.It is entirely possible to be doctrinally correct and spiritually dead at the very same time, and the Bible says so without flinching for a moment. A person can ...

Question 17. Why does right belief lead to right behaviour? I am convinced that right belief is the hidden engine behind a holy life, and that most of our failures ...

Question 18. What does spiritual maturity look like according to Hebrews 5 and 6? I love this passage because the writer to the Hebrews refuses to let spiritual maturity stay ...

Question 4010. The fruit of the Spirit is one of those phrases I hear quoted so easily that we rarely stop and ask what it actually promises about the Christian ...

Question 4008. The guidance of the Spirit is one of the dearest privileges of the Christian life, and also one of the most misunderstood. Many believers picture it as a ...

Question 4007. The still small voice is one of those phrases that has wandered a long way from its home, and I want to walk it back. People use it ...

Question 4009. The fruit of the Spirit is Paul's lovely picture of the character that God grows in a believer's life, and it is found in Galatians 5 where he ...

Question 11040. The claim that you can activate your healing by speaking God's Word over your body is one of the most widely taught and most damaging errors circulating in ...

Question 11041. When Jesus said we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, he added a word that was not in the original commandment, and ...