Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11162. Faith and feelings are often confused with one another, and untangling them properly matters a great deal, because many believers quietly measure the health of their walk with God by how spiritually they feel rather than by what they actually believe and how they actually act on it. I meet this confusion constantly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11161. Christian doubt is something almost every believer meets sooner or later, whether it arrives as a quiet nagging question late at night or a sudden crisis triggered by suffering, unanswered prayer, or a hard intellectual objection you cannot immediately answer, and I want to talk to you honestly about it rather than offering…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 6166. The Hebrews 10 warning has probably cost more sleep among sincere believers than any other paragraph in the New Testament. “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.” Read that at two in the morning after a bad week…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 something they did. They have confessed it, sometimes for years, and the weight has not lifted. I want to say two things that sound contradictory…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 image appears while holding a baby. A believer who loves God finds his mind producing material that horrifies him. The people who ask me about…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08120. Few questions in pastoral ministry generate as much fear and confusion as whether demon possession is possible for a believer, and few have been answered so badly by so many well-meaning people. My answer is no, and I hold it firmly. But the question deserves more than a flat denial, because the people…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08103 If you are carrying past occult involvement and wondering what to do about it, I want to say the most important thing at the very start. Jesus is enough. Whatever you did, however deeply you went in, the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin, and there is no category of sin marked…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08063 Whether spoken curses can affect a Christian is a question I have been asked in quiet voices more than once, usually after something unpleasant has happened. Someone has cursed a believer to their face, or a relative involved in witchcraft has made a threat, or a stranger online has pronounced something ugly over…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8049. Of all the titles Scripture gives him, Satan the accuser is the one that touches ordinary Christians most often. We may never face a dramatic temptation or anything resembling a spiritual encounter, and yet most believers I know have spent a bad night under a voice reciting their failures back to them with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7104 The phrase personal relationship with Jesus is everywhere in evangelical speech and nowhere in the Bible, which is worth noticing before we go any further. That does not make it wrong. The reality it points to is thoroughly biblical. But the wording has caused a fair amount of confusion, and clearing that up…