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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7095 Freedom from shame is one of the least advertised benefits of the doctrine of justification, and for many believers it is the one they need most. Guilt and shame are not the same thing, and a gospel presentation that deals only with guilt will leave a great many Christians still bowed under something…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7091 The question of assurance of salvation is one I am asked more often than almost any other, and it is usually asked by people who are already believers. That in itself is telling. The person living happily in unrepentant sin rarely loses sleep over whether they belong to God. It is the tender…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 7090 Few situations in pastoral work are as uncomfortable as sitting with someone who has come forward at three separate meetings, prayed the same prayer each time, and can point to no genuine change of any kind. They are not play-acting. The tears were real. The desire was real. And yet a year on,…