Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 it did not go well for them. Nadab and Abihu offered unauthorised fire. Uzzah steadied the ark with the best of intentions. Cain brought an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 Jesus pray and their request was not teach us about prayer but teach us to pray, which tells us something about where the difficulty actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 four seconds? I want to make the case that this is one of the habits worth recovering, and that the reasons for it are rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 than any argument over music ever has. When Scripture speaks about worship it reaches for words about bowing, serving, and giving God his due weight….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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. A leader is challenged about money, doctrine, or conduct, and someone stands up to warn the congregation that they are touching God’s anointed. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 the least visible part of Christian life and, I would argue, the part that shapes everything else. It also carries a good deal of guilt….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 service and want to know whether that counts, or they have stopped attending and would like to know whether the walk on Sunday morning will…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 the desk or the wheel or the checkout feel like the necessary cost of the parts of life that matter, and the parts that matter…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 believers as permanent second-class members. Others have waved the whole matter through as though Jesus had never spoken about it. I want to set out…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 of this, who has read the verses a hundred times at two in the morning, and who is frightened that God is against them as…