Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 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 who were told that their illness was evidence of unrepented sin, and I have watched what that does to a person who is already at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 loud and command it to shift. Debt, illness, a difficult employer, all of these get labelled mountains and are duly spoken to with varying degrees…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 verses to one another. The instruction not to be afraid appears again and again, and it is almost always accompanied by a reason rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 that anger must therefore be its opposite. Many believers carry a low grade guilt about an emotion they cannot switch off. Scripture takes a different…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son (John 14:13). Read on its own, that sentence sounds like a blank cheque…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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? An hour? Is there a figure that would settle the matter and let me stop worrying about it? I understand why people want a number….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 Scripture would not sanction. The fear is reasonable. There is a great deal of nonsense about, and some of it is loud. But the answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 me which Bible reading plan they should use when what they really want to know is why the last three collapsed by the middle of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 discipline. There is simply a slow flattening, a sense that prayer has become mechanical and Scripture has gone grey. I get asked how a believer…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 to be arrogant, and the humble believer is assumed to be vague. I have met both caricatures in the flesh, and I have also met…