Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0027. Few questions expose the fault lines in the modern church as quickly as whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement. On one side stand those who say doctrine divides while love unites, so we should keep doctrine to a minimum for the sake of getting along. On the other stand those who treat…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of all to the apostles’ teaching. Three thousand people had been baptised in a single day. A small band of disciples had become a movement overnight….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0024. The noble Bereans have become a byword in Christian circles for careful discernment, and rightly so. Whenever someone urges us to check a teaching against the Bible rather than swallowing it whole, the noble Bereans get a mention. But it is worth asking what they actually did, and why Luke thought it worth…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04024. Few aspects of the Spirit’s ministry are as misunderstood as the conviction of sin. In common Christian speech it has shrunk to a vague feeling of spiritual unease, something close to guilt with the lights off. But the way Jesus describes conviction of sin in John 16 is far more specific and far…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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. Am I being led by the Spirit here, or am I following my own appetite and dressing it up as the will of God? That…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 will not gratify the desires of the flesh” is a precise instruction with real content, and it shapes the whole texture of ordinary Christian living….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 come from the same Spirit, and yet they are doing two very different things, and when we blur them we start measuring one another by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 19. Why are so many Christians still spiritual infants after years of faith? It troubles me, and I suspect it troubles you, that so many believers remain spiritual infants long after they should have grown up. They have been in church for a decade or more, they love the Lord in their way, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 vague. He gives us a working definition, a sober warning, and a clear path forward, all in a few verses. If you have ever wondered…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 in conduct trace back, sooner or later, to a failure in what we actually believe about God. That sounds like a bold claim, so let…