Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4003. Being filled with the Spirit is one of those phrases that gets pulled in two opposite directions, and I think both of them miss it. Some treat it as a rare, elusive state reserved for the spiritual elite, and others treat it as a synonym for emotional intensity in worship, as though the…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 0046. The phrase itching ears comes from one of the most honest descriptions of human nature in all of Scripture, and Paul saw it coming with painful accuracy. People would gather teachers to suit their itching ears, choosing voices that scratched the spot rather than told the truth. “The time is coming,” he wrote,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0041. When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value feelings above truth. It happens by a slow shift of weight, where the test of whether something is right gradually moves from what God has…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The reasoning sounds spiritual. If the Spirit teaches me, why bury my nose in books and arguments? Why not simply trust him to guide me into…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4185. I want to write about the Spirit in depression with great care, because this is a subject where careless words from a pulpit have wounded many sincere believers. Depression is not the same as ordinary sadness that lifts after a good night’s sleep. It is a heavy, often prolonged darkness of mind and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, because the answer shapes how we read more than half of our Bibles. The short reply is that the believer is not under the Mosaic…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion12013 Few pastoral questions arise with more emotional weight than what to do with the body of a loved one who has died. For centuries, burial was the standard Christian practice, and many believers today feel instinctively that cremation is wrong. Others see no issue with it at all. The question touches on deeply held…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11088 For many things in Christian life, this question has a straightforward answer: Scripture names them, and that settles it. But there is a genuine and growing category of situations, particularly in contemporary life, where the specific action is not mentioned in the Bible and where Christians may hold quite different views. How do…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11009 Work is not a consequence of the fall. It is one of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of the biblical story, because many people assume that labour is a curse imposed on humanity after Genesis 3. In fact, God gave Adam meaningful work before sin entered the picture, and Scripture treats honest work…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11008 Few pastoral questions carry more emotional weight than the question of remarriage after divorce. Churches have sometimes handled this issue with a harshness that compounds the pain of broken marriages, and at other times with a permissiveness that ignores what Scripture actually teaches. The Bible does not leave us without direction on this…