Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11134. Reading the Bible for the first time can feel overwhelming, and I say that as someone who has walked more than a few nervous new believers through exactly this question. Sixty-six books, two testaments, unfamiliar names, and a shelf of different translations to choose between before you have even opened the cover. Where…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11132. Study Bible reading and devotional reading are not competitors, though the way some people talk about them you would think you had to pick a side for life and defend it against the other camp. I hold both together, and I want to show you why that combination, rather than either one alone,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11131. Devotional Bible reading gets a bad name in some circles, as if reading Scripture for nourishment rather than for analysis is somehow the lightweight cousin of proper study, the spiritual equivalent of skimming instead of really working. I want to push back on that a little. Devotional Bible reading, done well, is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11130. Scripture memorisation is one of those spiritual disciplines that almost every believer agrees is valuable and almost no believer actually practises with any real consistency, myself included in seasons of my own ministry when other demands crowded it out. I want to make a case for why Scripture memorisation deserves a genuine place…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11129. The Lord’s Prayer is probably the single most recited passage in the whole Bible, spoken in churches, schools and homes across the world every single week, and yet I have met a great many believers who could recite it perfectly without ever having stopped to ask what Jesus was actually teaching us to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11128. Praying for enemies is not offered in Scripture as an optional spiritual extra reserved for the unusually mature Christian, it is a direct command from Jesus Himself: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44). I want to be honest that this is one of the hardest instructions in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11126. A prayer list is nothing more than a written record of the people and situations you intend to pray for, and I want to say plainly at the outset that Scripture never commands you to keep one. It is a practical tool, not a spiritual discipline in its own right, which means the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11125. Intercessory prayer is simply prayer offered on behalf of someone else rather than for yourself, and I have come to believe it is one of the most underrated disciplines in ordinary Christian life. We tend to think of prayer as a private conversation about our own needs, and it certainly includes that. But…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11124. hands in prayer, laying them gently on someone you are praying for, is a thoroughly biblical practice, not a charismatic innovation to be viewed with suspicion, though it is worth understanding what the gesture actually does and does not accomplish before you use it. Scripture records believers laying hands on the sick, on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11123. prayer for healing belongs at the heart of ordinary Christian life, not at the fringes of it, and I want to say that plainly because some believers, wary of the excesses they have seen in certain corners of the charismatic movement, quietly stop asking God for physical healing altogether. Scripture never gives us…