Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2008. People ask me constantly whether God speaks today, and I understand why the question keeps surfacing. Cessationists tell us God speaks only through the closed pages of Scripture now. Some charismatic circles talk as though a fresh word, vision or impression carries the same weight as the Bible itself. Neither extreme is where…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 04123. Speaking in tongues today divides opinion in the church perhaps more sharply than any other single spiritual gift, and I want to give this question the space a Deep Dive allows, because both the Pentecostal insistence that tongues is the necessary initial evidence of Spirit baptism and the cessationist claim that tongues ended…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 04116. Whether spiritual gifts today remain a genuine part of the church’s life is one of the most practically consequential questions in modern evangelicalism, because the answer shapes what happens on a Sunday morning, how a church trains its members, and how it responds when someone claims to have prophesied or been healed. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04113. Whether God still does miracles today is a question I get asked more often than almost any other, usually by someone who has either just watched a television healing programme with deep suspicion or just heard a testimony from a friend that they cannot quite explain away. My answer is a careful yes,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4068. The gift of healing has not ceased, but it has also never operated the way the New Testament describes at every point in church history since Pentecost, and those two statements are not actually in tension once the New Testament’s own pattern is examined closely. Even within the pages of Acts, healing clusters…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4056. Few questions in contemporary church life generate more confusion, and in some quarters more dangerous claims, than whether apostles and prophets still function today with the same authority they carried in the first century. The rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, with its confident assertion that God is restoring apostles and prophets to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4055. The word of wisdom is easy to confuse with wisdom in the broad biblical sense, the kind James promises every believer may ask God for in James 1:5, but Paul has something more specific in mind when he lists it as a distinct gift in 1 Corinthians 12:8. Getting the distinction right matters…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4054. The word of knowledge appears exactly once in Paul’s list of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, and that single appearance has carried an enormous amount of theological weight ever since, not least because charismatic ministry has attached a very specific meaning to it that may or may not reflect what Paul had in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4053. I get asked about the gifts of the Spirit more than almost any other subject in pastoral ministry, and the gift of discernment of spirits sits near the top of the list of things people misunderstand. Some picture it as a kind of spiritual x-ray vision, a superpower for spotting demons in a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4052. The gift of miracles tends to be handled in one of two unhappy ways. Either it is inflated into something sensational, a kind of spiritual circus act, or it is quietly ignored in churches that feel awkward about anything they cannot tidily explain. Neither response does justice to what the New Testament plainly…