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 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: 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: 6 minutesQuestion 16. To detect false teaching is a skill every believer needs, and not only the pastors and scholars among us. Jesus warned that false prophets would come in sheep’s clothing, and the apostles return to the theme again and again, which tells me this is ordinary equipment for ordinary Christians, not a speciality for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13. Itching ears is one of Paul’s most quietly devastating phrases, and it describes a danger that is more alive today than ever. Writing his final letter to Timothy, he warns that ‘the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4006. The Spirit’s voice is something believers ask me about constantly, usually after someone has told them that God spoke to them in an audible voice and they are wondering why it has never happened to them. So does the Spirit speak audibly today? Very rarely, if at all, in the way people mean,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9. Doctrinal disagreement is not the end of fellowship, and I want to say that clearly at the outset because so many believers fear that it is. They imagine that to stay in true fellowship everyone must think identically about everything, and so they either paper over real differences or break off from anyone…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7. Learning to tell primary truths from secondary doctrines is one of the most useful skills a Christian can develop, and the lack of it has wrecked more friendships and split more churches than I care to count. Some believers treat every conviction they hold as a hill to die on. Others treat nothing…
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…