Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11138. Should I have an accountability partner in my Christian life? I hear this question most often from believers who have just come through a season of moral failure, or who sense a particular temptation gaining ground in their life and want a genuine safeguard beyond simple willpower and private prayer alone. My short…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11137. Christian mentoring gets talked about a great deal in church circles these days, often in the same breath as discipleship, and I think that overlap causes more confusion than clarity for most believers wondering whether they actually need a mentor, a discipler, or simply a good friend who happens to be further along…
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: 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 60077. Peter tells us to be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in us, and I suspect that verse has produced more guilt in ordinary Christians than almost any other. We read it and picture a debate we would lose. But look at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60063. The assumption that faith and education pull in opposite directions is so widespread that it barely gets stated, it just hangs in the air. Get educated and you will grow out of religion. Stay religious and you will have to keep your head down in a seminar. I do not accept the framing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60001. Nobody teaches most of us how to defend the faith. We learn to pray, we learn to find Habakkuk without the contents page, and then one day a colleague says something about the Bible being edited by emperors and we discover we have nothing to say. Scripture is not vague about this. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13008. Church history has a reputation problem. It sounds like the sort of thing you take up once the children have left home and you have run out of hobbies, a matter of dates, councils and men in unlikely hats. I want to argue the opposite. Church history is the record of how Jesus…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12000 Christian ethics is the study of how followers of Jesus ought to live, and that sounds dull until you notice that almost every difficult decision you will make this year falls under it. What you do with your money, how you speak about an absent colleague, what you accept at work, how you…