Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11107 Biblical parenting is a phrase that has sold a great many books, most of which contain considerably more method than the Bible does. Scripture is not a manual on sleep training, screen time or how to handle a fifteen-year-old who has stopped speaking to you. What it gives instead is a small number…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11099 Should we expect persecution, or is that something that happens to Christians in other countries and other centuries? It is a fair question for a believer in Britain, where nobody is arresting us and the worst most of us face is an awkward silence in the staff room. Yet the New Testament speaks…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11072 Christian parents are the first theologians their children will ever meet, and most of us only realise it long after the lessons have started. Every answer given at bedtime, every reaction to bad news, every explanation of why we are going to church again this Sunday is doctrine being taught, whether we intended…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11041. When Jesus said we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, he added a word that was not in the original commandment, and it is worth asking why. Deuteronomy 6:5 says heart, soul and might. In Mark 12:30 Jesus says heart, soul, mind and strength. The mind is…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11024. Being a disciple is not a rank within Christianity; it is what a Christian is. The New Testament uses the word for the whole company of believers, and it carries a meaning our English ‘follower’ has largely lost. So what does it actually mean, day by day, in a life with a job,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11023. The Great Commission is the standing order Jesus gave His followers between the resurrection and the ascension, recorded most fully at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. It is quoted constantly and examined rather less often. So let me take it apart slowly. What is actually commanded, to whom was it given, what authority…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11020. Jesus told His followers to make disciples, and the church has spent two thousand years discovering how easy it is to do something else instead. We gather crowds, run courses, fill diaries, and quietly hope that formation happens somewhere in the middle. So this is a practical answer to a practical question. What…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11019. Christian discipleship has become a word we use for programmes: a course, a booklet, a six-week series for new believers. The New Testament uses it for something considerably larger, and considerably less optional. A disciple is a learner who follows a teacher in order to become like him. That is the whole idea,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11000. How should Christians pray? It is one of the first questions a new believer asks and one that mature believers never entirely stop asking. The disciples had watched Jesus pray and their request was not teach us about prayer but teach us to pray, which tells us something about where the difficulty actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11027. Biblical worship is far larger than the hour we spend singing on a Sunday morning, and that single misunderstanding has probably done more damage to the church’s worship than any argument over music ever has. When Scripture speaks about worship it reaches for words about bowing, serving, and giving God his due weight….