Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1088. Scripture in evangelism is not a set of proof texts we reach for after we have already made our own case. It is the message itself, and the power that makes the message land. I have shared the gospel in enough settings, from the pulpit to a hospital bedside, to know how tempting…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4106. Philip the evangelist is one of my favourite characters in the whole book of Acts, and I suspect he does not get nearly the attention he deserves. He was not one of the twelve apostles. He held no office higher than deacon, appointed in Acts 6 to wait on tables so the apostles…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4086. Spirit’s conviction of sin is one of the most significant realities in the whole business of evangelism, and the question of what it actually does inside a person when they hear the gospel deserves a careful answer. Does it genuinely open the possibility of a real response, or does it produce some kind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how we engage non-Christian friends around Scripture, and how we understand the Holy Spirit’s own work in a person’s life. Whether an unbeliever can understand the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4134. The power of the Holy Spirit in Acts 1:8 is Jesus’s last commission before His ascension, and it is often misread. We tend to hear “power” and imagine a dramatic experience – something intense, overwhelming, perhaps visually or emotionally spectacular. But the word Jesus uses (Greek: dunamis) means effective enabling capacity: the ability…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4188. Anyone who has preached for long comes to feel the weight of this question, because the work of the Spirit in preaching is the difference between words that only inform and words that actually save. I can prepare a sermon, choose my texts, order my arguments, and deliver them as clearly as I…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4198. We talk a great deal about famous missionaries and almost never about the fact that the Holy Spirit is the primary missionary of the church, and I am convinced that this single omission has done more to confuse our thinking about mission than any other. We picture mission as something the church does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04039. The relationship between the Spirit and unbelievers touches something basic about who the Holy Spirit is and what He came into the world to do. If His indwelling is the very mark of belonging to Jesus, as Romans 8:9 insists, does that mean the Spirit has no dealings at all with those who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04028 The work of the Spirit in evangelism is the most overlooked factor in the whole business of telling people about Jesus. We fret about our nerves, our lack of training, our awkward attempts to steer a conversation toward the gospel, and all the while we forget that the decisive worker in any conversion…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4017. What is resisting the Holy Spirit, and is it something a Christian can do? The phrase comes to us from a tense and dramatic moment in the book of Acts, and it carries a sharp edge. To understand resisting the Holy Spirit we have to watch where the Bible actually uses the language,…