Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 14. Spiritual discernment is what allows a believer to tell true teaching from false, and it does not arrive automatically the moment someone trusts Christ. Scripture treats it as a capacity that grows through use, deliberately trained by exposure to sound doctrine and honest practice at telling the difference between what is genuinely from…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60023 Christian television has produced a particular kind of ministry figure: the faith healer who calls words of knowledge from the platform, lays hands on people who fall backwards, announces dramatic healings, and encourages large financial donations as an act of faith. Millions of people watch these programmes. Some are ill and desperately hopeful….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4158. The Lakeland Outpouring was a series of nightly meetings held in Lakeland, Florida, in 2008, led by a travelling evangelist and broadcast widely over Christian television and the internet. For a few months it gathered large crowds and attracted enormous attention before collapsing amid scandal almost as quickly as it had risen. Of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0031 Sound doctrine works in the soul rather like a spiritual immune system works in the body, and once you see the picture you cannot unsee it. Your body is surrounded every day by bacteria and viruses that could destroy it, and the only reason you are not constantly ill is that an unseen…
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 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: 9 minutesQuestion 15. Progressive Christianity is a movement many believers have heard named but few could define clearly, and that vagueness is part of what makes it so difficult to respond to. It presents itself as a kinder, more thoughtful, more inclusive version of the faith, a Christianity finally grown up and freed from embarrassing old…
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 12. False doctrine spreads like gangrene. That is not my phrase but Paul’s, and it is one of the most arresting medical images in all his letters. Writing to Timothy about a pair of false teachers, he warns that ‘their talk will spread like gangrene’ (2 Timothy 2:17). It is a deliberately ugly comparison,…
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,…