Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60024. The New Testament assumes that false teachers will come. Jesus warned about them, Paul warned the Ephesian elders that they would arise from among their own number, and Peter, John and Jude each devote substantial space to the problem. The question is never whether they exist. It is how ordinary believers, without a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60023. Televised faith healers have produced a recognisable style: the platform, the word of knowledge about a condition somewhere in the auditorium, the hand on the forehead, the person falling backwards, the announcement of a miracle, and then the appeal for a gift of faith. Millions watch. Many send money they cannot spare. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60018. Ask ten people what makes a group a cult and you will get ten answers, most of them about atmosphere rather than substance. It is small. It is intense. It is odd. It made my cousin move to Wales. Used that loosely the word becomes a way of saying that I find a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11040. The claim that you can activate your healing by speaking God’s Word over your body is one of the most widely taught and most damaging errors circulating in the church today, and it needs answering carefully rather than dismissively. It needs care because the people who teach it use Bible verses, and the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08100 The way the enemy attacks churches tells you a great deal about what he fears, and it is rarely what we expect. In my experience he is far less interested in dramatic assault than in the slow, respectable erosion that nobody notices until a congregation looks round and wonders where the life went….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 8046. Paul says it directly: Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. It comes in the middle of a painful passage where he is defending his ministry against men who had arrived in Corinth with better manners, better rhetoric and a different gospel, and it explains how they had got a hearing at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8038. Lying spirits are not an occasional tactic of the enemy but the whole shape of his operation. Jesus said of the devil that when he lies he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Everything else he does runs downstream of that. Scripture uses…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6022. Paul warns Timothy about teachers with a seared conscience, and the image he chooses is a surgical one. He is describing a moral sense that has been burned until the nerve endings no longer report anything at all. It is one of the bleakest phrases in the New Testament, and it is worth…
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: 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…