Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4104. walking in Spirit is commanded throughout the New Testament precisely because having the Spirit and yielding to the Spirit are two different things, and the gap between them is where most of ordinary Christian struggle actually lives. Every believer already possesses the Spirit permanently from the moment of conversion. Not every believer, on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4098. The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of virtues, a framework every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would instantly have recognised from Aristotle and the Stoics. He could have described the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4141. Receiving the Spirit by faith is the very first argument Paul reaches for when he wants to correct the Galatian churches, and he reaches for it because it settles the whole controversy in one stroke. “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4009. The fruit of the Spirit is Paul’s lovely picture of the character that God grows in a believer’s life, and it is found in Galatians 5 where he lists love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It is one of the best loved passages in the New Testament, and also…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11088 For many things in Christian life, this question has a straightforward answer: Scripture names them, and that settles it. But there is a genuine and growing category of situations, particularly in contemporary life, where the specific action is not mentioned in the Bible and where Christians may hold quite different views. How do…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 12031 The Bible does not mention gambling by name. There is no verse that says, “You shall not place a bet.” This absence has led some to argue that gambling is a matter of personal freedom, while others recognise that Scripture’s silence on the specific activity does not mean silence on the principles involved….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has often failed its own people. Whether through ignorance, fear, or a misguided belief that all psychological suffering is fundamentally spiritual in origin, many believers have been left without the help they need. A biblical view of mental illness must take seriously both…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 12064 Few phrases have generated as much heat in contemporary Christian conversation as “love the sinner, hate the sin.” It is often attributed to Augustine, though the precise formulation is closer to a paraphrase than a direct quotation. It has become a shorthand for the Christian attempt to navigate between two extremes: unconditional approval…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 12001 Every day, often without thinking about it, we make decisions that carry moral weight. Some are small and others are life-altering, but all of them reveal something about what we believe, what we value, and whom we ultimately serve. The question of how Christians make moral decisions is not academic. It is one…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11024 The word “Christian” appears only three times in the New Testament. The word “disciple” appears over 260 times. That difference in frequency tells us something important about how the early church understood what it meant to follow Jesus. Being a disciple is not a higher level of commitment available to the especially serious….