Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04045. To call your body the Spirit’s temple is one of the most startling things the New Testament says about you, and Paul says it without flinching in 1 Corinthians 6:19: do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? That a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4021. How does the Spirit sanctifies us? I love the question because the answer takes us straight to the heart of how God changes a person. To say that the Spirit sanctifies us is to say that holiness is not something I wring out of myself by gritted teeth and willpower, but something God…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and wonders if they still apply. The short answer is that the Christian is not bound to obey the Levitical law, because it was part of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10153 The phrase “the blessed hope” has become so familiar in Christian vocabulary that it can lose its force through sheer repetition. But when Paul used it in his letter to Titus, he was describing something specific, something that was meant to shape the way believers live in the present. The blessed hope is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09055 Church discipline is one of the most neglected functions of the modern church. Many congregations have never practised it. Many pastors have never been trained in it. And many believers would be horrified at the suggestion that a church has the right and the responsibility to confront sin in its members and, if…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09056 Excommunication is the strongest measure the church possesses, and it is one that fills most modern Christians with deep discomfort. The word itself sounds medieval and punitive, conjuring images of papal edicts and political power plays. But the biblical practice is neither medieval nor primarily punitive. It is the final step in a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09047 Not every organisation that calls itself a church is one. The New Testament presents a picture of the church that has specific characteristics, specific commitments, and specific functions, and throughout history Christians have recognised that certain features mark the difference between a genuine church and something that has adopted the name without the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08116 Cherubim and seraphim are among the most striking and least understood figures in the biblical narrative. They appear at some of the most dramatic moments in Scripture, from the guarding of Eden to the throne room of God in Isaiah’s vision. Yet they are often confused with one another, blended into a generic…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07015 Sanctification is what God does in the believer after conversion. If justification answers the question of the believer’s standing before God, sanctification answers the question of their state, the actual moral and spiritual condition of their inner life. The two must be carefully distinguished; confusing them is the source of considerable theological muddle…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1116 Few passages in Scripture trouble modern readers more than God’s commands to Israel to destroy the Canaanite nations. When God instructs Joshua, “You shall devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them” (Deuteronomy 7:2), we face what appears to be divinely mandated genocide….