Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4049. The gift of tongues has caused more heat and less light than almost any subject I deal with as a minister. In some circles it is treated as the badge that proves a person has truly received the Holy Spirit. In others it is written off entirely as a first century oddity that…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4048. The gift of prophecy is one of the most discussed and most misunderstood of all the gifts the Spirit gives to the church, and I want to take my time with it. Some believers treat every passing impression as a word from the Lord, while others are convinced that genuine prophecy stopped dead…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 04047. The variety of spiritual gifts in the New Testament is wider and richer than most believers realise, and learning what Scripture actually lists is one of the most freeing studies a Christian can undertake. When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:7 that to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04046. When Paul calls the Spirit’s guarantee a deposit on our inheritance, he reaches for a word straight out of the ancient marketplace, and once you see what it meant, something genuinely wonderful opens up. He uses it three times. In 2 Corinthians 1:22 God has put His Spirit in our hearts as a…
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 04044. Becoming more sensitive to the Spirit’s leading is something many believers long for and few feel they have grasped. The phrase itself can sound mystical, as though some Christians possess a spiritual sixth sense the rest of us lack, and I want to take the mystery out of it without taking away the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04042. Paul tells us not to grieve the Spirit, and I have noticed over the years that most believers nod at that instruction without ever asking what it actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The command sits in Ephesians 4:30, tucked into a passage about how we speak to one another and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 04041. Few questions unsettle a tender conscience like falling away, and few passages of Scripture stir more argument than Hebrews 6:4-6. There the writer describes people who were once enlightened, who tasted the heavenly gift, who shared in the Holy Spirit, and who tasted the goodness of the word of God, and yet fell…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04040. The work of the Spirit in regeneration is the hidden hinge on which the whole of conversion turns. Behind every genuine coming to Jesus there lies a deeper miracle that no preacher can perform and no sinner can manufacture for himself, the giving of new life to a soul that was spiritually dead….
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…