Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4062 The cessationist and continuationist debate turns, at its heart, on a single exegetical decision: are prophecy and Scripture the same category of thing? If they are, then genuine prophecy today would mean adding to the Word of God — an obvious impossibility given that the canon is closed. But if prophecy and Scripture…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4063 Paul identifies three conditions for Spirit-filled living in Ephesians 4 and 5, and 1 Thessalonians 5: do not grieve the Spirit, do not quench the Spirit, walk by the Spirit. They are simple to list and genuinely demanding to live. Understanding why each one matters — and where each one is most likely…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4068 The gift of healings is listed plainly in 1 Corinthians 12:9 and 28, and the New Testament account of its exercise in the early church is vivid and specific. Lame men walk. The blind see. Peter’s shadow falls across the sick, and they recover. Paul lays hands on the father of Publius on…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 9109 The church has always struggled to hold two things together: genuine openness to the Spirit’s ongoing work in equipping believers with gifts, and the biblical insistence on order, intelligibility, and discernment in corporate worship. The history of charismatic Christianity is littered with the wreckage of communities that lost the second whilst pursuing the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4066 Someone approaches you after a church meeting, or perhaps contacts you privately, with a message they believe is from God for your life. They may have used the language of prophecy, or they may have phrased it more tentatively as something they felt they should share with you. How do you respond? The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10109 How does a believer grow in holiness? The question sounds simple and turns out to be one of the most contested in Christian thought. On one side stands the quietist: “Let go and let God” — spiritual growth is entirely His work, and the believer’s task is to get out of the way….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04117 If you have spent any time in charismatic circles you will almost certainly have encountered the idea that God has been moving in successive waves of the Spirit across the twentieth century, each building on the last and preparing the church for what comes next. The language of a “Third Wave” of the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4065 Every believer in Christ has received at least one spiritual gift. This is not an aspiration or a target to aim for — it is a statement of fact grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 04118 The word “impartation” has become so standard in charismatic vocabulary that many Christians use it without pausing to ask whether it describes something the Bible actually teaches. The idea is deceptively simple: that a spiritual gift, anointing, or measure of the Spirit’s power can be transferred from one person to another through the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04119 When Paul writes to the Ephesian believers that they were “sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13), he reaches for language drawn from the commercial and legal world of his day. A seal was not decorative. It was a mark of ownership that identified what belonged to whom, and a binding guarantee…