Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4010. The fruit of the Spirit is one of those phrases I hear quoted so easily that we rarely stop and ask what it actually promises about the Christian life. People treat it like a personality test, as though one believer were issued patience while another got kindness and a third somehow missed out…
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: 6 minutesQuestion 4008. The guidance of the Spirit is one of the dearest privileges of the Christian life, and also one of the most misunderstood. Many believers picture it as a mysterious inner sat-nav that, if only they could tune in finely enough, would dictate every decision from which job to take to which cereal to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4007. The still small voice is one of those phrases that has wandered a long way from its home, and I want to walk it back. People use it to mean the gentle inner nudge of God in the quiet of prayer, and they build a whole approach to guidance on it. The phrase…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4006. The Spirit’s voice is something believers ask me about constantly, usually after someone has told them that God spoke to them in an audible voice and they are wondering why it has never happened to them. So does the Spirit speak audibly today? Very rarely, if at all, in the way people mean,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4005. Giving glory to the Spirit is something many believers feel oddly uncertain about, and the question deserves a straight answer. We sing freely to the Father and to the Son, yet when it comes to the third Person of the Trinity a strange shyness sets in, as though praising Him might somehow be…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4004. Can we really grieve the Spirit? Ephesians 4:30 says we can, and it is a command both sobering and, when you stop to think about it, quite remarkable: ‘And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.’ That the Spirit of God can…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4003. Being filled with the Spirit is one of those phrases that gets pulled in two opposite directions, and I think both of them miss it. Some treat it as a rare, elusive state reserved for the spiritual elite, and others treat it as a synonym for emotional intensity in worship, as though the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4002. When do we receive the Holy Spirit? I want to answer that we receive the Holy Spirit at the moment of saving faith, fully and permanently, and not at some later crisis that divides Christians into the haves and the have-nots. That is the short answer, and I am convinced it is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4001. The person of the Spirit is the first thing I want settled when anyone asks me who the Holy Spirit really is, because almost every mistake people make in this area flows from getting that one point wrong. Is the Spirit a Person, or is He a force? Is He someone I relate…