Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04029 The role of the Spirit in worship is something I wish more congregations understood, because so much confusion about worship comes from forgetting it. We argue endlessly about styles, instruments, song choices and volume, as though worship were a matter of getting the externals right. Jesus cut straight past all of that in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04028 The work of the Spirit in evangelism is the most overlooked factor in the whole business of telling people about Jesus. We fret about our nerves, our lack of training, our awkward attempts to steer a conversation toward the gospel, and all the while we forget that the decisive worker in any conversion…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04027 The assurance of salvation is one of the sweetest gifts the Holy Spirit gives, and one of the most attacked. I have lost count of the believers who love the Lord yet lie awake wondering whether they are truly His. They are not careless people. They are tender consciences who long to know…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04026 When I think about the Spirit in prayer, I am always brought back to a verse that quietly demolishes a lot of false confidence about my own praying. Most of us assume that prayer is a skill we slowly master, like learning an instrument, so that the longer we walk with God the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04025. There is a real and felt difference between reading the Bible as a piece of ancient literature and reading it as the living word of God speaking into your actual situation, and that difference is the Spirit’s illumination at work. It is not chiefly a matter of intelligence or education. The most learned…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04024. Few aspects of the Spirit’s ministry are as misunderstood as the conviction of sin. In common Christian speech it has shrunk to a vague feeling of spiritual unease, something close to guilt with the lights off. But the way Jesus describes conviction of sin in John 16 is far more specific and far…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04023. Almost every honest believer eventually asks whether they are walking in the Spirit or the flesh, and means it as a real question and not a rhetorical one. Am I being led by the Spirit here, or am I following my own appetite and dressing it up as the will of God? That…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04022. When Paul tells us to walk by the Spirit in Galatians 5:16, he is not handing us a slogan or a mood. “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” is a precise instruction with real content, and it shapes the whole texture of ordinary Christian living….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04020. The difference between the fruit and gifts of the Spirit is one of those quiet distinctions that keeps a church honest about itself. Both the fruit and gifts come from the same Spirit, and yet they are doing two very different things, and when we blur them we start measuring one another by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4019. What is the difference between carnal and spiritual Christians? The contrast between carnal and spiritual believers comes straight out of Paul’s letter to a church that was behaving badly, and it describes a difference we can all recognise if we are honest. Both are real Christians. Both have the Spirit. The difference lies…