Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04120. The Spirit’s illuminating work inside a believer and His convicting work upon an unbeliever are close cousins in Scripture, yet they are not the same ministry, and mixing them up has left more than one Christian either doubting a salvation that is perfectly secure or misreading how God deals with people who do…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1028. The Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with a passage I have read a dozen times before, and suddenly it is not the same passage any more. Nothing has changed on the page,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4128. The phrase “unction of the Holy One” appears in the King James Version of 1 John 2:20 (“But ye have an unction from the Holy One”), and it is a phrase that has lodged itself in Christian consciousness in a way that more modern translations of the same verse – “you have been…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4137. Three times in the farewell discourse of Jesus, recorded in John 14-16, the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of truth.” The first occurrence is in John 14:17, the second in 15:26, and the third in 16:13. Each appearance of the title adds something specific to our understanding of why this title belongs…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4189. There is a world of difference between reading the Bible and meeting God in it, and that difference is the whole point when we ask how the Spirit makes Scripture come alive during devotional reading. You can sit down with the same chapter on two mornings running. One day the words lie flat…
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 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The reasoning sounds spiritual. If the Spirit teaches me, why bury my nose in books and arguments? Why not simply trust him to guide me into…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01148 One of the most practically significant questions in contemporary Christianity concerns the difference between the Holy Spirit opening a person’s mind to understand what Scripture already says, and the claim that the Spirit provides fresh revelation that goes beyond or supplements the biblical text. Getting this distinction right matters enormously for how Christians…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01149 There is a beautiful coherence to the doctrine of Scripture that is sometimes missed in debates about inspiration and interpretation. The same Holy Spirit who oversaw the production of the biblical text is the Spirit who opens the minds of believers to receive it. The Spirit who breathed out the words is the…