Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11125. Intercessory prayer is simply prayer offered on behalf of someone else rather than for yourself, and I have come to believe it is one of the most underrated disciplines in ordinary Christian life. We tend to think of prayer as a private conversation about our own needs, and it certainly includes that. But…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11052. Intercessory prayer is simply praying for somebody who is not you. That definition sounds almost disappointingly plain, and yet the practice behind it runs through Scripture from Abraham on the road to Sodom right up to Jesus at the right hand of the Father. It is one of the most ordinary things a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7107 To be seated at the right hand of God is the New Testament’s favourite way of describing where Jesus is now, and it is quoted or alluded to more than twenty times. Peter uses it at Pentecost, Stephen sees it as he dies, Paul builds on it, and the writer to the Hebrews…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3041. The ascension of Jesus is the forgotten doctrine of the Christian faith. We celebrate the incarnation at Christmas and the resurrection at Easter, but Ascension Day passes most evangelical churches without a mention. Yet Luke thought it important enough to record twice, and Jesus told His disciples plainly that His leaving was not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3022. Jesus is not idle in heaven, and His heavenly intercession for believers is only one part, though the most frequently mentioned part, of an active present ministry that Scripture describes in surprising detail. He ascended, but He did not retire. Let me set out the main things the Bible tells us He is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4139. The groaning of the Spirit in Romans 8:26 is Paul’s description of the Holy Spirit interceding for us with what he calls “groanings too deep for words”, at exactly the point where our own prayers have run dry. I have stood at enough hospital bedsides and sat with enough grieving families 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: 9 minutesQuestion 03047 To say that Jesus is our High Priest is to say that He is the one who represents us before God and brings God to us, the mediator who deals with our sin and keeps us in fellowship with the Father. The title High Priest runs all through the letter to the Hebrews,…