Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11124. hands in prayer, laying them gently on someone you are praying for, is a thoroughly biblical practice, not a charismatic innovation to be viewed with suspicion, though it is worth understanding what the gesture actually does and does not accomplish before you use it. Scripture records believers laying hands on the sick, on…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 04118. Spiritual impartation is the phrase charismatic circles use so often that many Christians employ it without ever pausing to ask whether it describes something the Bible actually teaches. The idea, in its simplest form, is that a spiritual gift, an anointing, or a measure of the Spirit’s power can be transferred from one…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4105. laying on hands by the apostles, rather than the moment of their belief, is what Luke tells us the Samaritans in Acts 8 were actually waiting for before they received the Holy Spirit, and the gap between believing and receiving has puzzled careful readers for as long as the passage has been studied….
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4175. Can a believer today receive a spiritual gift through the laying on of hands, the way Timothy seems to have received something through Paul’s hands? This is a genuinely contested question, and I want to handle it with care, because there are sincere believers on more than one side and the texts themselves…