Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04114. The gift of faith is one of the nine gifts of the Spirit Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 12:8-10, and it is also one of the most misunderstood, largely because English uses the single word faith to translate several rather different biblical realities. Paul writes that to one is given faith by the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11128. Praying for enemies is not offered in Scripture as an optional spiritual extra reserved for the unusually mature Christian, it is a direct command from Jesus Himself: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44). I want to be honest that this is one of the hardest instructions in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11127. Praying Scripture simply means taking a passage of the Bible and turning its own words into your own prayer to God, rather than composing every prayer entirely from your own vocabulary and immediate concerns. It sounds almost too simple to need explaining, and yet I find that most Christians who actually try praying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11126. A prayer list is nothing more than a written record of the people and situations you intend to pray for, and I want to say plainly at the outset that Scripture never commands you to keep one. It is a practical tool, not a spiritual discipline in its own right, which means the…
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 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: 6 minutesQuestion 11123. prayer for healing belongs at the heart of ordinary Christian life, not at the fringes of it, and I want to say that plainly because some believers, wary of the excesses they have seen in certain corners of the charismatic movement, quietly stop asking God for physical healing altogether. Scripture never gives us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2061. I hear this question often, sometimes gently and sometimes with real frustration: why does God seem so different in the Old Testament, commanding conquest and judgment, compared to the New Testament, where Jesus speaks of love and mercy? The honest answer begins with God’s unchanging character, because the God of the Old Testament…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2007. Genesis 2:2-3 tells me that God finished His work of creation and rested on the seventh day, and that simple statement about seventh day rest raises an obvious question the moment I stop to think about it, one that catches most thoughtful readers sooner or later. God does not get tired. He does…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 11120. Raising hands in worship is one of those things that can make an otherwise unremarkable Sunday morning feel suddenly loaded, because the moment someone’s arms go up in a congregation that does not usually do that, half the room is thinking about God and the other half is thinking about the person with…