Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4134 The power of the Spirit promised in Acts 1:8 is the engine of the whole book of Acts and of the mission of the church ever since. As Jesus prepares to leave His disciples, He gives them a final promise: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4135 The promise of rivers of living water comes from John 7:38-39, where the Lord Jesus, standing in the temple on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, cried out, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4134 The power of the Spirit promised in Acts 1:8 is the empowering for witness that the risen Lord pledged to his disciples just before he ascended. He told them, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4148 The image of the Spirit as fire reaches its high point at Pentecost, when tongues as of fire rested on each of the gathered believers and the church was born in power. To grasp why the Spirit as fire is so fitting a symbol, we have to follow the thread of fire through…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4130 What Joel 2:28-29 says about the Spirit in Joel is one of the great prophetic promises of the Old Testament, that God will one day pour out his Spirit on all flesh, so that sons and daughters will prophesy, old men will dream dreams, young men will see visions, and even male and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04030 When people ask about the Spirit’s work in the Old Testament compared with the New, they often assume the Holy Spirit was absent before Pentecost and only arrived when the church was born. That is not the case. The Spirit’s work runs from the first verses of Genesis to the last pages of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09043 The question of when the church began is not a matter of historical curiosity but a question with significant theological consequences. The answer determines how we understand the church’s relationship to Israel, the nature of the church itself, and the way we read large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. The…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 4105 When Philip the evangelist preached Christ in Samaria, the response was extraordinary. People believed, were baptised, and the city was filled with great joy (Acts 8:8). Yet something unusual happened — or rather, something unusual did not happen. The Holy Spirit had not yet fallen on any of them (Acts 8:16). They had…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04108 Acts records four distinct episodes in which the Spirit’s coming upon a group of people is described with enough detail to note the circumstances and sequence. These episodes are not evenly distributed through the book; they cluster at moments of significant transition in the gospel’s outward movement. And they are not uniform. Each…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04123 Few topics in modern church life generate as much confusion, controversy, and pastoral difficulty as the question of speaking in tongues. For some believers, tongues is the defining mark of spiritual vitality, the indispensable evidence of the Spirit’s fullness. For others, it belongs entirely to the apostolic era and has no place in…