Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10053. The Holy Spirit is deeply and actively at work all through the end times, restraining evil, drawing sinners to Christ, and empowering bold witness right up to the return of the King. People often imagine that Bible prophecy is really all about the Antichrist and the beast and the various judgements, and so…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4104. walking in Spirit is commanded throughout the New Testament precisely because having the Spirit and yielding to the Spirit are two different things, and the gap between them is where most of ordinary Christian struggle actually lives. Every believer already possesses the Spirit permanently from the moment of conversion. Not every believer, on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4096. I get asked fairly often whether the fruit of Spirit in Galatians 5 and the character Jesus describes in the Beatitudes are really describing the same thing, and my answer is yes, with one qualification worth unpacking. Paul is describing what the Spirit produces in a believer from the inside out. Jesus is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4083. Spiritual dryness is one of the most disorienting experiences a Christian can go through, the sense that yesterday’s warmth in prayer has gone cold overnight and nothing you do brings it back. The instinct to read that dryness as proof you have grieved the Holy Spirit is understandable, and sometimes it is exactly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04200. Conviction of sin is the doorway every one of us has to walk through before the gospel can mean anything at all, because good news only sounds like good news to someone who already knows they need it. Nobody arrives at that awareness by clever argument alone, and nobody talks themselves into it…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 04123. Speaking in tongues today divides opinion in the church perhaps more sharply than any other single spiritual gift, and I want to give this question the space a Deep Dive allows, because both the Pentecostal insistence that tongues is the necessary initial evidence of Spirit baptism and the cessationist claim that tongues ended…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04121. Laying on hands for the sick is one of those practices that can provoke suspicion in one congregation and warm expectation in another, and I think both reactions usually owe more to cultural memory than to careful exegesis. Before we let televangelist excess on one side, or stiff cessationist caution on the other,…
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: 6 minutesQuestion 4111. Water baptism does not sit in the same fixed relationship to the Holy Spirit’s coming everywhere we look in Acts, and that surprises people the first time they notice it. Sometimes the Spirit falls before water baptism, sometimes after, and once, through the laying on of apostolic hands, considerably after. If you try…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4109. Sign gifts are often assumed, even by thoughtful Christians, to have belonged exclusively to the twelve apostles, as a kind of one-off credential to authenticate their unique office. Philip’s ministry in Samaria makes that assumption very hard to sustain. Luke tells us plainly that unclean spirits came out of many who were possessed,…