Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4068. The gift of healing has not ceased, but it has also never operated the way the New Testament describes at every point in church history since Pentecost, and those two statements are not actually in tension once the New Testament’s own pattern is examined closely. Even within the pages of Acts, healing clusters…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4066. A prophetic word is never simply accepted on the strength of someone’s confidence in delivering it. Paul is explicit about this: when someone speaks a word of prophecy in the gathered church, others are to weigh what has been said, testing it rather than receiving it uncritically. That single instruction from 1 Corinthians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4065. Spiritual gifts are not an aspiration to work towards but a settled fact about every believer in Christ. That is a statement of what has already happened, grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament, not a target you have yet to reach. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4063. Spirit filled living is commanded, not simply commended as an optional extra, in Ephesians 5:18, and Paul does not leave the command floating vaguely in the abstract for believers to guess at. Read the verses that surround it and three concrete conditions emerge clearly, conditions any believer can act on today rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4062. The relationship between prophecy and Scripture is often assumed rather than genuinely examined, and the assumption usually runs in one of two mistaken directions, either treating every prophetic word as functionally equal to the Bible itself, or dismissing prophecy altogether simply because it is not Scripture. Paul gives us a considerably better way…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4061. Whether spiritual gifts today continue to operate the way they did in the first century turns, for a great many cessationist writers, on a single disputed phrase tucked inside 1 Corinthians 13:10, and I want to examine that phrase carefully rather than simply asserting a conclusion and moving on. Paul writes that when…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has produced entire movements built on the idea that some believers possess the Spirit more fully than others. I want to set the two side by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4059. The Holy Spirit’s deity is not a matter of theological hair splitting, because how you answer it shapes how you pray, how you read the New Testament, and how seriously you take the words Jesus Himself spoke against dishonouring Him. I have met sincere Christians who speak of the Spirit as a kind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how we engage non-Christian friends around Scripture, and how we understand the Holy Spirit’s own work in a person’s life. Whether an unbeliever can understand the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4071. When I am asked to compare the doctrine of the Spirit across the Reformed, charismatic and dispensational traditions, I always begin by reassuring people that the disagreements, real and important as they are, sit on top of a vast shared foundation. On the doctrine of the Spirit these three great families of Bible-believing…