Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2069. God’s experience is not static in the way a statue is static, even though His character never shifts an inch. Scripture is full of language describing God rejoicing, grieving, being moved with compassion and, at least on the face of it, responding to what creatures do, and I do not think we should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2068. God’s silence is one of the hardest experiences a believer can walk through, that stretch of praying into what feels like an empty room when heaven simply does not answer. I have sat with people in that place, and I have been there myself, and I want to say plainly that this experience…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2020. What does Trinitarian prayer look like, and should we pray to the Father, to Jesus, or to the Holy Spirit? This question comes up more than you might expect, usually from newer believers who have noticed that different prayers offered in church seem to be addressed to different persons of the Trinity and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01156. Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one notorious case pronounce a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks (Psalm 137:9), sit awkwardly beside Jesus’s plain command to love our enemies…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy’s teeth, to let their children be orphaned, or to dash infants against rocks. Psalm 137 ends this way, and it sits in the same book that gives us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11118. Postures of prayer vary widely across Scripture, and that variety itself is instructive, because it tells us that God has not bound genuine prayer to a single required physical position. Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying face down, hands raised, eyes lifted or lowered, all of these appear in the biblical record, offered by faithful…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1091. Claiming verses is something I have watched sincere believers do in genuine faith, and something I have also watched leave people confused and hurt when the outcome they claimed never arrived. I understand the instinct. When life is hard, a promise like “I know the plans I have for you” feels like exactly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say this from experience as much as from study. There have been stretches of ministry where my Bible reading thinned out, and without my quite noticing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1087. Scripture in worship is not decoration set around the edges of a service. It is the very substance of what we say, sing and pray when a church gathers before the Lord. I have led enough services now to know how easy it is to let worship drift into a performance of moods…
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,…