Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4093. Learning to discern Spirit’s leading from my own preferences, fears and appetites is, in my experience, one of the hardest and most necessary skills in the Christian life. It is not a question of doubt or weak faith. It is the honest recognition that I am a fallen man with complicated motives, entirely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4092. Elijah’s journey to Horeb is one of the most emotionally honest passages in the entire Old Testament, and I think that is exactly why so many believers find themselves drawn back to it. Here is a prophet who had just called down fire from heaven on Carmel, who had watched the prophets of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4089. I get asked about this more than almost anything else in pastoral conversation, so let me say plainly that guidance through dreams is something Scripture treats with real seriousness, without ever making it the normal channel for hearing from God. Dreams sit in an odd place in the Christian imagination. Some believers dismiss…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul’s letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as doctrinal exposition, and treating them as though they were straightforward propositional teaching misses much of what they were actually written to do. I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11113. lectio divina, Latin for divine reading, is an old monastic practice of slow, meditative Scripture reading that has found its way back into evangelical conversation in recent years, and the question raised is whether Christians should actually practise it. My answer is a careful yes, with real guardrails firmly in place, because the…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1044. Cultural and historical context is not an optional extra for serious Bible readers, it is the very air the text was written to breathe. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about head coverings, was he addressing a timeless principle or a local custom peculiar to that city? When Jesus told the rich young…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 1043. Eisegesis and exegesis sound like a pair of obscure Greek terms you could safely ignore, but the difference between them decides whether a sermon, a Bible study, or your own private reading actually hears God or simply hears an echo of your own opinions dressed up in religious language. Have you ever heard…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1030. The word of God makes some remarkable claims about itself, and I think the place to start is simply to listen to them before we start assessing them. That is not circular reasoning. It is the same courtesy you would extend to any significant witness in a courtroom, hearing the testimony in full…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1028. The Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with a passage I have read a dozen times before, and suddenly it is not the same passage any more. Nothing has changed on the page,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4087. Distinguishing spirit prompting from your own reasoning is one of the most practically pressing skills a Christian needs to develop, because the stakes of getting it wrong run in both directions. Claim the Spirit’s leading for what is really just personal preference dressed up in spiritual language, and you end up living by…