Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4141. Receiving the Spirit by faith is the very first argument Paul reaches for when he wants to correct the Galatian churches, and he reaches for it because it settles the whole controversy in one stroke. “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4140. The Spirit of adoption is Paul’s name in Romans 8:15 for the Holy Spirit in His specific work of bringing us, as believers, into the felt reality of being God’s own children rather than His frightened servants. “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4139. The groaning of the Spirit in Romans 8:26 is Paul’s description of the Holy Spirit interceding for us with what he calls “groanings too deep for words”, at exactly the point where our own prayers have run dry. I have stood at enough hospital bedsides and sat with enough grieving families to know…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4150. The Spirit symbolised by oil is one of the oldest pictures in the Bible, and it carries a weight that is easy to miss if we only think of oil as something for cooking or for soothing dry skin. In the ancient world oil was the substance of consecration. When something was set…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4149. There is a reason the Spirit symbolised by wind runs all the way through the Bible, from the second verse of Genesis to the upper room at Pentecost, and it is no poetic accident. The biblical writers reach for wind because they are trying to describe something real about God that no tidy…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4158. The Lakeland Outpouring was a series of nightly meetings held in Lakeland, Florida, in 2008, led by a travelling evangelist and broadcast widely over Christian television and the internet. For a few months it gathered large crowds and attracted enormous attention before collapsing amid scandal almost as quickly as it had risen. Of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4157. The Brownsville Revival was a sustained season of intense meetings that began on Father’s Day in 1995 at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, and continued for several years. It drew enormous crowds, with people queuing for hours and travelling great distances, and it became one of the most talked-about religious events…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4155. This is one of the genuinely puzzling sayings of Jesus, and blasphemy against the Spirit seems at first to be ranked as worse than blasphemy against the Son himself. ‘Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven’ (Matthew…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4154. The fear of the unforgivable sin is one of the heaviest burdens I am ever asked to help carry, and it tends to settle on the most sensitive souls rather than the careless ones. People come convinced they have ruined themselves forever, replaying some thought or word and bracing for a verdict of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4153. Can a true Christian commit the unforgivable sin? I want to answer that plainly at the very start, because leaving it hanging only prolongs the fear: no, a genuine believer in Jesus cannot commit the unforgivable sin. That answer needs explaining and grounding, but I do not want anyone reading on in needless…