Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12060. Borrowing money is not always wrong, and the short answer to this question is no, though borrowing money carries warnings in Scripture that most Christians in Britain have never heard preached. We live in a country built on credit, and a teaching that never examines it has quietly surrendered a large part of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12058. Cohabiting before marriage is now the ordinary route into marriage in Britain, which means that when a couple starts attending church and someone eventually raises it, the conversation arrives with a great deal of embarrassment attached on both sides. I want to answer the doctrinal question honestly and then spend most of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12057. Is sex before marriage wrong? Yes, and I am aware that saying so plainly puts me at odds with almost everything a young person in Britain has ever been told. What I want to do is show you why Scripture says it, because a rule without a reason will not survive a single…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12056. Physical discipline is the part of this question that gets argued about, though behind it sits a whole theology of children, of authority and of correction. I want to deal with the wider matter first, because most of the heat here comes from people talking past each other. I should also say at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12055. A Christian immigration ethic has to do something the newspapers never manage, which is to hold together a genuine concern for the stranger and a genuine concern for the community receiving him. Most public argument picks one and treats the other as evidence of bad faith. I am not going to tell you…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12054. Family planning is one of the few subjects where Christians hold strong private convictions and say almost nothing publicly, which means couples often work it out alone, with no biblical teaching at all and a good deal of unspoken guilt. I want to change that a little. Not by handing down a rule…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12050. Ask a room of British evangelicals about climate change and you will get two confident answers and a lot of silence in between. One group treats it as the defining moral emergency of our time. Another treats the whole subject as a political trap dressed up in science. I think both are answering…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12049. Is smoking a sin? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just come to faith and is quietly terrified that the answer is yes and that they will fail. That pastoral setting shapes everything I am about to say. The honest answer is that Scripture…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12048. Every time border control comes up in conversation at church, somebody quotes the good Samaritan and somebody else quotes Nehemiah building a wall, and both of them think the argument is now over. It never is. This is one of those questions where the Bible has a great deal to say and almost…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12036. Every discussion about Christian entertainment eventually arrives at the same awkward moment, when someone asks whether a particular film, box set or video game is acceptable and everyone in the room quietly hopes the answer will land on their side of the line. I have been in that room many times. I have…