Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4018. Can you lose the Holy Spirit once you have Him? This is a tender question, and it is usually asked by someone who is frightened rather than curious. They have sinned badly, or they have gone through a cold and prayerless season, and they wonder whether the Spirit has quietly slipped away. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4017. What is resisting the Holy Spirit, and is it something a Christian can do? The phrase comes to us from a tense and dramatic moment in the book of Acts, and it carries a sharp edge. To understand resisting the Holy Spirit we have to watch where the Bible actually uses the language,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4016. Can we pray to the Holy Spirit, or should we only ever pray to the Father or the Son? I get asked this more than you might think, often by thoughtful believers who have noticed that the Bible’s prayers are nearly always addressed to the Father, and who wonder whether the Spirit has…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 16. To detect false teaching is a skill every believer needs, and not only the pastors and scholars among us. Jesus warned that false prophets would come in sheep’s clothing, and the apostles return to the theme again and again, which tells me this is ordinary equipment for ordinary Christians, not a speciality for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13. Itching ears is one of Paul’s most quietly devastating phrases, and it describes a danger that is more alive today than ever. Writing his final letter to Timothy, he warns that ‘the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12. False doctrine spreads like gangrene. That is not my phrase but Paul’s, and it is one of the most arresting medical images in all his letters. Writing to Timothy about a pair of false teachers, he warns that ‘their talk will spread like gangrene’ (2 Timothy 2:17). It is a deliberately ugly comparison,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10. Early church catechisms are something many evangelicals have either never heard of or quietly suspect of being a Roman Catholic invention, and both reactions miss a rich and useful history. Long before the Reformation produced its famous catechisms, the believers of the first few centuries were carefully instructing new converts in the faith…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4013. Praying in the Spirit is a phrase that has been pulled in two very different directions, and I want to bring it back to what Scripture actually means by it. For some it conjures speaking in tongues and little else. For others it sounds so mystical that they assume it is for spiritual…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4012. To quench the Spirit is a phrase Paul drops into a single short verse, and yet it carries a warning every believer needs to hear. We can, by our own choices, smother the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, the way a bucket of water smothers a fire. That is a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4011. The role of the Spirit in prayer is one of the most comforting truths I know, and also one of the most neglected. We talk a great deal about praying to the Father through the Son, which is right, but we often forget that the third Person of the Trinity is just as…