Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4179. Few questions touch daily Christian living as closely as the relationship between the Spirit and the conscience, because both of them speak to us from within and we do not always find it easy to tell their voices apart. You feel a check before you say something unkind. You feel a weight after…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4197. We usually think it is possible to grieve the Spirit only as individuals, in the privacy of our own hearts, but Paul’s warning was written to a whole church and aimed at the way its members treated one another. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4196. The love among believers that Jesus made the badge of His disciples is not something we work up by trying harder to be nice; it is fruit the Holy Spirit grows. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, He said, if you have love for one another (John 13:35)….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4195. When Paul calls the Philippians to be of one mind, he is not asking a roomful of different people to think identical thoughts, and a great deal of needless guilt has been laid on believers who assumed he was. The language appears across Paul’s letter to Philippi, in his plea that they stand…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4194. When Paul tells the Ephesians to be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3), he hands the church one of its most precious and most misunderstood phrases. People reach for it whenever they want to paper over a disagreement, as though the unity of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4193. Nothing wounds a congregation quite like church division, and nothing exposes how badly we need the Holy Spirit more clearly than the way a fellowship can tear itself apart over things that will not matter in a hundred years. A fallout over the colour of the carpet, a faction gathering round a charismatic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4192. Few subjects make a congregation more uneasy than church discipline, and almost no one stops to ask what the Holy Spirit has to do with it. We tend to picture discipline as a grim, legal business, a committee with folded arms removing a name from a roll. Scripture paints something altogether warmer and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4191. Ask most people what the Holy Spirit has to do with believer’s baptism and they will picture the water and stop there, as though the Spirit were a spectator at the side of the pool. That gets it exactly backwards. The water is the picture; the Spirit is the reality the picture points…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4190. We rarely stop to ask what the Holy Spirit is doing at the Lord’s Supper, and I think that is because we have quietly assumed He is not doing much. The bread and the cup are on the table, the words of institution are read, we eat and drink and go home. Yet…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4189. There is a world of difference between reading the Bible and meeting God in it, and that difference is the whole point when we ask how the Spirit makes Scripture come alive during devotional reading. You can sit down with the same chapter on two mornings running. One day the words lie flat…