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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4010. The fruit of the Spirit is one of those phrases I hear quoted so easily that we rarely stop and ask what it actually promises about the Christian life. People treat it like a personality test, as though one believer were issued patience while another got kindness and a third somehow missed out…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4009. The fruit of the Spirit is Paul’s lovely picture of the character that God grows in a believer’s life, and it is found in Galatians 5 where he lists love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It is one of the best loved passages in the New Testament, and also…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4008. The guidance of the Spirit is one of the dearest privileges of the Christian life, and also one of the most misunderstood. Many believers picture it as a mysterious inner sat-nav that, if only they could tune in finely enough, would dictate every decision from which job to take to which cereal to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4007. The still small voice is one of those phrases that has wandered a long way from its home, and I want to walk it back. People use it to mean the gentle inner nudge of God in the quiet of prayer, and they build a whole approach to guidance on it. The phrase…