Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4001. The person of the Spirit is the first thing I want settled when anyone asks me who the Holy Spirit really is, because almost every mistake people make in this area flows from getting that one point wrong. Is the Spirit a Person, or is He a force? Is He someone I relate…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4000. The doctrine of the Spirit is the part of Christian teaching that asks who the Holy Spirit is, what He does, and what His nearness means for an ordinary believer trying to follow Jesus on an ordinary day. We give it a technical name, pneumatology, and the name can make the whole thing…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 0046. The phrase itching ears comes from one of the most honest descriptions of human nature in all of Scripture, and Paul saw it coming with painful accuracy. People would gather teachers to suit their itching ears, choosing voices that scratched the spot rather than told the truth. “The time is coming,” he wrote,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0041. When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value feelings above truth. It happens by a slow shift of weight, where the test of whether something is right gradually moves from what God has…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 0040. It sounds wonderfully humble to say that you just want to read the Bible without theology, taking the plain words at face value and leaving all the systems and arguments to the academics. I have heard it many times, often from sincere believers who are weary of theological squabbling. Yet the more I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The reasoning sounds spiritual. If the Spirit teaches me, why bury my nose in books and arguments? Why not simply trust him to guide me into…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest Christians did not walk around with a leather-bound Bible containing all sixty-six books. The church was born at Pentecost, and the Gospels and letters were…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04035. Few areas cause more confusion than the Spirit’s ministries to the believer, because the New Testament uses four different pictures that are easy to run together. We are born of the Spirit, baptised in the Spirit, sealed by the Spirit, and filled with the Spirit, and a great deal of unnecessary anxiety comes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04034. Follow the Gospels closely and you cannot miss how often the Spirit and Jesus appear side by side. From the announcement of his conception to the power of his rising, the Holy Spirit is present at every hinge of the Lord’s earthly life. This is not a minor thread running quietly in the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04033. Ask where the Bible comes from and you cannot answer well without speaking of the Spirit and inspiration in the same breath. The Scriptures did not fall from the sky finished, nor were they invented by clever men who wanted to control others. They were breathed out by God through human writers whom…