Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11097 The phrase alternative medicine covers such an enormous range of things that treating it as one subject is the first mistake most of us make. It stretches from a cup of peppermint tea for indigestion all the way to practices that involve summoning spirit guides, and lumping those together produces either needless panic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11096 Should Christians use doctors, or does going to the surgery show a shortage of faith? I have been asked this more often than you might expect, usually in a low voice by someone who has been told by a well-meaning friend that real believers trust God rather than the NHS. The question deserves…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11095 Whether we should use instruments in worship is one of those questions that sounds trivial until you meet someone for whom it is anything but. There are sincere, Bible-loving congregations across these islands who sing unaccompanied on principle, and there are others where the drum kit arrived decades ago and nobody has thought…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11094 Ask ten Christians what music in worship is for and you will get ten answers, several of them contradictory and at least two delivered with some heat. Some treat the singing as a warm-up act before the sermon. Others treat it as the point of the whole service and everything else as an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11093 Christian giving is one of those subjects that makes a congregation shuffle in its seats, and I understand why. Money is private, budgets are tight, and most of us have sat under at least one sermon that felt like a sales pitch. So let me say at the outset that I am not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11092 Saturday or Sunday is a question that arrives in two very different tones. Sometimes it comes from a believer who has been challenged by a Seventh-day Adventist or a Hebrew Roots teacher and is genuinely unsettled. Sometimes it comes from someone who simply wonders why the church meets when it does. Either way…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11089 The law of Christ is the phrase Paul uses when he wants to say that a believer released from the Mosaic covenant is not therefore released from moral obligation. It appears in Galatians 6:2 and again, in a slightly different form, in 1 Corinthians 9:21, where Paul describes himself as not being outside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11088 Discerning sin is one of the ordinary tasks of the Christian life, and it is a good deal harder than the lists suggest. Scripture names a great many things plainly, and then leaves us with hundreds of daily decisions it never mentions: this job, that programme, this investment, that friendship, this way of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11087 Do I need to forgive myself? The question arrives constantly in pastoral conversation, usually from someone who believes God has forgiven them and still cannot get free of something they did. They have confessed it, sometimes for years, and the weight has not lifted. I want to say two things that sound contradictory…