Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11085 Sinful dreams trouble sincere Christians far more often than anyone admits from a pulpit. A believer wakes with the residue of something adulterous, violent or blasphemous still vivid, and spends the morning wondering whether he has offended God in his sleep and what it says about him that his mind produced it. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent image appears while holding a baby. A believer who loves God finds his mind producing material that horrifies him. The people who ask me about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11083 The sin of gluttony is the one item on the traditional list of deadly sins that the modern church has quietly dropped. We preach against drunkenness, greed and lust with reasonable confidence, and then we hold a fellowship lunch. I include myself in that observation and I am not writing from a position…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11082 The disease model of addiction has become the default explanation in medicine, in the media and increasingly in the church. Addiction, we are told, is a chronic brain disorder rather than a moral failing, and to speak of sin in the same sentence is unhelpful at best and cruel at worst. The question…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11081 Cross-cultural ministry has a founding case study in Acts 8, and it is not the one most people expect. Before Peter went to Cornelius and long before Paul set out for Asia, a deacon named Philip walked into Samaria and preached to people his own nation had despised for centuries. What happened there…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11080 Material wealth is one of those subjects on which the Bible says a great deal more than most congregations want to hear, and it says it in both directions. Anyone hoping for a simple verdict, either that riches are a blessing to be pursued or that poverty is inherently holy, will be disappointed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11071. Truth and love are set against each other so routinely in Christian conversation that many believers assume they must be balanced, as though every increase in one required a reduction in the other. That framing is wrong, and it has done real damage in both directions. Scripture never presents them as competing forces…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11079 The Lord’s Prayer contains adoration, submission, petition, confession and a request for protection, and somebody always notices that it contains no thanksgiving. For a prayer given by Jesus as a model, in a Bible that commands gratitude on almost every page, that looks like a surprising gap. I have been asked about it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11078 Speaking to this mountain has become one of the standard phrases of a certain kind of Christian teaching, usually meaning that a believer may address a problem out loud and command it to shift. Debt, illness, a difficult employer, all of these get labelled mountains and are duly spoken to with varying degrees…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11069. Fear and anxiety are addressed in Scripture far more often than most people realise, and usually with a good deal more tenderness than the way we quote those verses to one another. The instruction not to be afraid appears again and again, and it is almost always accompanied by a reason rather than…