Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11063. Christians and poverty is a subject on which the church has swung wildly between two errors, and both of them are still with us. One says that God wants every believer wealthy and that poverty indicates a failure of faith. The other treats poverty itself as a spiritual achievement and regards money as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11062. Single Christians are frequently handed a mixture of unhelpful advice, ranging from the assurance that God has someone lined up to the suggestion that they should stop looking and then he will provide, which are two ways of saying that the situation is temporary and slightly embarrassing. Scripture does something much better than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11061. Dating unbelievers is a question the Bible never addresses directly, for the simple reason that dating as we know it did not exist when Scripture was written. That has allowed a good deal of creative reasoning over the years, most of it arriving at the conclusion the person wanted before they started. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11048. Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand. I understand the instinct and I do not entirely share it. The Bible contains a very large book of written prayers, God’s people have sung them for three thousand…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11060. Marrying an unbeliever is a question I have been asked in tears more often than almost any other, usually by someone who already knows the answer and is hoping I will find a way round it. So let me be honest and kind at the same time, because both are needed here. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11047. Ending prayers in Jesus’ name is a habit most Christians acquire before anyone explains it, and quite a few carry a low-level worry that they have been reciting a formula rather than doing something meaningful. The phrase comes straight from Jesus himself, repeated several times in the upper room discourse, so we are…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11046. Saying Amen at the end of a prayer is so automatic for most of us that we have stopped hearing it, which is a shame, because it is one of the few words that has travelled unchanged from Hebrew through Greek into English. Children ask about it and adults rarely have an answer…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11055. Soul ties come up more often than you might expect, usually from a believer who has been told that a past relationship has left an invisible spiritual attachment which must be broken by a specific prayer before they can move on. The teaching arrives with real pastoral urgency and often with genuine distress…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11043. Praying for the dead is a practice most evangelicals have never considered and many bereaved believers have quietly done anyway, usually in the first raw weeks after a funeral when the instinct to keep speaking to God about someone is overwhelming. So this deserves a gentle answer as well as a clear one….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11054. Fasting and prayer appear together so often in Scripture that many believers assume the combination works like a spiritual amplifier, as though skipping meals turns up the volume on our requests until God can no longer ignore them. That instinct is understandable, and I think it is wrong in a way that matters….