Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11041. When Jesus said we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, he added a word that was not in the original commandment, and it is worth asking why. Deuteronomy 6:5 says heart, soul and might. In Mark 12:30 Jesus says heart, soul, mind and strength. The mind is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11053. Praying aloud feels natural to some believers and excruciating to others, and I have met plenty of Christians who quietly assume they are doing it wrong whichever way they lean. Somebody who was raised in a tradition of audible prayer can feel that silent prayer is half hearted, while somebody who prays best…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11052. Intercessory prayer is simply praying for somebody who is not you. That definition sounds almost disappointingly plain, and yet the practice behind it runs through Scripture from Abraham on the road to Sodom right up to Jesus at the right hand of the Father. It is one of the most ordinary things a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11051. The length of prayer is one of those questions that makes people squirm before they even ask it. Somewhere in the back of most Christian minds sits a suspicion that real believers pray for an hour before breakfast and we are all quietly failing an exam nobody set. I want to take the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11039. Estate planning feels like a subject for solicitors rather than sermons, and that assumption is precisely why so many Christians die intestate and leave their families a mess. Scripture does not contain a chapter on probate. It does contain a great deal about provision, about planning, about honesty and about the numbering of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11049. Few things wound a believer more quietly than unanswered prayer. You have prayed for the marriage, the diagnosis, the wayward son, the job, and heaven has felt like a ceiling rather than an open door. I have sat with people in that place, and I have been in that place myself, and I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11038. Leaving an inheritance is commended in Proverbs and complicated by almost everything else Scripture says about money, which is why sincere Christians land in very different places on it. Some are determined to pass on everything they have. Others intend to give it all away and let their children make their own way….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11024. Being a disciple is not a rank within Christianity; it is what a Christian is. The New Testament uses the word for the whole company of believers, and it carries a meaning our English ‘follower’ has largely lost. So what does it actually mean, day by day, in a life with a job,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11035. Cryptocurrency investing is one of those subjects where Christians want a verse and there is not one, which means the answer has to be built from principles rather than proof texts. Bitcoin did not exist when the New Testament was written, and neither did index funds, mortgages or pensions. What Scripture does address…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11034. Student loans raise a genuine question of conscience for believers, because Scripture has strong things to say about debt and yet many young Christians cannot train for the work God has given them without borrowing. This question comes to me most often from American readers, where the sums involved are frankly alarming, but…