Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11147. Honouring difficult parents is one of the hardest commands in Scripture to obey with integrity, because the fifth commandment was never written for families where love flowed easily. Exodus 20:12 says honour your father and your mother, full stop, with no footnote excusing us when a parent has been unkind, absent, controlling or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11146. Honouring your parents does not end the day you move out, get married, or start making decisions they disagree with. The command stays with you for life, though the shape it takes changes considerably once you are grown. I get asked this often by adult believers navigating ageing parents, strained relationships, or simply…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11145. Disagreement with leadership is one of the more delicate situations a church member can face, because Scripture asks for genuine respect toward those who lead while never asking for silence in the face of real concern. I have been on the receiving end of this as a pastor, and I have also been…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11144. Disagreement and division sound like near neighbours, and in a tense church meeting they can feel indistinguishable, but the Bible treats them as genuinely different things, and confusing them causes real damage in both directions. I have watched churches wound themselves by treating every disagreement as an act of rebellion that must be…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11141. Leaving a church is one of the most painful decisions a Christian can face, and I never want to make it sound simple, because in my experience it rarely is. I have sat on both sides of this conversation, as the pastor a family was leaving and as a friend counselling someone through…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11136. A disciple of Jesus is not simply someone who believes the right facts about Him. It is someone who has attached their whole life to His, as a learner attaches their life to a teacher whose way of seeing the world they intend to make their own. I want to unpack that carefully,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11135. Spiritual dryness in Bible reading is something almost every believer I know has faced, and if you are in the middle of it now, I want to say plainly that it does not mean your faith has failed or that God has gone quiet forever. I have had seasons in ministry where opening…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11133. Choosing a study Bible is one of the more practical questions I get asked by newer Christians, usually once they realise their plain paperback Bible does not explain the strange customs, the unfamiliar place names, or why a passage seems to contradict another until you understand the background. I want to answer this…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11143. Church hurt is a real and painful thing, and I want to say that plainly before anything else. Whether it came from a controlling pastor, a gossiping small group, a public discipline handled cruelly and without grace, or simply years of being quietly overlooked and unappreciated, this kind of wound cuts deeper than…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11142. Finding a new church after leaving one you have belonged to for years is genuinely disorienting, and I say that having walked several families through exactly this process. The familiar faces, the seat you always quietly sat in, the small weekly routines you barely noticed until they were suddenly gone, all of that…