Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5031. The human spirit is the dimension of you that was made for God Himself, and it is the least understood part of human nature. We hear plenty about the body from the gym and the doctor, plenty about the soul from the therapist and the poet, but the spirit rarely gets a mention,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4100. The Spirit in salvation does far more work than most believers realise, and most of it happens before we are even aware anything is happening at all. Salvation is the work of the whole Trinity: the Father who planned it, the Son who accomplished it at the cross, and the Holy Spirit who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4131. The new heart and new spirit in Ezekiel 36 stand at the very heart of what the new covenant promises and the Spirit accomplishes. “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4151. The Spirit symbolised by water is a picture that would have spoken instantly to people who knew what it was to be thirsty. We turn a tap and water appears, so the force of the image can pass us by. In a dry land, water was the difference between life and death, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04040. The work of the Spirit in regeneration is the hidden hinge on which the whole of conversion turns. Behind every genuine coming to Jesus there lies a deeper miracle that no preacher can perform and no sinner can manufacture for himself, the giving of new life to a soul that was spiritually dead….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04035. Few areas cause more confusion than the Spirit’s ministries to the believer, because the New Testament uses four different pictures that are easy to run together. We are born of the Spirit, baptised in the Spirit, sealed by the Spirit, and filled with the Spirit, and a great deal of unnecessary anxiety comes…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07017 Regeneration is the miracle at the heart of conversion. It is what makes the entire Christian life possible. Without it, there is no genuine faith, no real repentance, no lasting change, and no spiritual perception of God. It is the point at which God acts to bring spiritually dead people to spiritual life,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07035 The doctrine of effectual calling is one of the five points of Calvinist soteriology, and whilst the terminology is distinctively Reformed, the underlying question it addresses is genuinely biblical: how does a person come to respond to the gospel? Why do some hear the same message and believe whilst others hear it and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07032 The phrase ordo salutis is Latin for “order of salvation,” and it refers to the logical sequence of the various elements involved in a person coming to salvation and continuing in the Christian life. It is a theological framework rather than a biblical phrase, but the question it addresses is thoroughly biblical: does…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6044 Paul’s language of the “old man” and the “new man” appears at key points in his letters, and it is easy to read past it without understanding the weight of what he is actually saying. This is not motivational language about improving yourself or leaving bad habits behind. It is a description of…