Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6013. A besetting sin is the sin that knows your address: the particular temptation that returns again and again long after other struggles have faded, the one you have confessed more times than you can count. The phrase itself comes from the Authorised Version of a single verse in Hebrews, and understanding what the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6009. Overcoming sin is the daily concern of every genuine believer, and the honest ones will tell you how the usual methods have gone: willpower failed, resolutions broke, promises to God lasted a fortnight. If that is your testimony too, take heart; the New Testament describes a different strategy altogether, and it begins in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6007. Sinless perfection has been promised by more than one movement in church history: the claim that a Christian can reach a point in this life where sinning stops altogether. Others swing to the opposite corner and treat ongoing sin so casually that holiness hardly seems worth pursuing. Can Christians live without sinning or…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 05045. Are soul and spirit two words for one thing, or two distinct parts of you? That is the heart of the long debate between dichotomy, the view that a human being consists of body plus one immaterial element, and trichotomy, the view that we are body, soul, and spirit as three genuinely distinct…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4104. walking in Spirit is commanded throughout the New Testament precisely because having the Spirit and yielding to the Spirit are two different things, and the gap between them is where most of ordinary Christian struggle actually lives. Every believer already possesses the Spirit permanently from the moment of conversion. Not every believer, on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4098. The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of virtues, a framework every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would instantly have recognised from Aristotle and the Stoics. He could have described the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4097. Character formation is a phrase psychologists reach for almost as often as pastors do, and that overlap is worth pausing on before going any further. Anyone who has watched a believer grow steadily kinder, calmer and more self-controlled over years of walking with Jesus has watched something that both categories, the psychological and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4079. Whether losing the filling of the Spirit happens through a single, dramatic act of sin or through a slower, more gradual drift is a genuinely practical pastoral question, and Scripture’s answer turns out to be more nuanced than either a strict once-off model or a purely gradual one alone. I want to work…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4076. Second blessing language has circulated in evangelical churches for well over a century, usually describing a dramatic, identifiable post-conversion experience in which a believer receives a fuller measure of the Spirit than they had at conversion. The phrase carries real emotional weight for many Christians who have had a genuinely significant spiritual experience…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4063. Spirit filled living is commanded, not simply commended as an optional extra, in Ephesians 5:18, and Paul does not leave the command floating vaguely in the abstract for believers to guess at. Read the verses that surround it and three concrete conditions emerge clearly, conditions any believer can act on today rather than…