Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has produced entire movements built on the idea that some believers possess the Spirit more fully than others. I want to set the two side by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4067. Few slogans have travelled further or faster through Christian circles than let go and let God, and I am regularly asked whether it is actually biblical or just a comforting piece of folk wisdom. My honest answer is that it is a half-truth, and half-truths are slippery, dangerous things, because the half that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4043. In Galatians 5 Paul sets two lists side by side, the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit, and I cannot think of a passage anywhere that more honestly maps the daily battle of the Christian life. The works of the flesh are what my old fallen nature produces when…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4122. The phrase “law of the Spirit” appears in one of the most important sentences Paul ever wrote. Romans 8:2 reads: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” That single sentence sits at the hinge point of the entire…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4148. The Spirit symbolised by fire is one of the most dramatic and recurring pictures in Scripture, reaching its most famous expression at Pentecost, where “divided tongues as of fire” appeared and rested on each of the believers gathered in the upper room (Acts 2:3). Fire runs through the biblical story as a consistent…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4145. The liberty of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is the freedom Paul says belongs to everyone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, a freedom from the old covenant’s condemning, veiling, life-denying power, and from the despair of trying to please God through a law that could only ever expose sin without removing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4144. The ministry of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3 is Paul’s description of the new covenant he has been entrusted to preach, a covenant written not on stone tablets but on human hearts by the Spirit of the living God, and one that produces life rather than condemnation. “He has made us ministers…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4142. The continuous filling of the Spirit is exactly what Paul has in mind when he writes “be filled with the Spirit” in Ephesians 5:18, and the Greek grammar behind that command tells us something the English translation, on its own, can easily miss. The verb Paul uses is a present tense, passive, imperative….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4182. Almost every Christian I have ever pastored has had at least one sin that seems to cling closer than the rest, and the longing to overcome a besetting sin is one of the most painful and persistent struggles of the believing life. It may be a temper that flares before you can stop…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04042. Paul tells us not to grieve the Spirit, and I have noticed over the years that most believers nod at that instruction without ever asking what it actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The command sits in Ephesians 4:30, tucked into a passage about how we speak to one another and…