Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04045 There are few more striking statements in the New Testament than Paul’s declaration in 1 Corinthians 6:19: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” That a human body — mortal, material, subject to hunger and tiredness and decay —…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04042 Most Christians have heard that it is possible to grieve the Holy Spirit. The phrase comes from Ephesians 4:30, where Paul writes: “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” But what does grieving the Spirit actually look like in everyday life? And…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 11074 It is one of the most difficult balancing acts in the Christian life. On the one hand, we are called to contend for the faith, to hold fast to sound doctrine, to stand firm on the truth of God’s Word. On the other hand, we are called to clothe ourselves with humility, to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11075 Walk into almost any Christian bookshop or open a church website and you will find no shortage of Bible reading plans on offer. Chronological plans, canonical plans, thematic plans, plans that pair Old and New Testaments, plans that take you through in a year, plans that take you through in ninety days. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11076 It sounds like a simple question, but it carries a pastoral complication: depending on how it is answered, it is very likely to produce more guilt than growth. Whatever number is given, someone will feel they are already failing. So before giving any kind of practical answer, it is worth beginning not with…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7064 In 1937, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship. Writing against a German church that had largely surrendered its integrity in the face of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer drew a distinction that has echoed through Christian thinking ever since. Cheap grace, he argued, is the preaching…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7061 At Christian camps, conferences, and evangelistic meetings, the call to re-dedication is a familiar one. A believer who has drifted steps forward to renew their commitment, making promises they genuinely intend to keep. A question sometimes surfaces in that moment, and it is a serious one: does this mean I was never truly…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7060 The word “backslider” carries more weight in older Christian usage than it does in most modern translations, but the reality it describes is woven through the entire New Testament. It refers to a genuine believer who has withdrawn from active fellowship with God, whose spiritual life has contracted, whose once-warm faith has grown…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7085 The question arises naturally for anyone who takes the New Testament seriously. Paul can write to the Corinthians and call them “those sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:2), and yet the same letter spends considerable energy addressing a congregation with serious moral and relational problems. If they are already sanctified, what is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07073 One of the most liberating and yet most misunderstood aspects of the Christian life involves the relationship between who the believer already is in Christ and who they are still becoming in daily experience. The New Testament holds these two realities in constant and deliberate tension, and failing to distinguish them produces either…