Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11129. The Lord’s Prayer is probably the single most recited passage in the whole Bible, spoken in churches, schools and homes across the world every single week, and yet I have met a great many believers who could recite it perfectly without ever having stopped to ask what Jesus was actually teaching us to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11128. Praying for enemies is not offered in Scripture as an optional spiritual extra reserved for the unusually mature Christian, it is a direct command from Jesus Himself: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44). I want to be honest that this is one of the hardest instructions in…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12047. Christian pacifism is one of those positions I find myself respecting far more than I agree with. The people I have known who held it were not soft-headed idealists. They were serious believers who had read the Sermon on the Mount and decided to take Jesus at His word, whatever it cost them,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6059. When Jesus says of the offending hand, cut it off, He is not opening a clinic. He is using deliberate overstatement to say something about sin that gentler language would never get past our defences. The words come in the Sermon on the Mount. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4096. I get asked fairly often whether the fruit of Spirit in Galatians 5 and the character Jesus describes in the Beatitudes are really describing the same thing, and my answer is yes, with one qualification worth unpacking. Paul is describing what the Spirit produces in a believer from the inside out. Jesus is…