Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12057. Is sex before marriage wrong? Yes, and I am aware that saying so plainly puts me at odds with almost everything a young person in Britain has ever been told. What I want to do is show you why Scripture says it, because a rule without a reason will not survive a single…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12024 Sexual purity has become an embarrassing phrase in some circles, partly because it has been handled badly. A generation of young Christians was given rules, fear and a promise that keeping the rules would be rewarded with a happy marriage. When the promise did not materialise, the whole framework collapsed for many of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11106 Christian singleness is a subject most churches handle badly, and I include myself in that criticism. We build our programmes around families, we preach on marriage several times a year and on singleness roughly never, and then we wonder why unmarried believers in their thirties quietly drift away from congregations where they have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11062. Single Christians are frequently handed a mixture of unhelpful advice, ranging from the assurance that God has someone lined up to the suggestion that they should stop looking and then he will provide, which are two ways of saying that the situation is temporary and slightly embarrassing. Scripture does something much better than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11060. Marrying an unbeliever is a question I have been asked in tears more often than almost any other, usually by someone who already knows the answer and is hoping I will find a way round it. So let me be honest and kind at the same time, because both are needed here. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11006. Christian dating is a phrase the Bible never uses, and that alone should shape how confidently we answer this question. Courtship as we practise it is a modern arrangement, and anyone who claims chapter and verse for a particular method is stretching the text. What Scripture does give us is a settled understanding…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4125. The question of whether celibacy is a spiritual gift tends to generate two opposite responses: either people dismiss it as a peculiarly Roman Catholic concern that has nothing to do with evangelical Christianity, or they embrace it so enthusiastically that they effectively make every unmarried Christian feel as though they must have a…