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 4078. How the Spirit’s filling relates to intercessory prayer is a connection Scripture draws explicitly, and understanding it will change how you approach prayer for others, particularly when you genuinely do not know what to pray or how to pray it. Intercessory prayer, prayer offered on behalf of someone else, is not primarily a…
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: 9 minutesQuestion 4127. The Spirit’s anointing is a phrase that is used very freely in contemporary Christian conversation, not always with a great deal of precision. People speak of ‘coming under the anointing,’ of a preacher or singer as ‘anointed,’ of seeking ‘fresh anointing’ before ministry, and sometimes of ‘transferring the anointing’ from one person to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4003. Being filled with the Spirit is one of those phrases that gets pulled in two opposite directions, and I think both of them miss it. Some treat it as a rare, elusive state reserved for the spiritual elite, and others treat it as a synonym for emotional intensity in worship, as though the…