Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04049 Few gifts have generated more controversy in the modern church than the gift of tongues. In some circles it is treated as the essential evidence that a person has received the Holy Spirit. In others it is dismissed entirely as a first-century phenomenon that ended with the apostolic age. Both positions, as this…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04047 When Paul writes that “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7), he is describing something that belongs to the entire church across all ages. Spiritual gifts are not occasional divine extras for particularly devout believers. They are the normal means by which the Spirit…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04048 The gift of prophecy is among the most discussed and most misunderstood gifts in the New Testament. Some believers treat every impression or sense of spiritual prompting as “a word from the Lord.” Others conclude that genuine prophecy ended with the apostolic age and that anyone claiming to prophesy today is at best…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion Q04012 The question may seem almost impertinent. Can a divine person be suppressed? Can a member of the Godhead be hindered? Yet Scripture addresses this directly, and the answer it gives has significant implications for how we understand both the Spirit’s work and our responsibility towards it. What the Text Actually Says Paul’s instruction…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04121 The sight of someone placing their hands on a sick person and praying for healing can provoke a range of reactions in evangelical circles, from warm affirmation to deep suspicion. For some, the practice conjures images of televangelist excess and manufactured spectacle. For others, it represents a sincere and scripturally grounded act of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4061 Of all the biblical arguments marshalled in support of cessationism — the view that certain spiritual gifts have ceased with the apostolic age — the most frequently cited is 1 Corinthians 13:10: “when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” The cessationist reading identifies “the perfect” as the completed New Testament canon….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4062 The cessationist and continuationist debate turns, at its heart, on a single exegetical decision: are prophecy and Scripture the same category of thing? If they are, then genuine prophecy today would mean adding to the Word of God — an obvious impossibility given that the canon is closed. But if prophecy and Scripture…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4068 The gift of healings is listed plainly in 1 Corinthians 12:9 and 28, and the New Testament account of its exercise in the early church is vivid and specific. Lame men walk. The blind see. Peter’s shadow falls across the sick, and they recover. Paul lays hands on the father of Publius on…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 9109 The church has always struggled to hold two things together: genuine openness to the Spirit’s ongoing work in equipping believers with gifts, and the biblical insistence on order, intelligibility, and discernment in corporate worship. The history of charismatic Christianity is littered with the wreckage of communities that lost the second whilst pursuing the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4066 Someone approaches you after a church meeting, or perhaps contacts you privately, with a message they believe is from God for your life. They may have used the language of prophecy, or they may have phrased it more tentatively as something they felt they should share with you. How do you respond? The…