Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4175. Can a believer today receive a spiritual gift through the laying on of hands, the way Timothy seems to have received something through Paul’s hands? This is a genuinely contested question, and I want to handle it with care, because there are sincere believers on more than one side and the texts themselves…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4174. When it comes to identifying spiritual gifts, believers often reach first for a questionnaire, tick a few boxes, and come away with a printout telling them their top three gifts as though the Spirit could be diagnosed like a personality type. I understand the appeal, and such tools are not worthless, but Scripture…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4173. Do spiritual gifts change over time, or once the Spirit gives a gift is it fixed for life like the colour of your eyes? This is a question I hear from believers who served wholeheartedly in one capacity for years and then sensed the Lord drawing them elsewhere, and who wonder whether something…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4172. Can a Christian have more than one gift from the Holy Spirit, or are we each handed a single speciality and told to stay in our lane? The short answer is that yes, a believer can certainly have more than one gift, and many believers plainly do. When I read the New Testament…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4171. The difference between spiritual gifts and talents, and between both of those and a learned ability, is a question I am asked more often than almost any other in this whole area of the Spirit’s work. People want to know whether their flair for music, their head for numbers or their knack for…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4169. The Holy Spirit and ordination are joined together in the New Testament far more closely than our tidy modern ceremonies sometimes let on. We tend to picture ordination as a service of certificates, robes and a kind handshake from the deacons, and there is nothing wrong with marking the moment well. Yet when…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4052. The gift of miracles tends to be handled in one of two unhappy ways. Either it is inflated into something sensational, a kind of spiritual circus act, or it is quietly ignored in churches that feel awkward about anything they cannot tidily explain. Neither response does justice to what the New Testament plainly…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4051. Few subjects in the church today generate more heat and less light than the gift of healing. On one side the airwaves are filled with dramatic claims and conference stages where healing is promised on demand. On the other side many cautious evangelicals quietly file the whole category under “things that stopped with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4050. The interpretation of tongues is the gift that quietly does the heavy lifting whenever tongues are used in the gathered church, and yet it is the one we hear about least. It sounds technical, and because it is tied so closely to tongues themselves, many believers pass over it without realising that Paul…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4049. The gift of tongues has caused more heat and less light than almost any subject I deal with as a minister. In some circles it is treated as the badge that proves a person has truly received the Holy Spirit. In others it is written off entirely as a first century oddity that…