Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent image appears while holding a baby. A believer who loves God finds his mind producing material that horrifies him. The people who ask me about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11065. The three enemies of the Christian life have been named in that order for centuries, the world, the flesh and the devil, and the grouping is not a piece of ecclesiastical tidiness. It comes straight out of the New Testament and it is enormously useful for diagnosis. The reason it matters is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08137. Whether Satan know Scripture is not really in doubt once you have read Matthew 4, because he quotes it there, quotes it accurately, and quotes it to the Son of God. The more useful question is how he uses it, because that is where the danger lies for us. A misquoted Bible is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08096 Knowing whether you are under spiritual attack is harder than most books on the subject admit, and I want to be honest about that before offering anything more useful. There is no diagnostic checklist in the Bible, no set of symptoms that appears only when the enemy is at work. What Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08088 When James tells us to resist the devil, he is not handing us a slogan to shout at the ceiling. He is describing a settled posture that has a great deal more to do with what we submit to than with what we say out loud. Yet in a good many churches the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08084 Satan’s role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything from adultery to a lost temper in traffic. Others speak as though he barely exists and every failure is nothing more than psychology and bad…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08064 Telling temptation from Satan apart from the ordinary pull of your own flesh is harder in practice than most teaching admits, and I think we should say so at the start. When you are actually in the moment, the experience does not usually arrive with a label attached. Even so, Scripture does distinguish…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, which is rather like apologising for having been shot at. So where does the line fall? And if Jesus was tempted in every respect as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been asked it in hospital corridors and in the church car park, and it always carries a certain weariness with it. It deserves a straight answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6013. A besetting sin is the sin that knows your address: the particular temptation that returns again and again long after other struggles have faded, the one you have confessed more times than you can count. The phrase itself comes from the Authorised Version of a single verse in Hebrews, and understanding what the…