Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09070 The question of whether Christians should actively seek spiritual gifts touches on a tension that runs through much of the charismatic debate: the balance between the Spirit’s freedom to distribute as He wills and the believer’s responsibility to desire what is good for the church. Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 14:1 is direct:…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04123 Few topics in modern church life generate as much confusion, controversy, and pastoral difficulty as the question of speaking in tongues. For some believers, tongues is the defining mark of spiritual vitality, the indispensable evidence of the Spirit’s fullness. For others, it belongs entirely to the apostolic era and has no place in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04116 The question of whether the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament remain available to the church today is among the most practically consequential theological debates of the modern era. For much of evangelical Christianity in the West, the answer has been shaped not primarily by careful biblical exegesis but…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04050 Of all the gifts Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12, the gift of interpretation of tongues is perhaps the one most easily misunderstood, partly because it sounds technical, and partly because it is so closely tied to tongues itself. Yet Paul treats it as a distinct and necessary gift, not an add-on, and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04031 Pentecost is one of the most significant events in the entire Bible, and yet it is often reduced to a story about strange languages and tongues of fire. What actually happened in that upper room in Jerusalem, and in the streets that followed, was nothing less than the birth of the New Testament…
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: 3 minutesQuestion Q04013 The phrase “praying in the Spirit” appears in two places in the New Testament: Ephesians 6:18 and Jude 20. It has generated considerable discussion, particularly in Pentecostal and charismatic circles where it is often associated with speaking in tongues. Understanding what the phrase actually means requires attending carefully to what these texts say…
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 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…