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(Personal actions of the Holy Spirit,) Romans 8:16, a personal action is testimony, the Spirit bears witness about Christ and he bears witness with believers regarding adoption, that does not mean every strong inner sensation comes from him, feelings rise and fall for many reasons. Paul places...

(Personal actions of the Holy Spirit,) the next pressure is knowing where to go, Paul and his companions are traveling in Acts chapter 16, they have a mission, they have a map, they are trying preach, their first route closes. Acts says they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit from speaking the...

(Personal actions of the Holy Spirit,) the Spirit can speak and faithful people still listen together, test what they have heard and act humbly, but speech opens another question. If the Spirit speaks, what does he say? Does the Spirit become a second source of teaching beside Jesus? Does the...

(Personal actions of the Holy Spirit,) start in Antioch, the church is gathered, Acts chapter 13 names prophets and teachers serving the Lord and fasting. Barnabas is there, Saul is there, other leaders are there, they are not trying to manufacture urgency, they are waiting together. Then the...

(Personal actions of the Holy Spirit,) is the Spirit mainly a power you experience when the atmosphere changes or is he a personal presence who can be speaking, teaching, guiding and helping even when nothing feels dramatic, that is why one small pronoun carries so much weight. Consider Romans...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, all of this finally points back to Christ and that turn is not a tiny bow stapled onto the end, because a Bible study is supposed to end somewhere religious, consider where the word charisma came from. Charisma, the grace thing grown straight out of charis...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, to a church that had turned its differences into rankings, Paul keeps pressing on the one thing they all shared, which was the giver standing behind every single gift. Your gift and the gift of the person you envy did not come from different shops, they came...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, love, that is more excellent way Paul promised, it is not a better gift to add to the top of the list, it is a different kind of thing altogether, the very thing the gifts were always meant to be carrying. Love is not item number one on the inventory of...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, people tend to read 1 Corinthians 12:31 as a lovely metaphor about teamwork, the sort of thing you might cross stitch and hang in a church foyer, it is far more pointed than that, Paul is taking the Corinthians leaderboard and smashing it. The Corinthians had...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, Paul tells you so almost in a single phrase that turns out to be the key that unlocks the whole subject, the spirit, he says, distributes these gifts to each one individually as he wills, 1 Corinthians 12:11. The giving is personal and it is sovereign, it is...

1 Corinthians 12:1-32, spiritual gifts, consider the so-called gifts of healing, which Paul writes in the plural, healings, as though each one were its own separate act of mercy, rather than a standing superpower somebody carries around in a pocket. Even the most spectacular item on the...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, watch what Paul does with the gifts themselves, because this is exactly where the modern reader tends to take a wrong turn, you want a list, you crave the definitive inventory of spiritual gifts, numbered and defined, neatly separated, so you can scan down...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, the church in that city caught the fever of the city, we know this, because Paul spends most of the letter treating the symptoms. The church had split into rival factions, each one rallying around a favorite teacher and looking down on the others. They were...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, consider who Paul writing to, Corinth was a loud place, it sat on a narrow neck of land with a sea on either side, which made it one of the great crossing points of the ancient world. Ships that did not want to risk the long dangerous voyage around the bottom...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, charisma, a thing produced by grace, a grace-thing, you could almost translate it clumsily, but accurately as a graced-thing, something that exists only, because grace handed it over. Charisma is the word sitting under the bold heading, not a talent you were...

1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, two clean words sitting over the passage like a label on a jar, but Paul never wrote that heading, he never even wrote the second word “gifts.” The word translated gifts is not actually in the Greek, Paul wrote one word there, a word that means something...

John 11:35. John 11:43, the miracle is not only a happy ending, it is a sign and the sign is bigger than Bethany, but John does not let the scene end with celebration, as soon as Lazarus comes out, the danger around Jesus intensifies. John 11:45 says, many who saw what Jesus did believed in him...

John 11:35, now, Jesus has ordered the stone moved in front of everyone, if nothing happens, the shame will be public, if Jesus speaks and Lazarus does not come out, the sisters will have to stand there before an open tomb and a watching crowd, the command to remove the stone is not decorative...

John 11:35, the shortest verse slows the whole chapter down, Jesus does not rush past the mourners to prove a point, he does not tell Mary to get up because a miracle is coming, he does not shame Martha for thinking about the odor, he does not treat tears as a failure of faith, he weeps. John...

John 11:35, verse 27, John is showing you something that matters for anyone who has ever had correct theology and a broken heart at the same time, true doctrine does not make grief imaginary, but doctrine must lead somewhere, it must lead to trust in Christ himself. Martha goes back into the...