In my last post on healing, I spoke of its relationship with faith. As an example of a faith-filled sermon on healing I cannot recommend anything better than my pastor's talk last weekend, "He Healed Them All". Following the meeting we had a large number of people respond, largely for "emotional healing", and the impact of the powerful prayer time that ensued will be felt for some time, I am sure!What can I say about the gifts of healing? Well, the first is to say that it is a plural, and I … [Read more...]

In my previous post in this series on 1 Cor 12, I blogged about the gift of faith. Actually, these spiritual gifts do in fact overlap, and I want to give you a good example of that with regards to the gifts of healing. I suspect I will need to spend more than one post on healing, but what I want to speak about today is how healings and faith are obviously entwined.One of the strange aspects of the gift of faith is how God often gives us a supernatural confidence about future events. So, for … [Read more...]

"To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are … [Read more...]

I havent forgotten my blogging the gifts series, and will get to faith shortly. But I know many of you are longing for the bit on tongues so here is a prelude in the form of a reader-submitted question. I would be interested in your responses to the following either here or on your blog with a link posted here in my comments section:-Let's say you are in service, and there is a tongue given, and you feel you have the interpretation, but you aren't sure. You wait a bit, because you are just … [Read more...]

I have spent more than thirty years of my life in charismatic churches, and these reflections try to summarize that experience. This particular series is not an attempt to justify the continuation of the gifts theologically as I have done that elsewhere and in my debate with Dan Phillips. Nor is this post intended to persuade you - I want you to be persuaded by the Bible, not mere experience! Instead, here I want to simply answer the question, "What do the gifts look like in practice in places … [Read more...]

I have spent more than thirty years of my life in charismatic churches, and these reflections try to summarize that experience. This particular series is not an attempt to justify the continuation of the gifts theologically as I have done that elsewhere and in my debate with Dan Phillips. Nor is this post intended to persuade you - I want you to be persuaded by the Bible, not mere experience! Instead, here I want to simply answer the question, "What do the gifts look like in practice in places … [Read more...]

"I am constantly amazed by how many people in the church can be utterly faithful to the gospel, but then can be unwilling to be reformed by Scripture in other areas. In my Sunday school class on James, we recently discussed what it means for a man to 'walk away from a mirror and forget what he looks like.' James laments a common problem... the unwillingness to use God's Word to look at and reform those areas in your life or church that aren't glorifying to God or making full use of his … [Read more...]