What does the work of the Holy Spirit look like in our lives? It could be a little bit like this:

The @RamsNFL have a spotter for their head coach and it's our favorite thing right now. pic.twitter.com/fbHsYQqQHp

January 22, 2019

Thanks to Hannah Anderson for...

I have a theory about evangelism. Many Christians—and this includes me—have a habit of saying that things would be cringeworthy or embarrassing to our unbelieving friends, when what we really mean is that they would be cringeworthy or embarrassing to us. This can be benign, and lead to...

Over the past few weeks I have been arguing for the goodness of the freedom of the gender binary, the idea that our identity as a man or a woman is given to us by God and is therefore not something which we have to create through performance. This is good because it gives us the freedom to be how...

Here's a beautiful illustration of the Romans 5:20 principle that "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more." It comes from Glenn Packiam's forthcoming book Blessed, Broken, Given: How Your Story Becomes Sacred in the Hands of Jesus, which I've just had the privilege of endorsing.

We were...

I want the great world religions taught in every school. Secular humanism has reached a dead end - and any liberals who don't recognise that are simply enabling the worldwide conservative reaction of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam. The human quest for meaning is innate and...

Glen Scrivener is exactly the sort of person I was trying to persuade in Spirit and Sacrament: a sharp, thoughtful, open, joyful and evangelistic Anglican who recognises the force of continuationist arguments, but has seen enough bad practice to have a lot of good questions. Watch me defending...

So far in this series, I’ve introduced the concept of the freedom of the gender binary and argued that the New Testament authors’ approach to masculinity shows that they understood and applied it. Those posts have been primarily about the theory, but what about the practice? How do we...

The main fault line in contemporary society is not between right and left, or capitalists and socialists. Rather, argues David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, it is "between the people who see the world from Anywhere and the people who see it from...

And if you still don't get the result you want, change the rules governing the vote.

No, I’m not referring to Brexit, but to a poll of doctors planned by the Royal College of Physicians.

The RCP is planning to poll its 35,000 members to ask whether ‘they would help a terminally ill...

The case of Asia Bibi, kept in solitary confinement for nine years on trumped up charges of blasphemy, has thrown Pakistan into turmoil and garnered headlines around the world.

In this extended report, the BBC provides a comprehensive account of the severe problems faced by minority groups in...

In the previous post in this short series I argued that when compared with their contemporaries, the New Testament authors take a radically different approach to masculinity. For Greco-Roman authors, masculinity was a performance and the status of ‘real man’ was something to be...

What is the most attractive quality in a leader? No doubt there are all sorts of ways of answering that, and although some responses are obviously wrong, I don't think there's any particular one that is obviously right (other than "Christlikeness" or "love", which just push the question back a...

In the first post in this series, I shared about my moment of revelation concerning the freedom of the gender binary: how God’s creation of us as male or female, and his gift of that identity, gives us the freedom to be how we are without changing who we are, therefore meaning we do not have...

Richard Bauckham identifies three features of Christian prophecy, which I find very helpful in thinking on the subject: discernment, prediction and response.

First, there is discernment of the contemporary situation by prophetic insight into God’s nature and purpose. We have noticed...

There was a time in my childhood when I thought I was a girl. Though externally I looked like a boy, and everyone thought I was a boy, I believed that internally I was a girl. I remember being afraid that one day I would get pregnant (obviously before I understood how these things work!) and that...

This piece is a response of sorts to the conversation over at Mere Orthodoxy between Gavin Ortlund and Jonathan Leeman (both Baptists) who discuss the theological conundrum of church membership and the Lord’s Supper in relation to differing views of baptism (all links can be found here)....

Is having a baby that results from a loving relationship the same as having a baby being created via a business transaction?

That is a question posed by Mirah Riben. Surrogacy is becoming an increasingly important ethical issue, with governments around the world, including the UK, indicating that...

David Cannadine's Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 strikes me as a fairly old-school sort of history book: a careful account of politicians and laws, men in suits and the Acts they passed. It is top-down history, and the contrast with bottom-up accounts of similar periods, like...

On Tuesday, Andrew Bunt posted some of his ‘tricks of the trade’ in wrestling with knotty ethical issues. The first was to focus on what the Bible says before working out how to apply it.

To many of our readers, I imagine that seemed obvious. Yes, we might forget it sometimes, and...

There has been a fascinating discussion recently over whether, and in what circumstances, Baptist churches should welcome paedobaptists into membership and/or to the Lord's Supper. (That "and/or" is crucial to the discussion, as we shall see.) Gavin Ortlund says yes and yes, on the basis that...

I recently spent a few sessions helping a group of pastors to think through their position on a complex ethical issue. At the end of one of these sessions, one of the group came up to me and asked if something I had kept doing in the discussion was one my tricks. (He then realised what he had said...

Recently I had the privilege of having two fascinating conversations with writers I admire: Jon Haidt, on his books The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind, and Tim Keller, on his The Prodigal Prophet. The former, on Justin Brierley's excellent show Unbelievable, was about why...

"A movement is afoot," says Tim Challies in his (very encouraging) review of Spirit and Sacrament, which released on Tuesday. Until now, Tim explains, there have been a substantial number of professing charismatics in what he calls "New Calvinist" circles—John Piper, Don Carson, Wayne Grudem,...

My dad can’t remember my name any more. It’s unspeakably sad, not least because he is only in his mid-sixties. He knows he likes me, and even trusts me, but he’s not sure why. He often affirms that I’m ‘a good man’and I respond by telling him that I love him,...

Reparation is defined as "the action of making amends for a wrong one has done, by providing payment or other assistance to those who have been wronged." That sounds like something Christians should be into, as and when we have wronged others; it sounds like what John the Baptist told people to do...