17 - The Ministry of the Holy Spirit, Part 2b

Well, welcome back to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology.

I'm glad to the tens and tens... Okay, who am I fooling? The two of you that are watching.

No, no, no, but we are glad for each of you. We thank you for especially those of you who are the more diligent students who are very active in keeping up with their notes and the thought questions and the different posts we're doing in the groups and Facebook and all.

And we are thankful for those students who are memorizing the scriptures that we go over and doing the study ahead of time to make sure they understand these different things.

And today's lesson, we're going to go into some things that start getting a little bit controversial, some things that some people will disagree on and some that have differing understandings.

And so it's because of that that we're going to go a little bit slower. Want to make sure we clearly explain the things that we're going to be having on the show or discussing in class today and make sure that they're understood.

So if you grab your syllabus, that is if you are a paid student, if you enrolled, you get a syllabus and we are in the syllabus.

We are in lesson number 12 on the ministry of the

Holy Spirit. And this is part two and it's actually part two two because this is actually,

I guess it'd be two B because we actually started part two last week in last class and we didn't finish it up.

So we're going to finish it up now. So let's do a quick review. I know you guys are excellent students and don't need any kind of review, but you know me,

I'm a little bit slower than you. So I need the review. So let's do that. All right. Last week, we looked at the ministry of the

Holy Spirit specifically with the issue of regeneration.

That's that act that the Holy Spirit does when he, you know, saves us and gives us new life, that this is something he does.

And this is one of the first ones that we looked at. We then looked at the indwelling of the

Holy Spirit. And if you remember when we talked about the indwelling of the Spirit, we said that this is something that the

Holy Spirit does that is specific to the New Testament times, the time we live in.

This is different than the Old Testament. The Old Testament, the Holy Spirit, if you remember as good students, the

Holy Spirit came upon different people for leadership. And so now we have the gift of the

Holy Spirit indwelling us so that we would be always having the

Spirit with us. We'll see how that affects some things in this class in a little bit.

Then we talked about this thing called the filling of the Spirit, the filling of the

Spirit. And I hope if you remember that we had said that the filling of the

Spirit is a command, it's an imperative, which means that it's a command.

As a command, it's something that we all should be seeking to do. And it's a continuous word, meaning that if it's continuous, it's something we should always be doing.

We should always be obeying the command to be filled. What does that mean then?

Well, being filled means to be controlled by the Holy Spirit, to be controlled by the

Holy Spirit. And we discussed last week when we talked about the indwelling of the

Spirit, the fact that the Holy Spirit, when He indwells a believer, will indwell every believer.

And that indwelling the believer means that He's always going to be with us. Alright, that has some ramifications.

If the Holy Spirit's always with us, can we lose our salvation? Can you lose the Holy Spirit if He says

He's always going to be with you? I don't know what you think about that. We're going to get to that in some later lessons when we talk about the doctrine of salvation.

But I'm kind of tipping my hat. Wait, I don't have a hat.

Alright, well anyway. But we are looking at this in more detail later on.

So what we do want to talk about is this difference though between filling of the Spirit and baptism of the

Spirit. And so what we have here is a distinction that often gets confused and causes some issues.

So let's look. We already said filling of the Spirit is something that is in the word filling in the

Greek there in Ephesians 5 is something, 518, is something that is continuous.

In other words, something we should always be doing. And it's something that is an imperative.

In other words, God commands it. Will God command us to do something we can't do?

Well, He commands all men everywhere to repent and yet it's the

Holy Spirit that does that. So yeah, I guess He does. Right?

So is this one of those commands that God commands of us but we can't do in and of ourselves?

Well, yeah, it is. I mean, we can't just obey the Spirit without the

Spirit working in us. And so we work in that sense but it is our responsibility still to obey the command even though we can't do it completely of ourselves.

Does that make sense? Well, if it doesn't make sense, remember lesson number one? That was the first attribute of God we discussed.

He's incomprehensible. I mean, if I could comprehend everything about God and explain everything to you that you'd comprehend everything about God, he wouldn't be incomprehensible, now would he?

Okay, that wasn't rockin' science, I hope. All right, so let's look at number five which is the baptism of the

Spirit. The baptism of the Spirit. This is the act of the Holy Spirit placing one of the believers into the spiritual body of Christ.

Okay? Now, this may be hard for some of you

Presbyterians out there. I'm sorry. But we have to look at the word baptism and this may help us to understand baptism of the

Spirit. Baptism comes from a Greek word baptismo. Now, we have an

English word for baptismo. But when they were translating the

Bible into English, the Church of England realized that if they translated that word directly into English, they had a problem because they weren't baptizing by dipping or plunging or immersing.

They were sprinkling and that was a problem. This, when we take with the

Holy Spirit, now let's look at that. When we talk about baptism of the Spirit, it's not a sprinkling or pouring of the

Holy Spirit. It is being plunged, being immersed with the

Holy Spirit where He's indwelling you. He's living inside of you.

You notice? Now, if we're going to translate that word properly, when it comes to baptism of the

Spirit, that explains some things. He's not just kind of sprinkling the Holy Spirit on you like some magic pixie dust or something.

And all of a sudden for different times, it's like here's the sprinkling of the Holy Spirit and at those times you have

Him, but other times you don't. Okay? You have

Him or you're in Him, I should say, because He indwells inside of you and He has baptized you,

He's plunged you into Himself. That's good.

You know why? If I could run away from the Holy Spirit, if I could lose my salvation, I would.

I'm a sinful person. Okay? I would do things, right? This is the reality.

So when we look at the word baptize, just place in there in the

English to plunge or dip and you won't have maybe some confusion with that.

All right? That's what the word means. So let's look in your syllabus there.

Under baptism of the Holy Spirit, when you look at that, did

I tip my hat by the way that I might be baptistic? Hmm, if you haven't figured that one out, but that's okay.

You Presbyterians can shoot me later, you know? But that's all right. I have some very good

Presbyterian friends. Wait, are they good friends or good Presbyterians that are friends?

All right, anyway, but that's all right. Even if you're Presbyterian, you could be wrong until you get to heaven.

I mean, then you'll learn that you should have been baptizing properly. It's okay. Won't hold it against you.

But what we do want to talk about, though, is when we properly understand that term, it might help us in understanding some of the issues people have with this.

All right? So let's look at some of the particulars in your syllabus there under the baptism, this baptism of the

Holy Spirit, okay? So one is that this ministry is limited to the church age.

This is limited to the church age. Let's look at 1 Corinthians and chapter 12, verse 13.

For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body,

Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.

Now, I want to point out two things to you here in case some of you, let's not take this off the screen yet because I want to point this out.

Some of you may start, some from different theological positions may see this and this may be the first time they're noticing it, okay?

Do you notice there that it says for one spirit we are all baptized?

That's our word, right? For baptized under the Holy Spirit. We are all plunged into one body, that body being the church, the universal church, okay?

And we are all made to drink of one spirit. Now, notice there that when we talk about this, this is showing that if we are in the body of Christ, if we are believers, we have the

Holy Spirit, okay? So, this is where I want to make this point.

Some people believe that baptism of the

Holy Spirit is evidenced by speaking in tongues, which means speaking in a foreign language, and we're going to look at that in next class in detail.

We're going to cover what that is, we're going to cover whether it still persists today or not, okay?

But what I want to point out at this point is if somebody says that that is the case, according to the verse we just looked at, if you don't speak in tongues, then you're not baptized in the

Spirit, therefore you're not a believer, okay? In other words, it would be incorrect to make the point if you believe that baptism of the

Spirit is evidenced by speaking in tongues, then according to 1 Corinthians 12, 13, if you don't speak in tongues, you're not a believer.

You're not part of the body of Christ, okay? It would be more consistent to say that if you believe that, okay, if you believe that speaking in tongues is the evidence of being baptized in the

Spirit, it would be more consistent to argue that anyone that doesn't speak in tongues is not a believer, okay?

Now, many that are in the Charismatic and the Pentecostal movement would not say that, okay?

And they get broken up into two camps then. One would be those that say, well, speaking in tongues is the evidence that you are baptized in the

Spirit, but they would then disagree with what 1 Corinthians 12, 13 says and just say you could be baptized in the

Spirit, or not baptized in the Spirit, but still be part of the body of Christ. Let's put that verse up again if we could.

For we were all baptized into one body, all of us, every one of us that was baptized into the

Spirit was baptized into the body of Christ, okay?

So, if you deny the fact that people can be, if you say that people can not speak in tongues and still be believers, but say that baptism in the

Spirit is the evidence of, or speaking in tongues is the evidence of being baptized in the

Spirit, you're going to have a problem theologically, all right? We'll get to some other issues maybe later, but you'd be inconsistent.

And I think that scripture is kind of clear on that one, all right? Where we see the evidence that you must speak in tongues to evidence the

Holy Spirit, I think that's the area where you should be questioning, not this verse where it says that all believers are in the body and have been baptized in the

Spirit, okay? Let's look at the next one, and this is that the ministry is experienced by all believers, and this is

Ephesians 4 -5, I've kind of made this point, but one Lord, one faith, and one baptism.

It's kind of clear, one, one, one. How many lords are there? One. How many faiths are there?

One. How many baptisms are there? One. There is one baptism of the

Holy Spirit, okay? It's not a second baptism, so it's not, as some teach, not as many, but some will call it a second blessing, and they'll say that you were baptized with the

Spirit once, but then you get this second baptism. There is one baptism of the

Holy Spirit, and everybody who's in the faith has that baptism, okay?

So, if you have, if you've been baptized by the Holy Spirit, if you've been immersed and plunged with the

Holy Spirit, then you are a believer, okay?

That's the definition, all right? The Holy Spirit indwells in you, and you are baptized in the

Spirit. Third, the ministry of the Holy Spirit is experienced by, sorry, the ministry is experienced by believers only once, only once, all right?

We already saw that in Ephesians, actually in both, Ephesians 4, we see that, one baptism, right?

There's only one baptism. You don't get baptized a second time. In other words, you don't lose the baptism and then gain it again, and we saw that in 1

Corinthians 12, 13, for there's, you know, all were baptized into one body and made the drink of one

Spirit, okay? So, we see that all are baptized into the

Holy Spirit. It is one -time event. Now, you're already catching some differences.

This is a one -time event. How many -time event was the filling? Over and over again. The filling of the

Spirit was a controlling thing where we sometimes lose that, okay?

We're sometimes under the control of the Spirit, and sometimes we're not. That's something that can come and go, all right?

So, we see that. Let me go to the next one, is that baptism is never commanded.

This is important. When I was in the charismatic movement, years and years ago, this was something that I was taught, that we are commanded to be baptized in the

Spirit. But if you look at the Greek word, every time that baptism is used, speaking of the baptism of the

Holy Spirit, it's never commanded, okay?

When the Bible, when God speaks of the filling, we already saw like in Ephesians 5, 18, it is an imperative, it is a command.

But in this case, it's not. It's never commanded.

Baptism, the water baptism, is commanded, okay? But baptism of the

Holy Spirit is never commanded. Okay, I just hope that you see that distinction now, because this is where the confusion comes in.

People see the command to be filled with the Spirit and substitute in baptism, okay?

And that just shouldn't be the case. All right, let's move on. Baptism is received at salvation.

Let's look at Galatians 3, 3. Galatians 3, 3.

Are you so foolish, having begun by the

Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Let's also look at Romans 6, 3 and 4. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?

We were buried, therefore, with Him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the

Father, we too will walk in the newness of life. So when we look at these two verses, we see that these two verses show us that baptism is something for all believers, once in time, at salvation.

This has all kinds of ramifications, I hope you're seeing, when it comes to people that believe that we can lose our salvation and gain it again and lose it and gain it again, lose it and gain it again.

If you want, go to our website and you can see on strivingforeternity .org,

you can see a paper that we have up there, I believe on Hebrews 6, that talks specifically about the used for people that believe that you can lose your salvation.

If you're going to argue for Hebrews 6 saying you can lose your salvation, one thing is clear, you can only lose it once.

But you're seeing that if baptism of the Holy Spirit is something that's true for all believers once in time and is the identification of a believer and you can't lose that, then you're starting to see that maybe it'd be hard to lose the salvation.

Now, if you disagree with that, when we get to the issues, the doctrines of salvation, we're going to go into a lot more detail.

But you can feel free to email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org, academyatstrivingforeternity .org,

excuse me, and you can let us know where you disagree with us, alright?

And so, let's move on. So, those were the particulars of baptism of the

Spirit. Let's look at the profit of that. Now, I don't mean profit like the guy that stands up in front of, you know, in the temple and proclaims

God's Word, alright? But the benefit, alright? So, if you look in your syllabus there, it is that becoming a member of the body of Christ, that's your blank there, becoming members of the body of Christ is one of the benefits of baptism.

We already looked at it, so we won't look at it again, but 1 Corinthians 12, 13, I keep coming back to that passage because it has a lot to do with this, right?

This is the benefit of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. If you're baptized in the Holy Spirit, you're part of the body of Christ, universal, okay?

Maybe not local, though you should be. If you're not a member of a local church, let's talk after class, okay?

We need to, seriously, okay? You should be a member of a local church, okay?

These classes, by the way, do not replace your

Sunday school or church, alright? Yeah, there's plenty of materials online where you can go and get good teachings and you can get good sermons.

That's not a replacement for church. You can't do all the one -anothering that the

Bible talks about in church at home by yourself, just saying. Alright, so a second benefit of being baptized in the

Holy Spirit is having union with Christ in death to sin and resurrection to life.

I mean, isn't it good, and we don't have time to look at this, but look at Romans chapter 6 and the first 10 verses, and you will see this described, that this is a great benefit, okay, is that we, when

Christ saved us and we were buried in death to Christ as we looked at it in verses 3 and 4 of Romans 6, we are buried, okay?

Our sin is buried with Him and we are resurrected to life. Oh, that's great.

We are resurrected into new life, alright? And so, a third one is the filling of the

Holy Spirit is made possible. Now, did you notice what I said? Baptism in the

Holy Spirit makes filling of the Spirit possible. In other words, filling of the

Spirit, being controlled with the Spirit is impossible if you are not first baptized in the Spirit. That's the reality, okay?

So, we have two different possible pictures of baptism in the

Spirit that I put into your syllabus. One is water baptism. Now again, here's the dilemma.

If you water baptize by sprinkling or pouring, my

Presbyterian friends, does that picture baptism of the

Holy Spirit? No, it doesn't. I'm sorry, okay?

You see the dilemma. So, we got to make sure we translate that word properly and do water baptism properly.

Okay, okay, enough of that. Good thing Si's not in the chat room. I'd probably be hearing it.

He'll watch it later and then email me, I'm sure. Maybe that's what we'll do one day is get him an eye on.

We'll discuss baptism. That'd be a fun thing. But a second picture could be, not dogmatic on this, but church membership.

Do you remember that passage we just looked at in 1 Corinthians, sorry, in 1, yeah, 1 Corinthians 12, 13?

Baptized by the Holy Spirit means baptized into one body. Church membership is actually kind of a picture of baptism of the

Holy Spirit, all right? So, we should be, I believe, members of a local church.

I think it pictures the baptism of the Spirit. Now, is baptism, and if you look in your syllabus you're going to see a question there, is baptism is baptism after the salvation?

In other words, does it come after salvation? Do we get baptized into the

Spirit afterwards? This is an important question. Why? This is an important question because those who believe, those of more

Pentecostal or charismatic persuasions, would believe that you can be saved and later be baptized with the

Holy Spirit. That's like a second blessing. All right, baptism mentioned in the book of Acts only, is mentioned in the book of Acts only a few times, all right?

It happens to, and I'm speaking specifically of baptism of the

Spirit. Baptism appears in the book of Acts several times, but when it talks about baptism of the Holy Spirit, it's only mentioned a couple of times,

Acts chapter 2, Acts chapter 10, Acts chapter 19. And it was a new extension of the ministry of the church, all right?

The norm for Christians in the initial transition from Old Covenant to New Covenant was a spiritual baptism at the time of salvation.

We saw that already, but the point here being is when we look at baptism, it happens at salvation after the

New Covenant was transitioned. So in other words, you had an Old Testament time, a New Testament time, and you had this transition that was in between.

That's what the book of Acts has. Now, we don't have the time to go into it, but there's an interesting study to look at.

Acts 2, who is it that receives the baptism of the Holy Spirit and there is tongues there present?

Well, that is those in Jerusalem, okay? Later, you're going to see in Acts 10, where is it done there?

In Samaria. And again, it is evidenced, there is evidence of someone speaking in tongues and they argue, well, hey, this is the same baptism that we had because we see the same gift of speaking in tongues, all right?

Then we see in Acts 19, all right, where is it then?

To a Gentile. Now, why do I point that out? Because if you go back to Acts 1, you're going to see that God had said that the

Holy Spirit would be poured out in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the utter parts of the world,

Rome even. That's what we see, Acts 2, Acts 10, Acts 19.

We see the Holy Spirit being poured out in Jerusalem, Judea, in Samaria, in the outer parts of the world, all right?

So, just a little thing. Now, I want to put up a chart, if we can. There we go.

And I want this, I want you to look at this chart. It's also in your syllabus, but I hope this becomes helpful, excuse me, to explain the differences between them.

So, you have baptism on one side, filling on the other. Baptism occurs once, filling is a continuous action.

Baptism is not commanded, filling is commanded for all believers. Baptism happens at salvation, where filling happens after salvation.

That's the confusion people have. They confuse these two, but notice the differences. Baptism is a work of God alone, where filling is a work of God plus obedience.

So, do you see these? I want you to keep it up for just a second more, so you can see that when we look at these two and we understand these two, we see two different things.

I want to keep that up for those who are taking notes and don't have syllabuses, so that you can write these down, because this helps to show us that these are two different things, all right?

So that you can clearly see baptism of the Holy Spirit is different than filling of the

Holy Spirit. And when we confuse these two, when we confuse these two, what ends up happening is that we end up thinking that you're commanded to be baptized with the

Spirit, and we end up having an issue where we can get to confusing whether baptism is tied to salvation, whether it can happen multiple times.

So, I hope this is helpful, all right? All right, let's move on, and if that's not clear to you, please let me know.

Please contact us either on Facebook or in emailing the academy.

And again, if you disagree, that's fine. We will talk in more detail about the issue of tongues specifically.

I will say if you want to, if you want to, you can't wait basically until next class.

If you go to our website, we do have two different papers on this subject. One is called,

I think something like Biblical Use of Tongues, but it's basically going through 1

Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 in context. That's important because most people take them out of context when they use them and just kind of take verses here and there and not look at it in its entirety, all right?

So that's what we want to do. We want to look at it in its entirety. Second thing is there's a paper specifically on 1

Corinthians 13, 8 and following when it says when this perfect thing comes, the tongues will cease.

And what does that mean that they cease? So we have a paper on that. So, you can go and see that, see those two papers that we have if you want.

All right, let's move on to the sealing of the

Holy Spirit, the sealing of the Holy Spirit. This is now the next one and this is, this is now, this is the work of the

Holy Spirit where He guarantees the security of our salvation, all right?

It is an expression of ownership and authority. Maybe some of you bought a home or a car and you put a down payment and that is something that, now in that case it doesn't give you ownership but if you think about like a house where you own the house even though you have a loan for the house, all right?

And we look at that and we can see that there is a part of us where the

Holy Spirit is in, He is our sealing, our guarantee, all right?

Now, if God says, think about this, we'll get to it as we go through but if God says that He does the sealing and let's look at that actually now, 2

Corinthians 1, 21 and 24, 22

I'm sorry. And it is

God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us and who has also put

His seal on us and given us His Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

So, do you notice here who is doing the work? This is going to be

God doing the work. So, in letter A of your first blank, God does the sealing,

God does the sealing, all right? The Holy Spirit, letter B there, the

Holy Spirit is the seal in Ephesians 1. In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation and believed in Him were sealed with the promised

Holy Spirit. So, the Holy Spirit Himself is the seal. The recipients, if you look at that verse we just read, are the believers, okay?

And it's at the time of salvation. Now, so let's go through that. God is the one who does the sealing.

God the Father does the sealing. The Holy Spirit Himself is the seal.

We that believe are the recipients and it happens at salvation, okay?

So, note in this verse that the tenses of the verbs indicate that hearing, believing and sealing all occurred at the same time.

Why do I emphasize this so much? Because again, if we're sealed with the

Holy Spirit, if God Himself is saying I'm giving you the Holy Spirit as a down payment so that you know that you have eternal life, then guess what?

How could He take that away? And how could we take that away?

How could we do something to lose that if God's the one saying I'm sealing you with the

Spirit so that you can't run away basically, okay? He's doing the sealing.

The Holy Spirit is the actual seal Himself, all right? So, we can't lose that.

I hope you're seeing. It's not just these couple of verses that people are going to argue and we'll look at in Doctrine of Salvation where they pull this out and say, oh, you can lose your salvation because of this verse or that verse.

You see, as we build our theology from the beginning and build up to the Doctrine of Salvation, we're going to see that we can't lose our salvation because our salvation is sealed by God with the

Holy Spirit. Who is greater than God? You think you are?

You think if you sin, somehow that is going to break the seal of God?

I mean, are you kidding me? You see, we can't just go to these couple of verses and understand them that way when greater verses that make it very clear that this has a greater ramification.

If you can lose your salvation, then you can lose the

Holy Spirit. Therefore, He is not a guarantee. He is not a seal that holds you until the day of your glorification, okay?

That baptism isn't there. And again, you can go to the website and see why I say if that is the case, then you can only lose it once and you can never regain it according to Hebrews if you're going to interpret it that way.

All right, so let's move on. We looked at baptism. We looked at sealing.

Let's look at the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Number six, this is the last ministry we're going to look at of the

Holy Spirit in this day. This is the gift of the Holy Spirit supplying the church with all that it needs for the furtherance of the work of Christ, okay?

And there's basically two kinds of gifts. We're going to break them into two categories. There is the gifts that are sovereignly distributed by the

Holy Spirit and some that are given to every believer, all right?

So, you have two different kinds. You have some that were given, I believe, for a time period in a special way and then those as signs, they're called sign gifts.

They point to something. And then there are those that are serving gifts, okay? Those are the ones that are given to all believers.

All right, so let's look at this now. And I want to point out these gifts of the

Holy Spirit, did you pay attention to what I said? This ministry, this is a ministry of the

Holy Spirit supplying the church with all that it needs for the furtherance of the work of Christ.

In other words, we do not need the gift of drama to further the gospel.

Now, you're like, oh, dude, come on, really? Yeah, there's people that believe they have the gift of drama and that's why we need drama in the church.

I mean, it's really strange some of the things that people think that God has given them a gift and they call it a gift of God.

Now, I want to make a distinction. There are some people who have gifts and some people have talents.

Well, okay, all believers have gifts and all human beings have talents. A talent is something you're good at from birth, okay?

Something that you're just naturally good at, that not everyone is, okay?

I'm naturally an organizer, okay? I organize, I like to organize things,

I have to organize things, okay? Is anyone, all right, I'll tell you a little story about just how insane

I am. When I was in first grade, kindergarten, first grade, you go out to like, you know, at lunchtime, after lunch you have recess, everyone runs outside to play.

We run outside, everyone would just throw their lunchbox down on the steps there and then run to play because they didn't care about the lunchbox, they wanted to run and play.

And it drove me nuts to see all of these disorganized lunchboxes.

So while everyone else was playing during recess, I would sit there and organize everyone's lunchbox in size order.

So the largest ones were on the left and the smallest ones were on the right. That's what I would do during recess because it drove me nuts.

Okay, I am nuts, I agree with you, all right? But that's what

I would do. Someone in the classroom would say, classic OCD. Yeah, all right, you got me, pegged.

I would spend years, I mean, preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade,

I would do that, all right? It actually, unfortunately, took the death of my mother to get me to stop that.

But that is something that I would do. I'm naturally organizing, all right? I didn't do that as a giftedness of the

Holy Spirit, okay? But there is a gift of the Holy Spirit to administer. We'll look at that in a minute.

We're probably going to go a little bit long just so I can wrap up class tonight, okay, to wrap this lesson up.

But there are things that are gifts of the Holy Spirit. Those are things we get at salvation.

Every believer is going to have them, okay? Every believer will get some gifts of the

Holy Spirit. If you look at 1 Corinthians 12, you're going to see that. We all have gifts of the

Holy Spirit. We have differing gifts and different levels of different gifts, but those are things we get at salvation.

For example, for me, when I got saved, teaching was something that was a gift of the

Holy Spirit. I did not in any way ever want to be in front of a classroom before I became a

Christian. I didn't want to talk to people. I didn't want to teach people.

Never in a thousand years would I have thought of that. But when I got saved, there started being a desire within me.

As I started studying the Scriptures more, I wanted to teach others what I was learning. And even though I have fear and trepidation,

I do get up in front of people and speak, all right? And if you think I'm not nervous before I speak, my son wants

I had a watch that you could check your pulse. Just before preaching one Sunday morning, just before getting up, my son looked.

I was just kind of curious, so I just kind of put my finger on the watch and checked it out. Yeah, it was like my pulse normally is like in the 60s.

I was doing like 120 beats per minute just because I was like so afraid to get up and speak.

And then once I open God's Word, I usually settle down because now it's a gifting of the

Holy Spirit. Because when I'm practicing the gift that the Holy Spirit gives, He does the filling.

He does the enabling. So the gifts of the Holy Spirit isn't just He gives it to you in leaves, but He helps and empowers you with it, okay?

He fills you to do it. So it's something that you, all of us, when we look at these gifts of the

Holy Spirit, I want you to realize every single one of us are commanded to do the serving gifts, okay?

It's just that not every one of them are going to come natural to us. Let's look at these real quick. Let's start with the sign gifts and I want to point out the purpose of the sign gifts.

Sign gift, a sign is to point to something, all right? Once that something arrives, you don't need the sign anymore. When I drive to Florida and I look for signs saying that, you know,

Florida this direction, which is what I hope to see and not Maine in this direction. I hope

I'm not going the wrong way. And if I see a sign saying I'm headed to Maine and I want to go to Florida, time to turn around and repent.

But when I get to Florida, I no longer need a sign saying Florida this way because I'm there, okay?

Once the thing the sign points to arrives, you no longer need the sign. So there's two purposes,

I believe, to these sign gifts. One is to validate the messenger, to validate the messenger.

That's your blanks there. Purpose number one is to validate the messenger. And number two, to authenticate the message.

So you have the messenger and the message. Validate the messenger, authenticate the message.

You had a time where people would look to have miraculous things they could do to vindicate that the words they're speaking are coming from God.

Okay, does that help? I hope. We don't have time to look at all these, but there's several categories of prophecies.

Let's put the verses up there though. So you can look, 1 Corinthians 13, 8, 10, 1

Corinthians 12, 8, and 9. You see here in these, you see the gift of prophecy.

You see the gift of tongues. You see the word of knowledge. You see the gift of healing.

You see the, in here, also we could put the next one up too, 1

Corinthians 12, 28, and 5. Oh no, that's for the next one. So hold off on that, sorry. But the word, the working of miracles, interpretation, word of wisdom.

So those are the sign gifts. Prophecy, tongues, word of knowledge, healing, working of miracles, interpretation, word of wisdom.

Okay, so looking at those, some of these are, we understand what they are, some we don't.

Prophecy, we already looked at that. That's foretelling and foretelling. Foretelling, you know, and foretelling, so one is telling the future, one is telling the past.

I would say that telling the past is clearly still in existence. I'm doing it now. I'm declaring to you what

God's word says. Part of preaching is prophecy. Tongues, we're going to look into in more detail next week.

A word of knowledge was some form of some special revelation that was given from God.

Healing, well that one's kind of clear. God sometimes gives people an ability, the authority to heal or an ability to heal.

It came from God though. Working of miracles, doing different miracles.

Interpretation of tongues, we'll talk about what that is. And then words of wisdom.

So, let's focus more on the serving gifts now and that is this. We see this in 1

Corinthians 12, 28 and Romans 12, 5 to 7. Easy to remember, the 12th chapter of both.

All right, now if we look at this, we see here the purpose of the serving gifts in your syllabus there is to equip the local church for the essence it needs for Christian ministry.

Now we have prophecy. If you look at here, prophecy, ministry, teaching, exaltation, giving, ruling and mercy.

Okay, now let's define those. Let's break each one of them down and look at what they are.

Okay, so as we look at these and I want to again emphasize this is all the gifts that church needs.

All right, you are given as part of a local church, you are given certain gifts of the

Holy Spirit to serve the local church. These serving gifts are for the purpose, not a pointing to something.

Okay, and I believe that that pointing is the message of God. Okay, that's what they deal with, revelation.

Therefore, I would argue once the Holy Spirit has finished and given us the

Word of God, we no longer need those signed gifts. Okay, but the serving gifts still exist today.

We all are commanded to do each one of them and we, but some are going to come more natural to us, kind of come easier to us.

All right, and that becomes the thing that we have to focus on. All right, so let's look at these gifts.

First, prophecy. What is prophecy? Prophecy, I already mentioned, this

Word has the idea of forth telling the Word of God whether it is

Scripture already revealed or details of future revelation. Since we now have a complete revelation, at least in our day and age, whether God wants to add to Scripture, that's up to Him.

I believe He would do that at the end of the church age though if He's going to do that. Since now we have a complete revelation, the gift connected with this, with being able to stand before various groups of people communicating what

God's already communicated. So, I believe this gift of prophecy would be that of standing before people and boldly proclaiming the

Word of God. All right? So, let's look at the next one, ministry.

This is the gift, this gift of the Holy Spirit is the ability to do behind the scenes functions, sometimes called service, without a desire for leadership.

It is associated with the office of a deacon because it's the same word used here. This is one of the problems we have in church government.

We'll look at this when we get to churches, that deacons function as a ministry. Pastors when they shouldn't, okay?

Deacons are those who serve behind the scenes. Some people have a gift to serve behind the scenes, okay?

They don't need to have leadership positions. They just like to be behind the scenes.

I'm actually more of that. That's my giftedness. My giftedness is teaching and serving.

I like to be behind the scenes doing stuff, all right? This is something where, you know, we have different things.

The gift of teaching, teaching is the ability to present clear fashion, the meaning of the word of God.

So, this is different than being that guy like, you know, the open air preacher or the pastor of church who gets up and boldly proclaims

God's word. I think the open air preacher, it's a little bolder. It's easy to preach. I do both.

It's easy to preach in front of a congregation of people that already agree with you and like the message you're proclaiming, even if it convicts.

It's a lot harder when you're on the street and you have people that don't like the message. But teaching is the ability to clearly communicate

God's word to people. And while this gift is required for pastors, pastors are not the only one that have this gift.

So, notice the difference. A deacon is going to have the gift of serving. A pastor is going to have the gift of teaching.

You can have both, as I believe I have. Next is the gift of exhortation.

This is the gift of the ability to confront someone with the truth when they need confronting.

This may also be giving indirection. We don't all like confronting people, but some people are more gifted when it comes to confronting people with the truth of God's word.

All right, giving. This is the ability to give to ministry of the church or to those in need.

It depends not on one's wealth of the individual, but on the heart that surrendered to the

Lord. This is something where some people have a gift to give, not just of money, but of resources.

Maybe it's your time. Maybe it's your properties. But, it is that you have a desire to give.

Now, if you have that gift, especially with finances, please stay tuned at the end of the show.

We're going to talk to you about how you can help us get rid of all the ads on UStream. We would be happy to help and provide you with a ministry to give to, because we could use it seriously.

But, it's not just money. It could be your time.

It could be any of your resources that God gives to you. This is, again, one of the things that I'm gifted with,

I believe, because I do love to give to other people. I love to be generous.

And, when people take me out and buy sushi for me and my family, I get in a bad mood, because I like to do the giving.

All right. Sorry. That was an inside joke. But, at least then, people know why

I'd be in a bad mood when they're buying and not me. Look, if you guys want dinner, come see me.

If you come visit me, you pray, I'll pay. As long as we're going out and having a good, sweet fellowship,

I don't mind. Okay? Until I go to the, you know, broke and then I'll make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I'm still paying for it, though, as long as you're praying, all right? But, I just want the fellowship.

But, next is ruling. This is the ability to direct ministry in the church by gently leading others, other

Christians, in some capacity. This gift is connected with the office of a pastor, but it's not exclusively given to pastors.

So, this is the ability to administrate. Now, remember, I said I'm like OCD, right?

When it comes to organizing. I've gotten over that. If you take a look at my desk these days, it's gotten a little bit too busy.

But, that aside, I have a talent for organizing and ruling and administering.

But, I had that since I was a child. I didn't get that at Salvation. So, I don't believe that would be something where we would look at that and say that's a spiritual gift, all right?

Next would be mercy. This is the ability to forgive and express the same type of mercy that our

Lord does, okay? I'm not gifted in exhortation or mercy. I just, I'm not, you know?

I'm horrible when it comes to putting my arm around somebody and just, you know, trying to express forgiveness sometimes, you know, or to have to correct somebody.

I just don't do it well, all right? But, those are things we're still commanded to do.

And so, that would be the thing that we look at these.

Now, if you look in your syllabus there, I want to lastly go over, because this is the question that always comes up, and what came, what comes up is this.

How do I know what my gifts are? We're going to end on this. Well, actually, we're not going to end on this.

I've got a couple more things, but we're going to end this lesson on this. How do I know what my gifts are and how to use them?

Okay, so here's some guidelines for realizing and utilizing your spiritual gifts, okay?

And if you have your syllabus, it's there. This is the advantage of a syllabus. And if you don't have a syllabus, you should.

You should get online. You should get onto our website. You should get into, go and enroll.

And the reason you should really go into the website is, go to the website because you'll see it's new.

We got the new website up. Let us know what you think of it, okay? We're going to be adding to it.

We're going to add a whole new store and all kinds of things, but I delay. All right, but if you go there, you can get the syllabus and have that.

But read the list of spiritual gifts and prayerfully analyze which of these easiest come to you, ones that come since you got saved, all right?

Next, ask godly Christians what they think your gifts are, okay? Godly Christians, you know, ask them, not, you know, someone that's, you know, just wants you to, hey,

I think you got the gift of teaching. You want to teach children Sunday school? Yeah, okay. That's called manipulation.

Forget that. But ask some godly Christians. We had someone that thought they had the gift of teaching and we allowed them to teach once.

They realized they didn't have the gift. So did we. So once you have an idea, ask the leadership of church how you can utilize the gifts as I just explained we did in one church.

Study the biblical principles that help guideline you, to give you guidelines for your gifts. And then lastly, as you utilize your gift in church, ask people to evaluate the fruitfulness of them.

This is another way to confirm whether you really have those gifts. Okay? So, these are the gifts of the

Holy Spirit. And this is something that I want you to think about and focus on.

This again is something to be purposed within your local church. In other words, you should be in a local church and you should be using these gifts.

Okay? Now, one of the things that if you want, you can contact us, academyatstrivingforattorney .org.

Want you to contact us. Want you to let us know your thoughts. Alright?

I said that if you have the gift of giving, we'd come back to that. We have two immediate needs for the ministry.

Where we need financial needs. Okay? If you could help, if you're one of the people who watch this live, okay, on YouStream, you know the pain it is when they put all the ads up there.

You can help us. Okay? You can donate online and mention that you want the money to go to YouStream.

Alright? Just put it in a comment. If we can raise $99 a month to cover the

YouStream costs, we can remove 100 hours of ad -free hours.

That, well, that might cover a week or two. So really what we need to do is if enough of you can come and contribute up to $300 a month, if we can get a commitment for $300 a month for one year, we could cover all of the ads.

So you would no longer see any ads on YouStream. Okay?

And so some of you would be going, oh, praise God, that'd be great because those ads drive me nuts. Yeah, but the problem is those ads cost us money.

And so we can't do that without some funding. Alright? Second great need we have is go to our website and check out the new website.

And as you do, what we want you to do is when you look at that website, take a good look at it and realize we couldn't get it all done in phase one and get phase one done as quick as we wanted.

We want to add a store so you could buy some of the products that we have for you.

Second thing we want to add is a special portal just for students of the academy.

Right now we use Facebook. You can go to Striving for Eternity Facebook page and we have discussions that go on there.

We want to add a special portal for those that are paid students so you guys can get in better contact with one another, be more encouraging to one another, and get to know more what's going on.

And we'd also have some inside things going on in there, some inside benefits of being in there.

So those are two ways you could help us out financially this year. We're really trying to make a big step to update the website this year with a lot of improvements, but we need your help if you could.

Now speaking of encouragement, I want to bring up our brother of encouragement this week. Our brother of encouragement is a personal friend.

I do not believe he watches the show so he won't know why you're encouraging him.

Unless you tell him that you heard about it on the show or explain.

But this is the thing. This is something where this is a brother who

I've served with alongside on the board of Solutions Pregnancy and Health Center.

He's been on that board, I want to say like 15 years, and I think most of those years as the chairman.

Leads it faithfully. He started a Bikers for Christ ministry here in New Jersey.

Guys that like to ride bikes and he takes that ministry, they communicate Christ to other bikers.

They go to biking rallies and they preach the gospel there. He is an open air preacher and they go there.

And there's another reason he could use your encouragement. Let me put his name up and that is his friend Bruce Cummings.

He's already been added to our Facebook group. So if you're friends with us on Facebook, you can go into the

Striving for Eternity Facebook group and you can tag him or look him up on Facebook. He's the one with all the bikers around him.

At least that's his profile picture today. But I want to encourage you to encourage him.

He some years ago was diagnosed with a pretty aggressive cancer. He just is such a testimony in so many ways to me.

I think they had to remove, I believe it's part of his intestines ultimately. But he totally changed his life, his diet, everything to try to be able to serve

Christ longer on earth. Now I want you to think about that. You find out you have cancer.

What's your motivation for getting better? I mean, yeah, his motivation was he did say he wants to be with his wife and family and see his boys, you know, raise his boys and be part of that.

But he wanted to serve Christ longer on earth. I mean, does that tell you a little bit of the character of the man?

He's an evangelist. He teaches at a Christian school. He also has a side work.

He does estimating. But he's just a godly, godly man, the kind of man

I'd encourage you to get to know and encourage him. It is hard to struggle with cancer.

It's hard for him to struggle, you know, dealing with this with a family, knowing that he's got his boys and things.

So I want to encourage you with that. Lastly, I'll just say if you happen to be in the New Jersey area, you need to find a good church.

You don't have a good local church. I've talked about church here tonight, the need to be in a local church.

If you're in New Jersey, anywhere within a hundred miles of Jackson, New Jersey, which is dead center of New Jersey.

So anywhere, you know, come down and come. If you can't find a local church close enough to you, drive, move, find one, get a new job.

OK? But we are planting a new church. Pastor Will Costello and myself, he's a wonderful guy.

We'll probably have him as a brother to encourage at some point. But he is, you know, he and I are,

I mean, this is basically from scratch. He's from Grace Advance. We're working on the Constitution with all of the men in the church right now.

A real blessing to go through. Constitution is a blessing. Yeah, it is.

It's a lot of fun. But we want to encourage you to come out to Faith Bible Church as we plant it, as you can help us out and use your gifts that God has given you to serve in this local church maybe.

For this local church could use you, especially if you play piano. We could use some help there.

Hint, hint, nudge, nudge to any of you very talented piano players.

That may live a couple states away, but it's worth the drive. I mean, come on, you know, I mean, a four or five hour drive for church is worth it, right?

If it's a good church, don't you think? I mean, that's a good use of your day. And if, you know, there's people in other countries that they have to walk three hours to get to church for the week.

So, you know, driving in your car, your air conditioned or heated car might not be so bad. But I do want to encourage you to go to find a good church though.

And we want to encourage you next week. Tell your friends, post it on Facebook, be looking.

I think there's actually already the advertising out there. The event is already created in the

Facebook, in the Striving for Eternity group. But let others know, invite others. We're going to deal with the issue of speaking in tongues.

So I'll start the lesson in Hebrew or Greek or Chinese or something, you know.

But we're going to talk about the biblical understanding of tongues next week. And you will not want to miss it.

Whether you agree or disagree that tongues are for today, you don't want to miss it. And until then, strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.