The Holy Spirit, Spiritual Gifts, What We Believe, Part 12

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The Show Introduction and the Question of Spiritual Gifts

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome back to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, joined by Pastor Jim Osmond of Kootenai Community Church, and we're here to help you, hopefully, in understanding a, well, not really something that should be a difficult topic, but it does seem to be a controversial one, and that is the idea of spiritual gifts.

Now, we're going through our series on what we believe from striving for eternity. If you want to see what that is, just go to strivingforeternity .org. If that's too much to spell, let me give you a shortcut.

Just go to sfe .bible. That'll get you to the same place. But once you're there, go to About, and under the About, click on what we believe, and we're in this section. We're finishing up the section on God.

We're looking at the person of the Holy Spirit, and what we're going to cover today is the issue of spiritual gifts, and there is much confusion in the realm when it comes to spiritual gifts—what they are, what they aren't, how they're used, whether you get them after salvation or at salvation, whether they could be taken away, which ones—do they all exist for today or not?

Lots of discussion, lots of confusion, and we're going to help to hopefully set the record straight? Well, okay, if we don't at least do that, we will give you what our view is at Striving for Eternity with what we believe about the issue of gifts.

Before we do, though, Jim, I made a big mistake today. You know what I did? I spoke in tongues? No, no, that would have been better, actually. No, I was really foolish. I decided to go for a two-hour run, and then right after running, sit down in my chair for two hours.

Oh. Yeah, so I went to get up, and I'm like—. Are your legs cramping up a little bit? I went to stand up, and my legs said, yeah, we're not going to be working the way you think that we're going to be working.

Yeah, so I did about a 12, 13-mile run today, which felt great when I was doing it, but now that I'm sitting in the chair for a while, it's not feeling so great getting up.

You might have to get up and go run for 45 minutes or something just to loosen up a bit. Oh, my.

I made that mistake where I had— I don't play golf at all, and for charity, we did this charity golf outing, and so I did, I forget what it was, like 200 rounds of golf or 200 holes of golf. We're getting donations per hole that we did, and so my goal was 200.

I think I did like 195 or something like that, and so we started off at 8 in the morning and went straight through until like 5 o 'clock, 6 o 'clock, and then they had a fundraising dinner, and being out all day using muscles that I've never used before, swinging that club, most of my time was actually spent in the woods.

The guys were making fun of me because they gave us a dozen balls to start, and by lunchtime, I came back with four dozen balls, and they were like, how do you weigh your balls? Multiplying, I said no.

Every time I hit it into the woods, I never find mine in the woods, but I find a lot of other ones in the woods, so I just pick up those and figure I'm going to need them because most of mine are going in the woods, I can't find them.

By the end of the day, I ended up with several dozen balls, having started off with one. I think I ended up with like four dozen balls by the end, but we sit through this two, three-hour dinner, and I went to stand up, and I put my hand on the table or my chair and went to stand up, and just my back and my body was just like, no, no, we seized up.

We're not working that way, and I kind of wobbled to the car. It was really bad. That was the mistake I made today, but hopefully I don't need to get up during this podcast, and I'll be able to recover from that.

Sponsor Read and Ministry Support

So before we get into today's topic, I want to just give a word for our sponsor because I want to be able to go through all the stuff that we have without interruption. This is put on by our sponsor, MyPillow.

MyPillow helps us be able to do some of the work we do. They sponsor this program and my Apologetics Live program as well, and so they make great products. I'm not saying this because they're sponsoring us.

I'm saying this because I actually asked them to sponsor us because I love their products. I absolutely have not found a single product from them that I do not enjoy. Now, Jim, up in your area where it's really, really, really, really, really, really cold.

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And that hasn't picked up. It's picking up, but nowhere near as much as we had prior in 2019. So all of our internationals canceled and things like that. So we really do count on sponsors like MyPillow or your help.

If you want to go to strivingfortraining .org support, that's a great place to go. Now, I do want to say before we get into this, if you, as you're listening, if you find value in this podcast, I want to encourage you to share it with others that will, especially if you have people that you think will really gain from this and learn from some of the discussion that we're going to have, because like I said in the opening, there is a lot of confusion in this area, and we're going to cover a lot of different things, and there's going to be two different realms.

We're going to have those who agree with us and those that don't. And for those of you who may not agree with what you hear, I want to encourage you, just give us a fair listen and hear us out. Hear us to the end so that you at least understand what it is we believe.

You may disagree with it, and we understand that, right? We're going to be disagreeing with you if you disagree with us, but I would want to hear you out and hear your argument. And if you disagree with us, or even if you agree and you're encouraged by us, would you let us know?

Send us an email at infoatstrivingforeternity .org. That's info at strivingforeternity .org. And with that, let's get into this. And this is the doctrinal statement of Striving for Eternity. It can be found at strivingforeternity .org.

Just go to the About section and What We Believe. Jim, would you mind, under the area that we have on God, the doctrine of God, reading those last two paragraphs of the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit administers the spiritual gifts to the Church. The Holy Spirit glorifies neither Himself nor His gifts by ostentatious displays, but He does glorify Christ by implementing His work of redeeming the lost and building up believers in the holiest faith.

John 16, 13 -14, Acts 1 -8, 1 Corinthians 12 -4, 5 -11, and 2 Corinthians 3 -18. God the Holy Spirit is sovereign in the bestowing of all His gifts for the perfecting of the saints today, speaking in tongues, and the working of signed miracles in the beginning days of the Church, for the purpose of pointing to and authenticating the apostles as revealers of divine truth, and were never intended to be characteristic of the lives of believers.

I read charismatic in there, obviously, because of the subject matter. 1 Corinthians 12, 4 -11, 13, 8 -10, and 2 Corinthians 12, 12, and Ephesians 4, 7 -12, and Hebrews 2, 1 -4.

The Influence of the Charismatic Movement on Views of the Holy Spirit

It's just interesting how, in our day, I mean, what you just did there, it really does explain the issue that so much of this has been influenced, and kind of, I'm going to say a word that may upset some people, corrupted by the charismatic movement.

The issue that we see is that this is so much a focus on gifts within the charismatic Church that it's really made this a case where now we end up seeing that the Holy Spirit is almost synonymous with charismatic gifts.

And this is why I believe there's been such a distinction, a problem in Christianity in studying the personal Holy Spirit. We addressed this in the last episode, that there's so much that isn't going on in the discussion of the Holy Spirit because we're not seeing that this whole thing, where people are, should be at least, looking at what the Scripture says about the personal Holy Spirit, so much of it is being influenced by a movement that started in 1905 that wasn't normative in history.

And so, when we look at the spiritual gifts that people focus on today in the charismatic Church or charismatic movement, we have to realize that those things were not normative for 1900 years, outside of the cult and the occult.

I mean, in Mormonism, speaking in tongues and things like that were considered normal. And so, it wasn't until 1905 in Azusa Street that at a prayer meeting, a woman came to at a conference, actually, a woman reading the Scripture said, well, why don't we speak in tongues today?

And they started praying to receive the gift of tongues and so on, and moved on to where they... Now, I will say this, and Justin Peters, in the new Clouds Without Waters DVD that he's working on, I know he addresses this in Clouds Without Water 3 that's going to be coming out sometime soon.

And what he addresses that early on in the charismatic movement, in the beginning in 1905, they understood that it was languages. It was human languages. And he even tells the story of one woman who believed she had the gift of speaking Chinese and writing Chinese.

And she went over to China to be a missionary because she thought she could write and read Chinese. And we have some of her writing in Chinese. Justin actually had sent that to my wife, who, for folks who don't know, my wife was born in Hong Kong.

She was born speaking and writing Chinese. And so, Justin had asked her, could you tell me, is this Chinese? And she said, no. And he actually wanted to see her reaction when he put it up. So, we did a video call and she's like, yeah, no, that's just scribble.

And so, he's like, can you write Chinese for me? So, she wrote out for him something that described what she just saw and says, this is not Chinese in Chinese. And so, he puts that up because you could clearly see the distinction between those.

But so much of this is a focus on gifts like that. And so, what we're going to do in this episode is we're going to go through what we believe at Striving Fraternity about spiritual gifts and the Holy Spirit's giving of those gifts and what they are.

But we're also going to spend a lot of time explaining what we don't believe. And any doctrinal statement is going to say what we believe, but what that also does is clarify what we do not believe. And so, we here would not believe that all the gifts of the first century continue to today.

Defining Spiritual Gifts, Talents, and the Timing of Gifts

All right. And let me do one other thing as a way, a means of introduction. Let me define some terminology. When I teach on gifts, as I just did preaching through, not too long ago, a couple weeks ago in my church, we're going through 1 Peter, and I went in and looked at the spiritual gifts.

And as we do that, I like to define a difference between a talent and a gift. Now, when we talk about spiritual gifts, it's a talent that you have. It's a skill set. A talent is a skill that you have.

A spiritual gift is a skill that you have. The only differentiation that I'm going to make is that a talent is something you're born with, so you've had it prior to salvation, where a spiritual gift is something you get at salvation.

I cannot really support that biblically. I don't know of any verse, I take it from inference, that gifts are given at salvation. Okay, I don't know any passage that clearly defines that. And so, that would be nice if there was, because many charismatics will say that we can get gifts after salvation.

And I see the work of the Holy Spirit, as we looked at last episode, so much of it that he's doing when he regenerates us. And when we're baptized into one body, and the gifts are for the purpose of that body, then I infer that we're going to get those gifts at salvation.

Okay. Now, I mean, you might even have a verse that you could think of that works better, but...

Well, I'm just thinking if we understand gifts as being the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, then obviously that's not going to take place in somebody's life before salvation. So, I don't know of any, I'm trying to think of any Christian sect, and I can't think of any Christian sect or denomination that would teach that we have spiritual gifts from the moment of our birth that are then just made manifest after our salvation.

I don't think that that would be the case. If a spiritual gift is the manifestation of the Spirit for the good of the church, for the edification of the church, then I don't know why it would be not theoretically possible that the Spirit of God could give a gift or accentuate an ability in a person after salvation at some point.

But I can't think of a single passage scripture that says every gift you've ever received, ever in your life as a believer, is going to be given a salvation. But I can't think of a single passage scripture that might suggest that you can get gifts after you're saved.

But see, I was probably saved six or seven years before I ever exercised the gift of teaching. So, the question is, did I receive the gift of teaching at the moment of my salvation? Or did I receive that gift at the moment that the Spirit of God wanted to use that in my life?

I had no inclination at all that I would ever be a teacher. I had no desire to really ever be a teacher until I started to do that. I was required to do it at Bible college. So, I'm just looking at my own experience.

If I'm to judge by my own experience, then I would have a hard time saying that I had evidence of or knowledge of the gift of teaching at the moment of my salvation.

But that's the thing with a gift, is we may not see a talent we learn from a young age that we're good at certain things. And the way I always explain this is I have a talent of being organized to a fault.

My wife has had to help me get rid of some of my OCD tendencies, but I always tell the story of when kids would go out on the playground and they'd have these things called lunchboxes. And for those of you who grew up in the last 30 years, you probably don't know what a lunchbox is, but we used to bring our own lunch to school.

We didn't have the government providing lunch for us. And so, the kids would go out to play after lunch and recess and everyone would dump their lunchboxes on the floor and go run and play. And it drove me nuts.

I would spend the entire recess organizing the lunchboxes by size order. Or alphabetically. Well, it wasn't alphabetically, but it was size. And my wife, when we got married, she basically said, look, you got one of two choices.

You could do your own laundry or you could let me put your clothes the way I think they should go. Because I had all my clothes organized, you know, long sleeve by short sleeve. Then it would go by style of shirt, color of shirt.

And I am just very organized that way. I had a guy that was helping me move out of my first house and he went up in my attic. He's like, even your attic is organized. I like things organized. That is a talent.

It's something I've had all my life. But when I got Or a defect. Or a defect in my case, it could be a little bit OCD with it, yes. The effect of the fall of all your life. But I never wanted to teach until after I got saved.

Now, I didn't express, like you, I didn't exercise it till later. But I do remember sitting and going like, you know, watching my teacher in school and being like, maybe it'd be neat to do something like that.

And it was something that once I started exercising it, prior to salvation, I was not good at communicating difficult things to people where they understood them. After salvation, I was. And so even though I didn't exercise it in a Bible study, in preaching or Sunday school or something like that, I believe that gift was there and it came out or was more revealed through the exercise of it.

And so I believe that we get the gifts because the gifts are for the purpose of the church and he baptizes us into the church. So I think he gives us what we need at that time. What we do see, and the only passages we could look to is in Acts, when you see that the first in Jerusalem, they get the gift of speaking in tongues.

When is it? It's tied to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. What is the argument that Peter makes when he goes to a Gentile's house and he says that they receive the Holy Spirit? They immediately got the same gift.

And so the argument Peter makes, and again, this is inference because this is just, this is what we see in one case. Is that the truth for all cases? But at least in that case, Peter's argument is because we see the gifts being practiced, that means they got the Holy Spirit.

And so when we also, in definitions, let me define terms between signed gifts and non-signed gifts. It's just a way of defining them as there are certain gifts that were purposeful for pointing to the vindication of those that would write scripture.

And so what you see there is that those gifts point to something. It's a sign to something. Once the thing comes, then you don't need the sign anymore. Now, Jim, I'm not sure your position on this. So you have to let me know if you agree or disagree, but we're going to get into this later.

But I would argue that once the canon was closed, in other words, if you don't know what the canon is, back to our previous episodes, we talked on the scriptures, but it's basically the 66 books of the Bible, the measure of them.

I believe once that was completed, there was no more need for these gifts and that brought about the end of them. The only scripture, and we'll spend some time in the scripture, but the only scripture passage I could turn to for that is going to be 1 Corinthians 13, 8 and following, with what is the perfect in there.

Jim, when you look at that, what is the perfect? What is it that you hold the perfect to be? I would say the same thing as you.

I believe it's a completed canon. MacArthur would say that that's a reference to the eternal state. And I think that that's Justin's perspective as well. In fact, he was just asked that at this conference that we did with him this last weekend at our church in the Q &A, and I asked him that question, what is the perfect referred to?

And he said that he thinks it's going to heaven, being perfected, being in the eternal state. And I referred to that as a mild heresy. I told him, I said, we can both agree to be a cessationist and hold to the same conclusion, even though we get there two different ways.

And let me encourage you, and I'll put some links in the show notes for this, but there's two articles that I've written on strivingforeternity .org on tongues. And if you view them, basically there's going to be, basically what we're looking at there is two articles that we have that are going to explain, one is the biblical use of tongues, and then the other is what is the perfect.

It's going to address that. And in that article, I spent some time saying that there are, you can make a case for the fact that there are views that I think you could hold to. I think it is possible to hold to either the eternal state as MacArthur or our death being that we then are glorified.

As Justin's view, I don't think they're right. I disagree with him, but I think those are probably the only legitimate ones other than saying that it's the completion of the canon. Okay. But I think that that's going to be something that becomes important as we look through this.

So, when we look at the signs, we're talking about these gifts are going to be signed gifts and non-signed gifts. And we're going to do that just because that way you end up seeing the distinction of those that the charismatics would hold to today that I'm going to say ceased.

Now, like I said, if you believe that gifts have not ceased, please do not tune us out. Please give a listen, hear us out, hear the arguments. And if you disagree, I'll tell you what, contact us, let us know.

If you disagree, let me encourage you to at least go to strivingfraternity .org, do a search on tongues. You'll find the biblical view on tongues. It goes through 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 in context.

Then have tongues ceased. Look at those two articles, read them, and then let's engage. And if you, I'll even put this out. If you disagree with my view in either of those papers and you would like to voice your opinion, I'd be happy to have you on my Apologetics Live show, where it's a two-hour discussion show, and we can have a full discussion on it.

And I will let you express your views and express where you think I'm wrong. And I will express where I think I'm right and I think you're wrong, but that's okay. We'll still go to heaven if we both believe in Christ.

So I'm not saying that someone's not a believer in this realm, okay? So these are some things we want to get out of the way before we get started with this, because there's so much confusion and controversy that's, I think, unnecessary when it comes to this.

The Holy Spirit Gives Gifts for the Church, Not for Self-Display

So let's look at what the doctrinal statement does say. The Holy Spirit administers spiritual gifts to the church. Now that right there should not be controversial. I certainly hope it isn't, but some might argue when he gives it.

But it is that the Holy Spirit does give believers gifts that are meant to be used within the church. And I distinguish that from a talent, okay? Now, when we have these gifts, they're for the purpose of the church, for building up the body.

So therefore, that's where it should be used. And as I said in the last episode, not for parachurch ministries. Your spiritual gifts should be used in your church first, parachurch ministries second. But one of the things I think that we have to realize is that the Spirit gives those gifts, and every one of us are different.

And if you read through 1 Corinthians 12, read that entire chapter, and what do you see? That every one of us have different gifts, and we're going to be used differently. He's going to use the illustration of our human body.

If I'm not the hand, can I be upset because I'm not the head? Or the foot, say, well, I'm not part of the body because I'm not the eye. Every part of our human body has a different function, but it all works together.

And that's the purpose of a spiritual gift. That's why I say 100 of the church should be serving 100 of the time. It shouldn't be an 80 -20 rule that 20 of people do 80 of the work. No, all the work should be done by everybody because we all have been given different gifts by the Holy Spirit to serve that body of believers that we're in.

God put us there to serve them. Therefore, that's who we serve. We need to be serving the body. That's the purpose of these gifts. Now, what happens if we're not using those gifts in the body? Well, what happens to you if your eyes stop working?

Well, your body doesn't function as well. It's hurt. Other parts of the body have to pick up more to compensate. If you're not using your spiritual gifts in the church, then other members of the church have to use their spiritual gifts to try to compensate for your loss.

You ever think about that, believer? If your church isn't doing well, it might be because you and I are not using our gifts in the body the way we're supposed to. Well, then let's get on that and start serving our local body.

But this first sentence, I think, doesn't have so much of the controversy. It is the Holy Spirit who gives these gifts. The Holy Spirit glorifies neither himself nor his gifts by the display of them. Let me be really clear with this.

Jim, we were talking earlier, I think even in last episode, where we talked about experiences, right? And this is really the big thing that we see. Like you were saying, do you judge your gift by your experience?

Did I have it? Did I rate your experience? We have experiences. And one of the things that we end up seeing is that sometimes the confusion is delineating between what the Bible says and what we experience.

And what we see in a lot of the behavior is people that just in a very outward way want to display, look at me, look at the gifts that I have. Okay, look, I speak in tongues. Oh, you speak in tongues?

Well, I get a word from the Lord. Oh, you get a word from the Lord? I can heal. Now, if you've been in charismatic circles as I have, you've seen that behavior. It's like a one-upsmanship a lot of times.

And it gets more and more chaotic and crazy where you get barking like dogs and holy vomiting, holy laughter. It's a circus of ridiculous. And there's only one area I could see where Scripture would say something about that.

And it's with the Pharisees that wanted their giving to be seen. So what did they do? Let's toot a horn. So everyone sees, look, I'm giving. Everyone see this? I'm giving. I'm going to put lots of coins in.

So you'll hear the clanging, right? God condemns that such behavior.

Yeah, and that happens in charismatic circles because of the nature of their claims. They have got to constantly be pushing the envelope. And so one person comes out and says they have a vision of heaven.

And the other person comes out and says heaven came down to them. Another person comes out and says, well, no, I actually went to heaven. And the next person has to go to heaven once a month. And the next person, I go there every day.

I go there four times a day. I go there and have dinner four times, five times a day. And everybody has to keep pushing the envelope to show how spiritual they are, because the measure of their spirituality, the measure of their walk with God is the degree to which the way in which they have these supernatural and spectacular experiences.

So if you really want to show yourself to be spiritual, then you've got to have the right spiritual gift, the right spiritual experience. And so everyone is always trying to one up the next one and get a little edge on them, because you've got to be hip, you've got to be current, you've got to be relevant in the charismatic movement.

So everybody has to always be pushing the envelope with these experiences and coming up with the latest and the greatest and the most supernatural expressions of their giftedness and their experiences.

Because if you don't, you'll soon be left behind, and then nobody's going to give to your ministry.

Left behind in a different way than the book series. But, you know, this is the thing. Let me agree with the charismatics in something. I remember, I think it was Charismatic Magazine, that wrote an article against fundamentalist churches that would use the worship music produced by charismatics.

Now, in case you're wondering, about 85 of all worship music is created by charismatics for charismatics. And so you have these non-charismatic churches singing songs that are all geared toward experience.

And Charismatic Magazine had it right. They're like, look, we're consistent. We're writing songs all about experience for a worship service that we have that's all focused on the experience. And you fundamentalists who disagree with our experience worship, and then you sing the songs that are written for that very purpose.

And you know what? They were right. It really is. And there is a difference between what we experience and what's theologically true. And we can't let our experience, no matter how ostentatious it is, to let that be the thing that it's like, well, look, look at this gift.

Everyone look at me. There is nowhere in scripture where God says we should have the focus on self. Now, some will turn, 1 Corinthians 12, 13, 14, when it speaks about tongues, there is this part where people will say, but look, you know, this edifies myself.

And so what they take that to mean is, I should be having these gifts. I could speak in tongues, and I can do this to edify self. And so what people will do is say, well, this is my prayer language. This edifies myself.

But when you look at that in context, and you look in the context of the entire Bible, the Bible always condemns the edification of self.

So it's sarcastic. It's sarcastic in that passage. Paul is criticizing them and saying, you're just edifying yourself. And Charismatics today said, oh, that's right. Yeah, we're edifying ourselves. It wasn't a compliment.

No, it was condemning.

Love, Tongues, and Prophecy in 1 Corinthians 13

My thing, when I was involved in Charismatic Church, I was at a Bible study and two people, I wasn't even sitting, it wasn't really part of the conversation. I was just sitting at the table. They were at the other end of the table talking.

And one person said, do you believe the gifts, all the gifts continue for today? And this other person said, no, I believe that certain gifts cease like tongues and healings. And I had never heard that before, because when I became a Christian, the only thing I knew was the Charismatic movement and Word of Faith movement.

And I went, what? And I remember going home and I sat down, reading 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14, and one sitting in context, just reading it straight through without the preconceived ideas that I had been told about gifts.

And all of a sudden I realized most of what Paul is doing there is condemning the very behavior that people do today. Right? They want to be seen. They want everyone to notice what gifts they have. They want everyone focused on one gift.

And it's an outward gift that can't be proven. I mean, can you prove if someone speaks in tongues? Well, not if you're going to say it's some angelic language. We'll get to that. But what really is it?

You know, if you're just doing a gibberish, it's like, well, yeah, I got that gift. You know, a lot of this becomes something that you can't prove. Now, when Word of Faith movement, where they believe they have prophecies, it's kind of strange that they say that they're only about— and this is them saying it— that they're only about 80 -85 accurate.