Book of Romans - Unity in the Church | Understanding Spiritual Gifts, Pt. 6 (11/07/2021)

Park Meadows Church

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Good to see everybody today. It's been a busy, busy week for me. How about you?

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Had a busy week. Good week, though. And beautiful weather.

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This is the best time of year in Texas. In fact, all winter is pretty good. I'm glad we're having children's church today, because I'm going to be showing a couple of films that you probably don't even want the infants to see.

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So you'll have to step out when I get to them, probably. I'll go like this and this.

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So they're going to be there. I mean, they're not. I wouldn't play anything terrible up here for you guys.

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But I mean, it's very kind of serious stuff that we'll talk about.

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But not yet. I'll give you plenty of warning when we get to it. But we're still finishing up our discussion out of Romans chapter 12 on the spiritual gifts and how one way to have peace in the church is to have everyone understand that not all of the gifts are still operating in the church today.

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But they will be during the last three and a half years of the tribulation period.

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They will start again, the scripture reveals. Obviously, if they're going to start again, they must have stopped.

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And we're talking about when they stopped and why they stopped and all those kinds of things. As long as everyone understands that, then that can't be used by Satan to create division in the church.

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I understand that there's a lot of disagreement on this. But there shouldn't be. Because when we take the word of God correctly interpreted, it's very clear.

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And when we look at church history, it speaks very loudly. And the only problem is,

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Jesus said there'd be many false prophets in the end times. And those false prophets will also write books claiming to be church history books.

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But if you just read them with any kind of common sense and you study church history, in other words, read other books that have been written by great church historians, you will see the conflicts in these books written by the charismatics that really say the opposite of what church history says.

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So you've just got to examine all of it. And so let's go into it again because we've got to cover.

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And it seems like very little time sometimes. OK, so sorry about that.

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We still have PA problems too. Good thing is we think we have replacements for all the equipment. But it's going to take maybe a whole day to rewire everything.

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And I had a really busy weekend. I'll probably have to be here when they do it. So we'll get it done eventually.

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Until then, we're just recording right in through this. The sound goes right in through this.

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The camera still works. And I think you can hear me at the back, right? So we're still in Romans chapter 12.

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The theme of a lot of that chapter is the unity of the church. And we've talked about five steps to have unity.

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We actually had six ways out of this chapter that we can have unity in the church. The sixth one is this one.

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And it's about understanding that not all the gifts are still in operation. And what that means, to be very frank about it, is that they're still happening in churches.

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But they're not being caused by the Holy Spirit. They're being caused by something else. Some psychologists believe that it's learned responses, that people teach people how to speak in gibberish, things like that, that it's a learned response.

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Others, like myself, believe it is a learned response. But by learning that response and that activity, it opens the mind to demonic activity.

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And so you have unclean spirits who are mimicking the Holy Spirit and making a joke out of the church, frankly, pretending that they're healing people, pretending that they're speaking in heavenly languages or angelic languages.

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Whereas in scripture, the angels, when they spoke, they spoke the language of whoever's standing near them. They didn't speak gibberish.

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But today, we're going to talk about who does speak gibberish historically in this world.

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And it's not Christians. And it's not the Holy Spirit. And if you don't know me, everybody here does.

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But in the internet world out there, I don't know who all is listening exactly. But if you don't know me, you need to understand this is not about a debate.

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This is not about an argument or winning or losing an argument. This is about truth. So I invite you to investigate everything that I say.

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And if you find that I'm in error on any of it, shoot an email back there to Ben, or they can send it to the church, and you'll get it forwarded to me.

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And we will talk about it, because it's all about truth. So just have an open mind.

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Just ask the Holy Spirit to teach you the truth. Because when we're in disunity, the

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Bible is very clear that it says it grieves the Holy Spirit. And if you believe that gibberish speaking in church is from the

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Holy Spirit, and I believe it's from a demon, we're not in unity. And that grieves the

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Holy Spirit. So we need to figure out, really, which viewpoint is biblical and correct and historical.

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And that's what this is all about. So please seek that. Don't seek, like, why is it that we'll pick up doctrines from some church we grew up in, and then we'll hold onto those as if they're ours, as if we own it, and as if we invented that doctrine?

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We shouldn't do that. The only authority that should be over us at all is the Holy Spirit of the church and the

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Bible. Not the church, the Bible, the word of God. And that's what we have to go to to ferret out the false thinking that churches have.

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Every great denomination has some wrong things in it. Every local church probably has some wrong things in it.

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So we have to have an authority so we can straighten that out and get that out of the church. And that's the desire of this local church, is to get anything that's not truth, get it out.

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Get it out of our vocabulary, stop doing it, and do what the Lord put us here to do. All right?

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So I believe in Hebrews chapter one and verse one, the Lord clearly says that he changed the way that he reveals things to his people.

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He did it through prophets and visions and dreams and words of knowledge and being able to speak a language you never studied in school.

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It was never gibberish, by the way. He did it that way in the Old Testament and in the early part of the

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New Testament, while the apostles and the early church prophets were still being authenticated.

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None of the Jews would have believed their message if they hadn't been able to do sign gifts. The scripture says clearly the

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Jew requires a sign. Look up the word sign in any good Bible dictionary, you'll find in the New Testament, the

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Jew requires the sign. So that's why they existed. And when that need passed away, the sign gifts passed away with the need.

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Once we had the whole word of God, the entire New Testament, we no longer needed those.

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And the Lord began to take them away. And even church history shows us clearly that that actually happened.

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But we know from this scripture in 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul, through the inspiration of the

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Holy Spirit said that love never fails, but if there's prophecies, they will fail.

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If there are tongues, they will cease. If there's knowledge or words of knowledge, that will pass away.

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For we know in part, we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

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And that which is perfect is the word of God. It's in the neuter in Greek, which means it's a thing.

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It's not a person. So it's not the Holy Spirit. It's not Jesus coming back. It's the word of God. And it's the only perfect thing that we have.

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And we showed a lot of scripture about that already. So you see, we have two points to look at to prove what's true and what's false.

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The scriptures, we've already done that part. And now we're gonna continue to finish looking at church history and look at that part.

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The judgment of leading church historians agrees that there has been no recurrence of the tongues phenomenon of the first century in the succeeding centuries.

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You say, well, that can't be true because churches have it going on now. Well, what they have going on now is not what the church historians are talking about because what they're talking about is true biblical languages as in the book of Acts and as 1

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Corinthians and elsewhere talks about in scripture. So that's what's not happening anymore where someone can actually, like if we had people from different nations in this room as they did on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem and I couldn't witness to you because I can't speak your language and the

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Holy Spirit enabled me to speak in such a way that all of you here in your language, it's earthly languages without signification, 1

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Corinthians says. It means it's a significant worldly language. Then that's a miracle. And the apostles could do that.

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And some of the people associated with the apostles could do it while it was still needed. It also made people stand up and say, well, somebody that can literally save someone from the dead maybe we should listen to their message.

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And their message was entirely different than Judea's. So they had to be authenticated and this is how they were authenticated.

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But when that need was gone, it passed in every regular church history that has written anything through the last 2000 years agrees with the fact that it ceased by the first century or during the first century.

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So most of the last 2000 years, that gift of tongues in particular has not happened from the

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Holy Spirit in any church anywhere. It has been mimicked by demonic activity and unclean spirits that make

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God's people out into thinking it was the Holy Spirit because they want to be faked out. They desire it.

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And the only way Satan can get inroads into a Christian's life is if that Christian desires some form of sin or to do something

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God says don't do or that he won't do. And so the Holy Spirit can't say in Hebrews 1 .1

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that I won't do it and then come back and do it because then he becomes a liar. So it's all wrong.

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It's all unbiblical. It's all ungodly, but it mimics godliness. Does that surprise us when the scripture says that Satan's ministers will appear as ministers of righteousness and that these ministers will appear to be angels of light, these false preachers?

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So does that surprise us that unclean spirits would enter into the Bible and mimic the

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Holy Spirit to make fun of the church and make them do ridiculous things that the Holy Spirit never did in the

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Holy Writ? You can't find anywhere in the Bible where the Holy Spirit made a whole church start laughing so long that they preacher couldn't preach or where the whole church starts roaring like lions as happened in, what was that, the 80s,

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Charlotte, or the 90s when that was going around the country, but in the Holy Spirit was supposedly causing that. That is an unclean spirit causing the church to be mocked by the entire world.

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And Satan is laughing at that. That's not the Holy Spirit causing a gift of the

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Bible, of the New Testament. So if you don't understand that some of these signed gifts have ceased, you'll be greatly deceived by Satan and by other people, people telling you to do these things.

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I have people in this church that people came up and said, you've got to go out and learn how to speak in tongues. Let me ask you something.

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If it's a spiritual gift, how can you learn it? That's not a spiritual gift.

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That is a fake spiritual gift is what that is. And yet it's everywhere in all these churches they do these things.

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But church historians say, no, red flag goes up because it stopped happening in the first century or shortly thereafter.

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Philip Schaaf, he wrote a book in 1910 called The History of the Christian Church.

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He's sometimes the acknowledged dean of church historians. And he said this, historically, the gift of tongues passed from the church at least by the time of Christ Osborne who lived 353 to 430

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AD. That's a long time ago. He further said that similar phenomenon may have been observed of an inferior type.

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And what he means by that, it wasn't real languages. It was gibberish. Whereas in the scripture, the tongue speaking, in fact,

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I hate the fact that it's translated that way in English, it should say be languages. The biblical, when it talks about tongues, the word is language because the only

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Greek word for language is tongue. And so they, for some reason, they gave a literal translation into English and call it tongues when a better translation would have been what we say when we mean languages, which is language.

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So you should say language, not tongues. But these are inferior because they were gibberish.

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They weren't really languages. They weren't miraculous. In other words, they weren't from the Holy Spirit. And yet they happened.

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They were approximations of counterfeits. And they did appear from time to time in seasons of special religious excitement.

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It doesn't mean the Holy Spirit was doing it. So we've had little uprisings of this for 2000 years on and off, but these historians are saying they're not legitimate because they're not from the

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Holy Spirit. He mentions that this phenomenon has occurred among the Mormons and other non -Christian sects.

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And he's referring to ecstatic utterances or gibberish. B .B.

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Warfield, who's probably the greatest church historian, he wrote a book called Counterfeit Miracles in 1918.

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See, this is not a new problem. Then the outbursts of tongues, which charismatic such as John Sherrill cite, were in clear connection with known heresies, movements that were teaching heresy, false doctrine.

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It's always connected. We mentioned this last Sunday. And I won't give this example again because we've already given it, but Sherrill mentioned this guy named

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Montanus, who he said, well, he spoke in tongues, but the guy also claimed to be the paraclete.

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He also claimed to be the Holy Spirit. That's false doctrine, ladies and gentlemen. And the point is this church historian is saying that when you see these little uprisings of tongue speaking and sign gifts, they're always associated with false doctrine and heresy.

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B .B. Warfield points out that many miracles cited by historians indicate a merger of Christianity and heathenism, where the church brings in heathen practices just to get more people to come to church.

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Don't wait in the church, in the modern church. You bring in worldly practices just to get a bigger crowd.

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And this has been used, this exact fake gift of tongues has been used to try to bring bigger crowd.

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To me, it would run me off, I don't know about you, but we're gonna let you have a taste of that here in a minute.

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Witches speak in ecstatic utterances in their coven meetings. So do pagans, so do

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Mormons, so do Hindus, Brother Raj has told me, Raj Kripalani, a

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Spanish pastor over at Northside Baptist Church. He speaks five languages, but they're all learned.

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It's not gibberish. But he says that it's a very common Hindu practice to speak in ecstatic utterances or gibberish.

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Now I'm gonna show you this. I clipped this out, an article, comes from Harvard University, and it's an article on witchcraft.

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This paper will show that glossolalia, which is the big word for tongue speaking, for gibberish.

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It almost sounds like gibberish, doesn't it? Glossolalia, if you said that 10 times fast, you'd be speaking in tongues.

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Anyway, glossolalia and similar speech phenomena occur in various forms during shamanistic rites.

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Shamanism is one of the worst false religions in the world.

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The creed had its roots in the ancient religions of Asia Minor. Herodotus speaks of an inspired priest in Greece who suddenly spoke in a barbarian language, and Virgil in the

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Aeneid says, he tells of a

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Sybil. Now what a Sybil is, it's a woman who is a fortune teller. He tells of a Sybil who spoke strangely while possessed by a demon.

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The Old Testament alludes to a form of ecstatic behavior similar to glossolalia.

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There was an account in 853 BC, 400 prophets raved in ecstasy before the gate of Samaria.

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And in ancient Egypt, necromancers, that's a witch who can tell the future, they uttered formulas believed to be revelations from the gods made up of foreign words and senseless noises.

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The more mysterious and incomprehensible these formulas were, the greater their power was thought to be from Satan.

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It is entirely probable, moreover, that sorcerers from India and China, contemporaneous to the

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Samaritans, spoke incoherently while divining, curing, and communing with the spirits.

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An example of glossolalia in the later Han Dynasty will be cited subsequently in this article.

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I didn't pull all that in here. To indicate the antiquity of phenomenon even in China.

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China, did I say it right? All right, so now it's telling me to show the

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John Henry video. This is where, unless the baby's asleep, cover its ears.

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Why do you think the gift of tongues, it became the sort of focal point of the charismatic revival at the beginning of the 20th century?

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And still is the gift, it seems to me, that charismatics tend to be obsessed with.

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If you haven't received the gift of tongues, then you haven't really been filled with the Holy Spirit. Well, I think that's what launched the movement.

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I suppose if they'd come up with something else, maybe that would have been it. But I actually think that's the easiest one to falsify.

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"'Amanda' AKA Taraka said the baka so that it's a commendation for an identity and a way to say that the outcome of the war has been established."

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"'El Kanabogu' said that the birth of the Gonda began with the birth of Jesus.'" "'Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

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That is true, that is true, that is true. That is true, that is true, that is true, that is true, that is true. "'Ele

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Mahadilege' I think praying in tongues is glorious.

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I can't imagine life without it. I like what Paul said, I pray in tongues more than all of you. The language he uses there, he says,

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I pray more in tongues than all of you combined. In other words, I'm a tongue talker and I believe in that breakthrough.

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I know what it's like to be edified by just praying in the spirit and have the Holy Spirit pray through. I love it.

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Hello everyone, this is John Henry with the Gospel of Christ, and welcome back to another episode.

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If this is your first time on the channel, I invite you to subscribe and click the bell button to be notified each time we upload a new video.

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First of all, let me start by apologizing for the charismatic tongue speaking, gibberish uttering chaos you just witnessed.

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Second of all, I hope that you know that those people were not speaking in tongues.

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It's just learned behavior put together gibberish with induced music that throws everyone in those gatherings into a frenzy and a trance in some instances.

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Lastly, I want to go back to what false teacher and false apostle Bill Johnson said about him loving to pray in tongues and not being able to imagine life without it.

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I think praying in tongues is glorious. I can't imagine life without it.

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I like what Paul said, I pray in tongues more than all of you. The language he uses there, he says, I pray more in tongues than all of you combined.

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In other words, I'm a tongue talker and I believe in that breakthrough. I know what it's like to be edified by just praying in the spirit and have the

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Holy Spirit pray through you. I love. If you're ignorant about Bethel church or Bill Johnson or the so -called gift of tongues of the charismatics, you may be duped into thinking what

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Bill Johnson said was a weighty, noteworthy spiritual statement.

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Now witness his church doing what he said about praying in tongues or praying in the spirit.

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Note that this took place at his church on January 29th, 2020, doing something called spirit importation, which was led by Randy Clark, another false teacher.

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This is not only chaotic, but also demonic. Now, why do I say that? As some of you know,

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I'm originally from Haiti and in Haiti, many, many people practice something called voodoo, which consists of incantations, demonic spirit possessions, and ritualistic interpolation of demons.

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Just as a side note, every major saint you know in the Catholic church is associated with a demonic spirit in the voodoo world.

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So a voodoo priest could be performing a ritual using the name of a saint, except it's not a saint.

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It's just a demonic spirit. So this was just a side note to put things into perspective a little bit.

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Now what you've just witnessed at Bethel church, which actually happens pretty regularly, by the way, is literally the same thing that happens in a voodoo ceremony, except it doesn't take place in a building called or designated as a church.

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As you can see, the majority, if not all of the people, have gone into some type of a trance in that gathering. What's next is demonic spirit possession.

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Exactly the same process in a voodoo ceremony, where pretty much most of the people there get possessed by some unclean spirit, some demonic spirit.

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The voice of the people start to change, the gaze start to change, which is a clear exhibition of demonic spirit possession.

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It is literally the same thing that happens in a voodoo ceremony. I'm sorry for even mentioning this, but it was worth mentioning, or at least

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I thought so. All in all, what you just witnessed at Bethel is not, I repeat, it is not a sign of the

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Holy Spirit manifestation. The Holy Spirit does not make believers do that.

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The Holy Spirit does not, and I repeat, make believers do that. That was a keen resemblance to people going into a trance right before they are completely overtaken and possessed by some unclean spirit, or as one would call it in voodoo world, by Aloha, L -W -A.

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You may hear John MacArthur, Justin Peters, Steve Lawson, Phil Johnson, and other teachers talk about the chaotic aspect of the charismatic movement.

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There is absolutely no order. Guess what? It is exactly the same thing in the voodoo world.

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There is no order. It is pure chaos. After all, why would unclean spirits need order, right?

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No one knows what's going to happen, or when what's going to happen is actually going to happen.

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Again, demons and unclean spirits don't set up schedules. So, these ceremonies go on for hours.

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There's no teaching, by the way. There's no sense of truth. It is purely sensual and perverted at times.

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Only singing or chanting and dancing until everyone or the majority of the people there is possessed, and then at some point, when their body can no longer go on and the spirit has left, that's when they stop.

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I think I have to make a different video explaining this in more depth. Anyway, this is not only about falsifying tongues and making people think you can speak in tongues.

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This is also about demon possession and unclean spirit importation. So, if you're listening or watching, do not open yourself to this gibberish, false teaching, and spirit importation nonsense.

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Many people, in their ignorance of the truth and the Word of God, may want to sincerely have some kind of spiritual experience in their lack of understanding of Scripture.

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They may want to experience what these false teachers claim to have experienced, but just know in doing so, they are opening themselves up to demons.

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Now, let's dial it back a little bit and listen to what John MacArthur has to say about tongues. JOHN MACARTHUR So when you've got

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Charles Fox Parham saying that Agnes Osmond stands up and is speaking in Chinese and nobody in the room knows

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Chinese, they're all, wow, look at this, you know, we're hearing Chinese and there's not a

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Chinese person in the building. Nobody knows that. It's an easy thing to falsify because it's nonsense.

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It also is an easy thing to sort of double falsify with a false interpretation because nobody knows what the person is saying.

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It's learned behavior. And if you listen to them, you know, they're saying what they've heard from somebody else, and it has a kind of staccato, and it kind of works together.

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As one guy I heard many years ago said, it's as simple as saying,

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Bata hunda chudabada Yamaha, you know what I mean? It's a kind of...I

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don't know if you say that really fast, Bata hunda chudabada Yamaha. You know, whoa, you know that.

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It's very easy to falsify. You can't falsify a miracle, you can't falsify anything as easily as you can falsify that, and everybody can talk in gibberish.

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So I think that's what started the movement. And you do remember, Phil, that in the early years of that movement, they attached the arrival of the

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Holy Spirit in the life of the believer to that experience. So that became the foundational kind of identifying mark of the baptism of the

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Holy Spirit. And once that got embedded in the movement, it just...it stuck. And again, it's easy to fabricate.

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People in crowds like this all stand up and speak that kind of gibberish and they get away with it because there's no way to measure the reality of it.

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PHILIPSON Although there would be. This goes back to my comment about charismatics not wanting their miracles to be...and

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they're not subject to verification. PHILIPSON That gift of all gifts would be pretty easy if it were genuine.

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JOHN Well, that's why they had to change the definition of it. PHILIPSON Right. JOHN They said at the beginning that it was Chinese and they were speaking language.

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Do you remember what Charles Fox Parham did? He started sending people to the mission field and said they don't need to learn language.

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And they all arrived in the mission field and said, we're here and we can speak the language supernaturally.

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And, of course, the whole thing collapsed in a massive embarrassing scam because they couldn't.

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PHILIPSON That's a sad part of the story because some of those people who literally sold everything and went to the mission field really believed because Parham had told them, you know, you're speaking

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Chinese. They believed they would be able to do that when they got to the field. And now we know that what they say is not any language at all.

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And so now the shift has been made that this is not a language, this is a private prayer language.

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And they call it the tongues of angels, twisting the interpretation of 1

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Corinthians 13, the tongues of angels. And then they come back and they've said this to me many times, you're blaspheming the

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Holy Spirit if you deny us this. I had a very interesting experience. I was invited to speak at a huge event a few years back now held by Charismatic Men.

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They had a huge men's movement. It was started by a guy named Demas Shekerion, you remember that name? Massive big men's movement.

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And they asked me to come and speak. And I was surprised, really surprised because I had written

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Charismatics, Charismatic Chaos. But somebody had told the leaders that I had gotten the baptism of the

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Holy Spirit, that I had spoken in tongues. Somebody told the leaders, they invited me to come thinking

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I was going to give my testimony. I didn't know they thought that. I thought they wanted the right view of tongues.

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So I went and Jay Letty was with me at the time and I said,

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I can't believe they're letting me do this. The place was packed. They're going to let me get up and tell the truth about tongues. I can't believe they're letting me do this.

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So I got up and I started into it. I opened the Word of God and I got about ten minutes into this thing and a guy grabbed me by the back of the coat and pulled me out of the podium and away from the microphone.

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And I said, well, I really wasn't through. And he said, oh, yes, you are. And that's the only time

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I've literally been yanked out of a pulpit away from a microphone. PHILIP It's a shame they didn't get a word of knowledge about your real position.

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JOHN No, yeah, that is right. Well, and the sad part of it is I went to the moderator of the meeting afterwards and I said, you know,

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I just want to ask you one question. He got up and told everybody in the building to pray that I would receive the gift of tongues there on the spot, that the

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Spirit would overwhelm me with tongues. Of course, it didn't happen. But afterwards I said to this guy,

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I said, could I ask you just a simple question? This is the coordinator and director of the whole meeting.

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I said, what is your confidence that you're going to be in heaven?

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Tell me, why do you think you're going to be in heaven? He said, well, you know, you don't know.

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There's this long staircase and at the end there's this guy at the door and you hope he lets you in. John Henry, the previous one word that he was saying you might not have caught was the word saint.

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He said it not so much like a Texan, he said saint or something. But he was talking about the fact that the

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Catholic Church, that the people that practice voodoo know the names of all the demons and that there's one associated with each of the

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Catholic saints. Isn't that interesting? I don't know if you noticed how similar the witch's tongue talking was to the

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Bethel Church. And the fact that he said, you know, that if you invite them in, you know, it helps to speak in gibberish and to think whatever you want, think it really strongly while you're doing it and then the unclean spirits enter in.

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It's the same thing, the same thing going on except they're doing it in the name of the Holy Spirit, which to me blasphemes the

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Holy Spirit. I know they would say that we blaspheme the Holy Spirit because we say that's not the

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Holy Spirit, but I'll take my chances and unfortunately they're taking their chances.

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All right, so let me finish up here. Let's see,

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I don't know, is the camera back on? Yeah, okay. All right, so rituals vary widely in the world of witchcraft.

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It may start with wild shouting or frenzied dancing. Now, I want you to think back to the video of the

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Bethel Church that you saw earlier. What did that look like to you? Was it, I mean, you've heard tongues your whole life, but have you ever seen,

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I don't have any, what do they have, 20 ,000 people in that service? Have you ever seen that many people going completely out of control of their own mind and into something else's control?

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It was obvious. Well, it's described here in this article on witchcraft.

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It's an article called Witchcraft and Women's Culture that I've pulled up here.

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So the way they start in their witch coven meetings is wild shouting, frenzied dancing, or maybe silent meditation or both.

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A carefully rehearsed drama might be enacted or a spontaneous poetic chant carried on for an hour.

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Everyone may enter a deep trance and scry, what is that, a crystal ball,

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I guess cage into a crystal ball, or they may pass around a bottle of wine and laugh uproariously at awful puns.

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And as you remember back in the 90s, there was a guy going around preaching, he was from Canada, teaching churches to get the gift of laughter and just, they would laugh for the whole service.

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I probably couldn't stop. Sometimes that happens. The best rituals combine moments of intense ecstasy and spiritual union with moments of raucous humor and occasional silliness.

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We evoke the goddess by chanting together a line or phrase repeated over and over.

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That's the tongue speaker. Moon, mother, bright light of all earth. As we chant, we find rhythms, notes and melodies and words seem to flow through us and burst out in complex and beautiful patterns, chanting, dancing, and breathing.

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So that's where I was going to show the witchcraft video. It's one and the same thing because it's caused by unclean spirits and they mimic in the church, they mimic the

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Holy Spirit because they find people who have not obeyed the scripture that says study to show yourself approved of God.

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They have not studied history, they haven't studied some of these articles I've put up, they haven't studied church history and they haven't studied 1

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Corinthians and the book of Acts and what the Bible actually teaches about language speaking.

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They haven't looked at that at all. So they're easily duped by shysters who dress up as preachers and we might call them as Jesus with false prophets who said in the end times there would be many of those and so they blank their mind out by learning the response of speaking meaningless words.

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Now I don't know if you're familiar with Hinduism but you've heard the word a mantra, right?

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You've heard about mantras. I don't know if you know the real use of a mantra but what a mantra is in Hindu they will teach the followers to think up a word that means nothing like put a group of letters together and make a sound that means nothing and you chant that sound over and over again for long minutes and maybe as long as you have to to where your mind is blank because if you chanted a real word your mind would begin to picture what that word is but if you chant a meaningless word such as gibberish your mind goes blank and that's when the demons enter and you have a religious experience according to the

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Hindus because they think the demons are gods. Have you ever seen the Hindu Bible? They don't call it a

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Bible. I don't know what they call it but I've seen one they're about this thick and I just opened it up and it was a young woman

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I was witnessing two years ago about the Lord and she said well let me show you my Bible and she puts it there and just opens it up and it opened they have pictures in it kind of like our children's

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Bibles do and this particular picture was a ghastly monstrous looking head with about 21 different arms and a body and that was one of the many gods that they worship.

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Obviously they worship demons and so we find the same is true of the church today they're worshiping these spirits thinking that they're the

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Holy Spirit because they're mocking and mimicking the Holy Spirit just like the young girl who followed Paul around in our sermon last week from the scripture in the book of Acts where oh listen to this man he's preaching the truth he's telling you how to get to heaven and that was a demon and he cast the demon out of the young woman so that was a demon who was mimicking the

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Holy Spirit but it was an unclean spirit and if that can happen to her why do people think it can't happen in church today in these modern churches where they're being taught by these pastors who stand up and say oh

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I love tongue speaking and he doesn't even understand in the Greek it means language language speaking and he's not speaking a language he's working up some of the these ecstatic utterances of gibberish

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James Hastings in a two -volume book it's called the Hastings Dictionary of the

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Apostolic Church he wrote this in 1918 he said moreover most of the ecclesiastical miracles that we see in the church today are mere prodigies or fake in other words and can in no sense be called true genuine biblical signs in many cases they are demonstrably the invention of later biographers and contemporary writers who show no uh these writers show no mention of them even happening so remember the earlier church historian said that these sign gifts ceased by the time of Christostom this is

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Christostom he lived from 347 to 407 AD he's one of the early church fathers and he was in the eastern church which is basically where Russia is they have

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Greek Orthodox that's that's the kind of thought church father that he was not

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Roman Catholic but similar it's just they had their own pope but he testified and he's the one who wrote a commentary on the book of first Corinthians and he testified the gift of tongues had passed away by the time that he lived in fact a long time ago from his viewpoint so long time ago that he couldn't even really discuss what it really meant because he'd never seen it before in operation in his commentary on the book of first Corinthians chapter 12 he said this whole place is very obscure but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance the facts referred to and by their cessation in other words they ceased being such as then used longer take place today for the church that was written by an early church father sometime around 370

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AD so by a thousand seven hundred years ago there was no gift of languages found in the churches anymore it had already ceased like the apostle

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Paul said that that comes from Christ's apostle homilies on the first epistle of Paul the apostle to the

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Corinthians and that's the footnote you can look that up if you want that's just church history man named

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Augustine who you hear me mention a lot in the 1480s one of the great

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Roman Catholic church fathers who believed in the sovereignty of God he believed the election he believed in predestination he believed in eternal security but the

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Roman Catholic Church didn't follow him and they went another direction and that that is a turning point in the history of the

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Roman Catholic Church if this man had won the argument we'd all be Roman Catholics to be happy to be one but he he didn't win the argument but all of any if you ask any

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Catholic do you know Saint Augustine oh we love Saint Augustine they just don't like what he taught but they think he's a great church father so uh he was born in 354 he died in 430 and why do we even look at church history and I already mentioned this so I won't read it but in 2nd

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Timothy 4 verses 11 and 13 it talks about how Paul asked for not only the scriptures which is the parchment of which is the uh the parchments but he also asked for other books which weren't scripture so study to show yourself approved unto

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God which Paul wrote that verse under the inspiration of his spirit doesn't mean just only study the bible we have to study everything that we can study that's true we we bear it all out with scripture but we need to be well studied so that the world around us will listen to us when we witness we need to have influence so you need scientific and mathematical and historical truths that the world knows if you're going to be a good witness

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Paul knew that Paul's one of the most scholarly Christians that ever lived so Paul was studying other books along with the scripture and we should do the same thing so we take a look at other books we learn church history and we take a look at what

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Saint Augustine who he was and what he taught and he taught the truth way back in that day what were the greatest church

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Christian thinkers of all time and they think that maybe he was the most significant since the days of the apostle

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Paul that he was when this man was alive he was the most significant

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Christian thinker since the apostle Paul all right well here's what he said in the earliest times the holy ghost fell upon them that believed and they spake with tongues which they had not learned i added that part as the spirit gave them there were signs adopted to the time that they lived in now let me interject some things you've already heard me say the time they lived in was a time when the apostles needed to be authenticated all right so they were they were signs suited to their time i mean this scholar understand really useful in the time when the apostles need to be authenticated for their behavior the tokening of the holy spirit in all languages or tongues to show that the gospel of god was to run through all tongues all over the world he used the word tongue to mean languages and he calls this particular sign a betokening in other words a sign gift that had a particular use and you had 5 000 people saved that day in jerusalem that spoke all different languages that peter didn't have a clue how to speak he was a fisherman and yet he spoke with languages so that they all understood it and got saved and that was the use of it and it also bore out that he was an apostle and that he was bringing new message to the world that judaism would disagree with if it weren't for these authenticated signs now that thing was done that tongue speaking was done for a betokening and it passed away you see that it passed away he says so chrysostrom said that um it had passed away by his day which was you know prior to 400 this is more like 470 i'm sorry 370 a .d

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so now you're pushing almost back to the time of polycarp right after john the apostle was preaching and by that time this gift had ceased from the church this is what charlie said it would cease so what was also happening about the same time the new testament was being canonized all of the scripture in one book and that's the perfect when that which is perfect has come these things will cease and it all fits together scripture and church history fits together just like that because god has given us the truth to look at so that you don't have to be deceived by false preachers and by unclean spirits with that in mind let's stand and have prayer together we'll go have lunch and forget about this nonsense all right it's good to have it covered lord we thank you so much for your word and how it is our authority how your holy spirit gave it to us and finished it and gave us the entire of christianity in that book by the time titus was written and certainly by the time the apostle john wrote the book of revelation where he said do not add to or take away from the words of this book just as the old testament scriptures it said we thank you lord that you've given us the word of god you've not only given it to us you have protected it and preserved it all the way to our day and you will for all eternity thank you for that thank you for the authority with which it speaks and instructs us and keeps us away from false preachers it helps us to identify them quickly and easily and to mark them as the apostle paul said and avoid them and so lord we ask you to go with us into this time of fellowship bless the food we're about to have we ask you to take this knowledge that we've been reminded of or some of us have learned for the first time the last few