Apostles and Prophets - Brandon Scalf

Heritage Church Tulsa

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1st Timothy chapter 3 verse 15 states that the household of God or the church is the pillar and support of the truth.

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That is the church exists to steward and to promote

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God's truth to God's people and yes even to the world.

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The question becomes after we hear such a thing is well what is the truth and how do we come to know the truth?

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Well many would -be preachers, pastors would get up and assert that we know the truth because of what someone says, some vision that they have had, some dream that came to them or maybe they were given a word from the

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Lord for God's people. But what our text is going to show us today is that actually we know truth because it has been written down by the

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Apostles and Prophets and it is something that has been done and it is not something that continues to be done.

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So as Christians we might ask how can we ensure that our lives are built on truth or as our text today is going to put it a true foundation.

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Well the Apostles and the Prophets are going to be that case.

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It's going to guard us from false foundations and false teachings. It's going to guard us against false ways of hearing from God because here's the reality.

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We need to hear from God and if we need to hear from God, hearing from God the way that God has instituted or the means by which he has created is the way we should hear from God.

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So getting this right is important. In fact it's the difference between spiritual life and spiritual death.

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It is the difference between growing in maturity or not growing at all. It is the difference between being a

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Christian and being a pagan or some sort of mystic and so if you would please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy infallible and all -sufficient

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Word as we seek to better understand through this passage what we need to understand as it pertains to how we must hear from God.

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I will begin reading in verse 17 and conclude in verse 22.

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This is the Word of the Lord. And he, that is Jesus, came and preached the good news of peace to you, that is the

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Ephesians, who were far away and peace to those who were near.

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Of course that being the Gentiles. For through him, that is Jesus, we both have our access in one spirit to the

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Father. So then, you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and of God's household, having been built on the foundation of the

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Apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.

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In whom the whole building being joined together is growing into a holy sanctuary in the

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Lord. In whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the

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Spirit. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever.

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Amen? Amen. Please have a seat. As we begin this morning,

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I want to go ahead and state my objective on the front end, just so you know where we are headed, so you know what

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I believe and what I am arguing for. My contention is that the signed gifts, the gifts given to the

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Apostles and the prophets in the New Testament era have ceased.

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And the reason that they have ceased is because they have done what God purposed them to do.

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Namely, they validated the claims that Jesus Christ is who he said he was.

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And so the Holy Spirit guarded their message, he guarded their ministry, and he promoted the truth that we stand on as the pillar and support of the truth.

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Now in saying that, I understand that there are maybe a myriad of different reactions to that.

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I understand that when you use the word cease, or if you use the label cessationism, all of a sudden hands start going up and that you start thinking, hey, that must mean that you believe that the

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Holy Spirit is not active. To that,

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I would say that's a misunderstanding of what it means to hold that position or to be called a cessationist.

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To be fair, I wish I was not called a cessationist. I didn't come up with the name. It was given to me by people throughout church history because of what

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I believe. It asserts something negative as opposed to something positive, which always causes people to look at you with a squinted eye.

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But the truth is, and the truth of this passage, is that no, the

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Holy Spirit has not ceased working in general. The Holy Spirit is

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God, he is amazing, he is beautiful, and he does the miraculous all of the time.

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The question becomes how does he do the miraculous and how does he communicate what he means to communicate, or rather, it might be better said, how has he communicated in the way that he is meant to communicate?

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I believe that the Holy Spirit is very active and very present in the life of the

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Christian and in the life of the church. I believe and I have seen the

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Holy Spirit work tremendously as he has taken dead sinners who cannot respond to spiritual stimuli, as Paul has talked about in Ephesians chapter 2, and awakened them to spiritual life.

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And if you don't think that is an amazing work of the Spirit, then you need to revisit your

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Bible. He illuminates the Scriptures, and yes, as a cessationist, it's perfectly fine to say

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God heals people. He just doesn't heal people through healers.

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Now, what does cessationism have to do with the text at hand? Well, it has everything to do with the text at the hand, because it's speaking about how the foundation of that very household, namely the church, has already been built and there is no more building that needs to happen in order for us to continue on the path that the

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Lord has us on. And so we're going to look specifically at verse 20, where it speaks how the household has been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

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And so as we do that, we need to understand that there is but one foundation of the church, not many.

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Look with me at our text here. It says what? This household of God has been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,

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Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. Notice it does not say foundations.

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There is a singular word here, meaning foundation. So we are not to conclude that there are other foundations holding up this church.

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There is but one. Not only that, but that it has already been laid. It is not something that is continuing to be laid over and over.

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It has been. This wonderful phrase here, having been, helps us tremendously.

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This is something that has been done in the past and has continuing results.

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Namely, we stand on it. It's been built, we stand on it, and we proclaim the truth from it.

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This foundation has also been masterfully and forever laid by God's gifts of apostles and prophets.

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If you look in Ephesians chapter 4, which we will get to in weeks to come, you will see that gifts are given to the church.

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And some of those gifts have been the apostles and the prophets. Now, not all gifts are offices of the church, but all offices of the church are in fact gifts to the church, and we must understand that.

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And they have masterfully laid this foundation that we are to speak of.

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Not only that, but the foundation of the church was laid with Christ as the cornerstone, or depending on your translation, the keystone, the thing that holds absolutely everything together.

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In other words, the foundation of the church was laid through the words, the works, and the wonders of the apostles and the prophets on the person and work of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Not on dreams, not on visions, not on good ideas, not on whatever.

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Jesus. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And so however we frame the next hour or so, we must understand that this is a foundation that has been laid, and this foundation has already been laid.

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There's no more laying that needs to happen, and that Jesus Christ is the cornerstone. It's all about Jesus.

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It's not about the apostles. It's not about the prophets. It's about Jesus. And so very simplistically, we are going to look at apostles, and we are going to look at prophets, and then we're going to look at modern -day apostleship and prophecy, and we're going to try our best to discern, are those biblical things?

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And then we're going to ask the question, what is the biblical payoff for answering and asking such questions?

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This is not a theological exercise. I'm not trying to put on some sort of seminary class. I want you to understand that when people stand up in the pulpit or on a stage with their coffee tables and their cool jeans and assert that they are apostles or that they have a prophecy from the

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Lord, they are not just mistaken. They're wrong, and as the

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Scriptures will show us, they're being evil. And so we need to understand what the text is saying so that we would understand how

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God speaks to us and how he leads us.

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So let's look here first, this church, this foundation that we have been brought into, as Paul is arguing, right?

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God is overcoming many obstacles to create and birth his church. He overcomes our sinful dead hearts and resurrects us from spiritual death and gives us new life.

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He takes our heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh that beats red with blood for him, and he forgives us of our transgressions, and he removes from us our desire to please our flesh and to be influenced by the world and the devil and his schemes.

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And then he brings both Jew and Gentile together, obliterating this chasm that exists between them so that Gentiles, those who have been far from God, can now come near God.

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And he creates one new man out of the Jew and the Gentile, the church.

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And this church has a foundation, and that foundation has been built by the apostles and the prophets.

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So what is an apostle? Well, an apostle is not a pastor. It's not someone who claims to be an apostle.

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It is a very specific thing. Now, to be sure, the word apostle comes from the

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Greek word apostolos, which literally means messengers or the sent -out ones.

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And so, sure, many of us, if we are sent out or meet the culture with some sort of message, are an apostle in one sense.

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But we are not an apostle in the biblical sense of the word.

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That is, we are not one of God's chosen messengers sent out for a very specific person.

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The apostles spoken about here, and the apostles that Jesus garnered, especially the

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Twelve, are those who were sent out to proclaim what

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Jesus Christ had said. Not only that, but they were sent out to heal, and they were sent out to speak the very words of Almighty God.

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So when an apostle in the Bible speaks, which Paul makes clear that he is, in fact, an apostle.

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I mean, at the beginning of the book of Ephesians, when we started, remember the first words out of Paul's mouth in Ephesians 1 .1

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was, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus. By who? The will of God.

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It wasn't his choice. He didn't decide to be an apostle. He was made to be an apostle.

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Now, I don't know about you, but do you remember how this happened?

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Paul was not looking to be sent out by Jesus to proclaim the excellencies of Jesus.

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He was riding on a horse, persecuting the people who worshiped Jesus, and Jesus kicks him off his horse, blinds his eyes, asks him, why are you persecuting me, and disrupts his entire life, and sends him on a mission to proclaim his awesomeness, his atonement, his beauty to the

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Gentiles. God elected him before the foundations of the world, yes, to be saved, but to be an apostle who would carry forth his divine revelation.

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You see, the apostles were not just armed with a message to preach or teach, much like I am.

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When I get up in this pulpit, I am reading from this book, and I'm trying to help you understand this book, because it's already here for me.

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But the apostles were given a divine message from God himself, and there was qualifications to being an apostle.

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You couldn't just wake up one day and be an apostle. That's proof in Paul's life, and that's true of every single other apostle's life.

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Firstly, in order to be an apostle, you needed to be a witness of the resurrected Christ. You had to see him, in other words, with your own eyes.

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Acts 1, 21, and 22 make this irrefutably clear, that the apostles were trying to discern who would replace

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Judas, who betrayed Jesus, and they said, it was necessary that of the men who have accompanied us all, the time that the

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Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning with the baptism of John until the day that he was taken up from us, one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.

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So to be an apostle, biblically speaking, would mean that you had to have witnessed Jesus Christ's life, death, and resurrection.

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Now, as I begin to walk through these, I want you to start asking the question, is that true of other people who might claim today to be apostles?

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In order to be an apostle, you had to have witnessed the resurrected Christ. Secondly, you needed to be personally chosen by Christ himself.

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Every single person who is an apostle in the New Testament had been handpicked by Jesus to follow him and to be sent out to proclaim his truth and to heal the sick.

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You can look at Matthew 16, for example, where Jesus sends out the apostles to proclaim and preach the gospel and to heal the sick.

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They're also taught by Christ, taught by Christ.

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They followed Christ. They believed Christ. They listened to Christ. They gained knowledge from Christ.

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And of course, lastly, they worked miracles. Working miracles was a staple to be an apostle.

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Not only did they need to be a witness over the resurrected Christ, be personally chosen by Christ, and taught by Christ, they had to work miracles that Christ gave him.

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In Matthew 10, 1, it says, "...and summoning his twelve disciples, Jesus gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness."

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Jesus, when he summoned the twelve disciples, he gave them authority to do that which

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Jesus himself did, to cast out demons, to heal the sick, and to proclaim the truth of God in such a way that their words were

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God's words. Peter says that as they were carried along by the spirit, they wrote.

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In 2 Corinthians 2, 12, we know that this is true because the signs of a true apostle, and I quote, "...were

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worked out among you with all perseverance by signs and wonders and miracles."

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So these specific miracles that were being done, they weren't just any miracles, they were signs of a true apostle.

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So how do you know if you are living in the first century, or now, who a true apostle is?

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How do you know if you're being told the truth? Well, is the person speaking a friend of Jesus?

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Have they witnessed his resurrection? Have they been personally chosen by him?

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Have they been taught by him? And have they been given the ability to perform miracles?

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I mean, Paul would heal the sick so much so that his handkerchief did it without him being around.

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This is absolutely unbelievable stuff. Well, doesn't this happen from beginning to end in the

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Bible? No. One of the things that I want to make clear as we journey on through this conversation is that there is only really three epochs in history where God does miraculous and wild things through men.

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Oftentimes, when we come to the Bible, especially as newer Christians, we think to ourselves, well, there's miracles on every single page of the

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Bible. God is always doing supernatural things. Well, God is always doing supernatural things, but he's not always doing miracles through people.

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And if you pay attention to the Bible, it's right there for you to see. The first time any man wields the power of God in such a way that he can perform miracles was when

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Moses came on the scene in about 1400 BC.

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We have Moses, and then we have Joshua. And there was a very real reason why

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Moses specifically was given the ability to do these sorts of miracles.

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If you remember, Moses goes to the burning bush, and Shahweh tells Moses, I have need of sending you to get my people out of slavery.

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And Moses asks a very logical question, how am I going to do that?

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And who am I going to say has the authority to demand such a thing?

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A burning tree? And Moses, of course, says, or God, of course, says, tell them

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I am, has sent you. And this is how they will know that I sent you.

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You see that staff that you're holding in your hand? When you throw it down, it'll turn into a serpent. When you do this, this will happen.

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When you do this, this will happen. God separated eventually the seas that Israelites were able to walk through after they were being chased when they were in fact freed.

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And the reason for that was so that Moses's message could be validated as God's very words.

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The second, of course, being Elijah and Elisha.

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So we have Moses and Joshua in 1400 BC, which lasted about 65 years.

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Now Elijah and Elisha, 800 BC, another 65 -year period where God uses another man, or two men specifically, to do wild miracles.

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People are raised from the dead. And then, of course, you have Jesus and the apostles, which is another roughly 65 years, beginning in 30

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AD, existing to maybe 100 AD or so. What this shows us is that God using people to do supernatural things is the exception, not the rule.

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And there's a purpose for it. And that purpose is not so that we could get together and magic just happen, but so that God's messenger would be trusted as speaking on behalf of Almighty God.

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So the apostles healed, the apostles taught, and when they taught, what they taught was

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God's words about God's Christ. And so it's as if when they spoke, God spoke.

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That is not true of me. When I speak,

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God uses His word by the power of His Spirit to convict you and to propel you into a life of Christlikeness in accordance with the foundations that have been laid by the apostles and the prophets.

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So the apostles were sent to carry divine revelation, as were the prophets.

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Now, we look back at our theme verse here. This household has been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.

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Now, who is he speaking about? Well, many people trying to get around what

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I'm trying to teach say, well, this is speaking of the Old Testament prophets, and it's showing us that the apostles who also functioned as prophets are like the prophets of old, and this is why it continues.

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But we know that that can't be the way that we should interpret this because a little bit later, he tells us that prophets in Ephesians chapter 4 are given to the church as gifts.

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So these prophets are not the apostles, but they work in tandem with the apostles.

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That's not to say that the apostles did not give prophetic utterance and the prophets were isolated by themselves.

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But of course, the word prophet means mouthpiece, and there would have been other people prophesying at this time.

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We know in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, for example, when it tells women that they are to be silent in church and not to prophesy, that there was prophesying going on in the first century.

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I have no problem asserting that. That is absolutely true, and we'll get to that momentarily.

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But prophesying meant that you were speaking for God. You weren't just proclaiming truth about God and healing, but you were prophesying about the coming

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Messiah. You were speaking on behalf of God.

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Moses, yet, is another good example of how we should understand the nature of prophecy and what prophets were all about.

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God tells Moses that he's going to speak his words.

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But Moses was a very timid man, and he didn't like to preach, didn't want to speak on behalf of God.

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And so God says, you are to speak the words that Aaron, your brother, is given.

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In Exodus 4 .15, it says, and you, Aaron, are to speak to him, that is Moses, and put the words in his mouth.

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And I, even I, will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and I will instruct you in what you shall do.

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So when Moses spoke, it was actually God who was the one doing the speaking.

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And this is so important for us to understand on the front end. It helps us understand that God supernaturally guards his message and his revelation, and he does not make mistakes.

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He is clear. He is concise. He says what he means, and he means what he says.

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And he literally puts words in the mouths of his prophets. Now, of course, we don't have time to get into this, but he does use their personalities, their experiences, and so on and so forth.

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It's not as though he's using them as puppets. He's using, really, their personalities. But he's giving them the very words to speak, and only them to speak.

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Understanding this reality is imperative because virtually every modern -day cult has been started by some self -appointed prophet or apostle.

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If we believe that God is still doing what he did then, we have no sure method by which to refute their blatant heresies.

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In other words, if you are saying, or if I'm saying rather, this is what

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God has said. Well, I just trumped everybody in the room.

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You can't fight against that. If God speaks to me the way that he spoke to Moses, then my authority is

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God's authority. But that is obviously not the case.

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There's qualifications of a prophet. And those qualifications are this.

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Firstly, they must be theologically precise. When you look at the

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Old Testament, you realize that being in accordance with previous revelation is a prerequisite to speaking for God.

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You can't say untrue things about God, and God use you to say true things about him and what he has for you.

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Deuteronomy 13, 1 through 5 says, if a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes true concerning which he has spoke to you, saying, let us walk after other gods whom you have not known, and let us serve them, you shall not listen to the words of the prophet or the dreamer of dreams.

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For Yahweh your God is testing you to find out if you love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul.

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You shall walk after Yahweh your God and fear him, and you shall keep his commandments, listen to his voice, serve him, and cling to him.

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But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death because he has counseled rebellion against Yahweh your

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God, who brought you from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery to drive you from the way in which

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Yahweh your God commanded you to walk, so you shall purge the evil from among you. What God is saying to the

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Israelites in Deuteronomy is, if someone shows up and prophesies and says he's had a dream about something and it causes you to walk away from the living

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God, he's no prophet. He's not speaking for me. This continues on in the

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New Testament in 2 Peter chapter 2. Peter says, but false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves.

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In order for a prophet to be a real prophet, he has to tell the truth about God's previous revelation.

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He doesn't add to it. He doesn't jettison it.

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He doesn't repackage it. What does this mean practically?

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Well, there are a few names that I could throw out that I think everybody would know. For instance,

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Benny Hinn. Benny Hinn often teaches that there are nine members in the

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Godhead. That's someone who cannot be trusted, to say the least.

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Kenneth Copeland. This is a familiar name in Tulsa. He used to be the pilot for Oral Roberts right down the road.

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As a matter of fact, much of his ministry was catapulted by Oral Roberts, and Oral Roberts does believe in a lot of what should not be believed in regards to prophets and apostles and such.

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But Kenneth Copeland actually once said that Jesus took on the nature of Satan on the cross.

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These are things that people say who claim to be prophets, but invalidate what it actually means to be a prophet, which is that you do not contradict sound teaching.

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Secondly, in order to be a prophet, you must have moral integrity. This is littered throughout the

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Bible as well in Jeremiah 23, 14 through 16. God says, also among the prophets of Jerusalem, I have seen an appalling thing, the committing of adultery and walking and lying, and they strengthen the hands of evil doers so that no one is turned back from this evil.

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All of them have become to me like Sodom and her inhabitants like Gomorrah. Therefore, thus says

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Yahweh of concerning the prophets, behold, I am going to feed them wormwood and make them drink poisoned water for from the prophets of Jerusalem, pollution has gone forth into all the land.

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Much of our modern day prophets and apostles are littered with moral failings.

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But one of the biggest charismatic churches, IHOP, not the

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Pancake Place, International House of Prayer, has just closed its doors because of the infidelity of their prophet and apostle.

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And this is not unique to them. In order to be a prophet, one must have moral integrity.

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This is why Jesus says in Matthew chapter 7, verse 20, so then you will know them by their fruits.

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Thirdly, they must have predictive accuracy. They must have predictive accuracy.

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They must be theologically precise. They must be morally upright.

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And they must get everything that they say right or they are not a prophet.

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And if they say untrue things, the Bible is clear that God is against them. In fact, in Deuteronomy 18, the punishment for someone who would speak on behalf of God and say, thus says the

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Lord, was death. Why? Because God, when he speaks, he's clear.

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And when you speak on behalf of God, that's a big deal. God hates, and I'll say it plainly and emphatically,

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God hates false and accurate prophets. And the sad reality, though, is modern prophecy boasts of their inaccuracy.

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But we'll get to that in just a moment. Ezekiel 13, 6 through 9, I want you to hear what God has to say about those prophets who would speak on behalf of God and not be accurate about their predictions.

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They behold worthlessness and lying divination who are saying Yahweh declares when

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Yahweh has not sent them. Yet they wait for the establishing of their word. Did you not see a worthless vision and speak a lying divination when you said

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Yahweh declares? But it is not I who have spoken. Therefore, thus says the

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Lord Yahweh, because you have spoken worthlessness and behold, lie. Therefore, I am against you, declares the

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Lord Yahweh. So my hand will be against the prophets who see worthless visions and utter lying divinations.

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They will not be in the counsel of my people, nor will they be written down in the register of the house of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel, that you may know that I am the

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Lord Yahweh. God is not just intolerant of them, he's against those who would say, thus says the

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Lord, and be lying. Now, that's interesting because modern day people who would claim that prophecy still continues have a totally different understanding of prophecy.

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In fact, Wayne Grudem, a theologian who is a proponent of the continuation of study gifts, has once said, yeah, when we prophesy, we're not saying, thus says the

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Lord. In fact, it would be best if you didn't say, thus says the Lord, but maybe you should say, this is what the spirit might be saying.

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Well, that doesn't sound like prophecy to me at all, but we'll get to that in a moment. Ephesians chapter 2 verse 20 is making the case that it is the apostles and the prophets, those who have been given special and divine revelation for a specific time, for a specific purpose, namely to validate the claims that God was making, and it is those claims that we stand on.

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And those claims, if you look at our next part of the verse, are centered on Jesus, the cornerstone.

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Of course, Jesus was the perfect prophet. He was the perfect apostle. He was the perfect king.

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Hebrews chapter 12 asserts that Jesus is the great apostle of our faith. He is the greatest prophet who came to preach.

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He is the one who sent these apostles and prophets, and he did not send them with their own dreams and their own vision and their own idea of what should be done or said.

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He gave them specific words. In fact,

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Jesus' entire ministry was much like the apostles' ministry and the prophets' ministry.

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Jesus did miracles, and he did miracles for one purpose, and one purpose as well, and that was to validate his claims that he was, in fact, the

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Messiah. You don't believe me? Acts 2, 22. Men of Israel, Peter says, listen to these words,

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Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs, which

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God did through him in your midst, just as you yourselves know. Jesus came doing miracles while he was on the earth to prove that his words about himself were true.

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You could trust his atonement. You could trust his words.

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You could trust his love. You could trust that he and the Father were one.

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You could trust that he was the God -man. You could trust all of these things, and he says, look, I healed the sick, the dead have been raised, so on and so forth.

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This is the foundation, friends. The foundation of the church has been built on the apostles and the prophets,

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Christ Jesus being the cornerstone, and that foundation is completely built.

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How do I know that? I know that because in buildings, there's one foundation, there's not many.

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Two, I know that because that's what the scriptures teach, and that's what experience as we look at the rest of the world tell us.

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Now, before we're continuing on, I want to give you three terms that help you understand better what

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I'm talking about on a theological level. There are three terms, the first being charismatic, the second being continuationist, and the third being cessationist.

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Before I brought these words up, I wanted to lay a foundation for what an apostle and a prophet was, biblically speaking.

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The Christians generally fall within three camps, the first being charismatic. Charismatic are people or churches or denominations that believe that these signed gifts, that is, prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, and so on, continue to function today and all the time.

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As a matter of fact, I just recently watched a man who is in this charismatic camp say that unless one's preaching is accompanied by miracles, he's not preaching the gospel, and he is a wolf.

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Within charismatic circles, there are essentially three waves throughout history that have presented themselves, and it really didn't come around until roughly the 1900s.

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On the first day of the year in 1901 in Topeka, Kansas, there was a man, and he got dreams and visions and started to promote this idea that God was still speaking to his people the same way that he spoke to the apostles and the prophets.

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A matter of years later, in 1906, he moved to California, and there was a revival of sorts that broke out.

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It was called the Azusa Street Revival. It was very famous, and there was this explosion of charismatic theology.

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But it's interesting because prior to that event, not many people had really engaged in that sort of thinking or teaching.

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It exploded, and then it kind of died down, and then again there was the second wave in the 1960s where this renewal of theology began to take place also in California, and then it, of course, spread across the

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United States of America. It began to wane. And all of these waves, these first two waves, kind of existed outside of what would be considered normal Christianity or Orthodox Christianity.

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It was on the periphery. It was wild. Things were happening. Maybe it was of God, maybe it wasn't. It was just over here.

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But there was a third wave that happened in the 1980s where there was this evangelical kind of insertion, an infiltration, if you will, where it became actually so intertwined with biblical evangelical

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Christianity that almost, experiencing it now, most people don't even consider how wild these claims are.

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And it happened at Fuller Seminary in California. All of this stuff took place in California.

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You're starting to see maybe why John MacArthur, for instance, has had a ministry combating these ideas because it's all just so prevalent in California.

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But it started at Fuller Seminary with a lot of different people, but the most famous name is probably

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John Wimber, who actually taught a class on prophecy there and began what is called the Vineyard Movement. Now, I know this is really boring, but it helps us understand how this idea of prophecy and apostleship and these sorts of things continuing in a religion that never really saw it that way in the first place.

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And so what it has done is instead of looking to the actual real foundation built by the apostles and the prophets and understanding that it is that foundation that we stand on and build on, that there is this continually happening foundation being built, that there's new words from the

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Lord that exists outside of Scripture, that God has, you know, given people the gift of healing.

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Okay. I wonder why they don't go to hospitals. But there's no reason to believe that that is the case.

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The second group, or second term, I want you to know is continuationists. These people are like the charismatics, but they are not quite as bought into the idea that every time we gather, people should be healed, we should be flying across the room and screaming like barking dogs.

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They don't necessarily buy into the idea that everybody should be speaking in tongues. These people are called continuationists. That is that they believe that the miraculous and revelatory gifts as seen in the apostles have continued throughout the church age, but they are more conservative in nature.

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A lot of people say, who are in this camp, they are open, but cautious. They're charismatic, but with a seat belt.

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Right? That is people like John Piper, Sam Storms, people who we love and respect, but we disagree with them.

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And it opens them up, opens up to a myriad of different theological issues. The term that I'm arguing for today is that of a cessationist.

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That is that miracles and revelatory gifts as seen in the apostles have passed away in the church along with the apostles in the apostolic age.

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And the reason for that is because that's what the scriptures teach that teaches us here. In Ephesians 2 .20,

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there is one foundation. That foundation has already been laid. It was laid by the apostles and the prophets, of course,

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Jesus being the cornerstone. Friends, this is so important.

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And it's important because it helps us to understand one very important doctrine, namely the sufficiency of Holy Scripture.

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Like I said, this is not some theological exercise. This is biblical Christianity.

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If revelation is continuing to happen over and over and over again by people who claim they are having revelation, then what is the

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Bible and why do we need it? We don't. More importantly, if people really are prophesying, why are we not adding it to the

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Bible? So, as we're looking at the foundation, let's also look at false foundations and let's evaluate the modern charismania that exists in light of biblical truth.

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There are churches out there in the charismatic and continuationist camp who would believe in prophecy, but they have redefined prophecy, which is very problematic because if I asked the children, they would probably give me a pretty good answer as to what prophecy is.

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Children, would you look at me? Children, what is prophecy? Okay.

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All right. Well, let me tell you. Prophecy is when God speaks through a man the words that he has for his people.

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His words are God's words because God has chosen to speak through him to reveal himself.

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And as we have already seen, as we have traveled along through this sermon, it's very important that apostles and prophets be right.

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And if they are not right, God is against them. But modern prophecy adherents undermine the sufficiency of scripture by claiming that there are, in fact, apostles and prophets today, and they redefine prophecy itself.

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We've already seen one quote from Wayne Grudem. They redefine it by saying that it's really just an encouragement from the

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Lord. That's the best of them.

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Continuationists. But as John Owen has famously said, if it agrees with scripture, it's unnecessary.

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And if it disagrees with scripture, it's of the devil. And so why can't you just encourage people in the

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Lord? Why do you need it to be a word from the Lord? It's not a word from the Lord, and you dishonor the Holy Spirit when you say such things.

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But people want it. People want to hear from God, and they don't think that this is good enough, which is why

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Jesus says in Matthew chapter 16, verse 4, and an evil and adulterous generation eagerly seeks for a sign.

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But a sign will not be given except the sign of Jonah. And he left them and went away.

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People who claim that they hear from God and speak on God's behalf also, generally speaking, are very abusive people.

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Because they claim to hear from God, and you have to listen because God is the one speaking. But Peter tells us that we have something so much better than prophecy.

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Now, Peter was an apostle. He was alive during the time of the prophets.

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He stood on a mountain with Jesus and witnessed

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God speak to him from heaven, and he saw Moses and Elijah.

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He saw things with his eyes that you and I can only dream of. And what does

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Peter say? Peter says we have something better. In 2

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Peter chapter 1, verse 19, it says we have a more sure prophetic word to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in dark places until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

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So if you're itching to hear prophecy, it's here. It's written down by the apostles and the prophets.

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What they did and what they said was recorded for us to live by. It shows us who

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Jesus is. It shows us what he has done. It shows us how to live life. It tells us what sin is. It tells us we need to repent of it, and it tells us how to do church.

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Well, there might be some objections to this. Well, certainly this is just your opinion. It's not my opinion.

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It is what the Bible teaches. But there are some objections, and there are some things worth talking about in terms of the

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Bible. People who say that the cessationist position is wrong do so on a couple different or do so making a couple different arguments.

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The first argument that objectors make is the spiritual gifts are employed in accordance to one's faith.

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The Bible says, they say, that miracles happen like the apostles, and prophecy happens, but only in accordance to one's faith.

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So if you don't have enough faith, that's why you're not seeing these miracles occur. They get this, of course, from Romans chapter 12, verse 6, which says,

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But having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, whether prophecy in agreement with the faith.

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Now, I just read from the Legacy Standard Bible, which nails this translation by putting in this definite article, the, before faith at the end there.

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A lot of translations translate this one's faith or his faith.

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The ESV does a better job and says our faith, but that's not really the word being used here.

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The word is the. It's a definite article. So their argument falls flat on these grounds.

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It's not speaking about one's faith that produced miracles, but in accordance with the faith, which actually ties into the argument of what prophecy actually is.

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Remember, it has to be in accordance with sound doctrine. It has to be in accordance with other revealed revelation.

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So what it says is, if there are gifts, and God does give gifts to the church that differ according to the grace given to us, whether prophecy in agreement with the faith.

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So this prophecy must be in agreement with the faith. This can be clearly seen also in Jude 3 and 4 when

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Jude says that he has wanted to write to the people of God and doing so earnestly for the faith, which was once for all handed down to the saints.

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So no, spiritual gifts are not employed in accordance with one's faith. Prophecy or any gift thereof must be in accordance with the faith.

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A second argument they might have. The Bible tells you that you are not to despise prophecy.

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In fact, Sam Storms has famously said that if you do despise prophecy or say that it has ceased, that you are in sin.

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He's wrong. He gets this, of course, from 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 where Paul says in verses 20 and 22,

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Do not despise prophecies, but examine all things. Hold fast to that which is good and abstain from every form of evil.

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To that I say amen. Do not despise prophecy. Also, I've never met a single person who has told anybody to despise prophecy.

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You have not heard me once up here say to despise prophecy. I have only said that you ought to look at modern day prophecy with a biblical lens and reject false prophecy.

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And that is much different than telling people to despise prophecy or despising prophecy itself.

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I want you to notice something about this verse as well. It says, Do not despise prophecy, but examine all things.

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Why must Christians test and examine prophecies, as Paul is saying here, if there wasn't something to measure it against?

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Namely, the foundation that has been laid by the apostles and the prophets.

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The Bible gives us permission to reject those who do not pass the test of orthodoxy. Not only that, but people who prophesy falsely are regarded as evil.

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And there's nothing wrong with asserting that people who make false prophecies stand up and speak on behalf of God are charlatans and engaging in real evil.

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Hold fast to that which is good and abstain from every form of evil.

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What all of this is teaching us so far is that prophets could not be sometimes wrong and sometimes right.

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There is either right prophets or wrong prophets. Paul even commends the

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Bereans for examining what he teaches in Acts 17 11. Now these were more noble minded than those of Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the scripture daily to see whether these things were so.

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Friends, I am not an apostle. I am not a prophet. And everything that I say should be weighed against the scripture and everything that you read ought to be taken as truth from God himself.

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When Paul spoke, even his words as prophets was examined in light of previous revelation.

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So that should be the same today. Now the third one, which is probably what charismatics consider the slam dunk argument, and that is the prophet

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Agabus. The prophet Agabus is said to have been wrong. So how can prophecy be wrong today, people say?

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Well, because prophecy sometimes is wrong. But where do you get that? You don't get it in the

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Old Testament. You don't get it in the New Testament in terms of the way that they talk about prophecy because the New Testament authors, namely, you know, the apostle

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Paul and the people there, they agreed with the prophets of the Old Testament and understood that you got to get it right.

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But Agabus didn't get it right, they say. To that I say, you're wrong.

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It is true in Acts 11, Agabus is affirmed as a true prophet.

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And in Acts 21, Agabus begins to prophesy saying that Paul would be bound up with his belt and taken to the

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Roman authorities. I'll read it for you, 10 and 11 of chapter 21.

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And as we were staying there for some days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea and coming to us, he took

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Paul's belt and he bound his own feet and hands and said, this is what the

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Holy Spirit says. In this way, the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the

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Gentiles. And of course, the story goes on and there's no mention of this belt being used and that the

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Romans just took him. And so the charismatics will say, well, see, look what, look, hey,

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Agabus was wrong. All these things didn't happen exactly what he says. He was mostly right, but he was really inaccurate on some things.

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Children, would you look at me? Everything I've said thus far, can prophets be wrong? No. Can the

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Holy Spirit be wrong, children? No. So a prophet has come on the scene and he says, thus says the

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Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit says. So if we seem to think there might be a contradiction, what have

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I always said, children? If we see a problem in the Bible, we actually have to assume what? It's with us, not the

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Bible. So we have to look deeper. So how do we combat the idea that Agabus was wrong?

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Well, one, we read the Bible, we know the Bible, and we understand that nowhere does Luke record that Agabus is wrong.

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He just assumes that he is correct. The Bible is replete with letting you know when people are wrong, when they're saying very untrue things.

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But Luke never mentions that he was wrong. No other New Testament author ever says that.

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It is radio silent. Nowhere in scripture is

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Agabus's accuracy criticized. No one asserts that in his prediction he erred.

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And so the continuationist argument on this passage is at best from silence.

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But it goes further. The scriptures actually do imply that Agabus was correct. Luke's description of what happened to Paul in Jerusalem implies that the

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Jews did bind him in some way. Acts 21, 32 says, and at once he took along soldiers and centurions and ran down to them.

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And when they saw the commander and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul. And so there you also have the

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Jews having handled him first. But then in Acts 28, 17, it says, and we entered

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Rome. Paul was allowed to stay by himself with the soldiers who were guarding him. And it happened there. After three days,

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Paul called together those who were the leading men of the Jews. And when they came together, he began saying to them, brothers, though I had done nothing against our people or the customs of our father, yet I was delivered as a prisoner from Jerusalem and to the hands of the

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Romans. The Greek verb here, to bind or delivered over, can mean to arrest, deliver over, or to imprison.

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But it can also certainly mean to tie up with ropes or to wrap up with rags.

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So Paul most certainly could have, and most likely was, bound.

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Now, of course, Luke did not say with his own belt. He didn't feel he needed to. He just assumed that Agabus was right.

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And he continued on with his story. But more importantly, I'm not trying to justify

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Agabus's actions. At the end of the day, I don't really care if Agabus is telling the truth. Agabus is a man, just like me and you, although he obviously was a prophet, so he was gifted by God in this specific way.

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But he does say, the Holy Spirit says. Look with me again at Acts chapter 2 and verses 10 and 11.

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It says, this is what the Holy Spirit says. So we have to protect that which the

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Holy Spirit says, because the Holy Spirit cannot lie. So the whole idea that Agabus actually got his prophecy wrong is entirely inaccurate, and it's a way to twist scripture so that we can say that men in the front can have these prophecies and visions and so on and so forth, and you better believe them.

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But not only that, church history is in accordance with this view. It wasn't until, like I said, the 1900s that this charismatic theology flooded the waters of evangelicalism, as it were.

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Church history includes that of the New Testament as well. Not just after.

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What you will find interesting is that the Bible, specifically in the writings of Paul, do not mention all of these miraculous things continuing to happen.

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First Corinthians is one of the first letters that Paul ever wrote, and First Corinthians is the only letter that mentions anything about tongues or miraculous gifts happening.

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He wrote six or nine other letters after First Corinthians to six different churches, and not once did he talk about how to handle continued prophecy or how to recognize a true apostle except for himself and his other companions and colleagues, and he never talked about how tongues are supposed to function, which is interesting because First, Second Timothy, and Titus, which were all written after First Corinthians, all deal with how to govern the church.

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Early church father Ambrose, on his work on the Holy Spirit, says, For as Paul heard the voice saying to him,

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I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, so too the Spirit forbade Paul and Silas to go into Bithynia.

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And as the father spoke through the prophets, so too Agabus says concerning the Spirit. Thus says the

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Holy Spirit, thus shall the Jews in Jerusalem bind the man who is in the girdle. Ambrose seems to think that Agabus wasn't lying.

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Augustine. How good, he says, seemed the intentions of the pious believers who were unwilling that Paul should go up to Jerusalem, lest the evils which

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Agabus had foretold should there befall him. And yet it was God's purpose that he should suffer these evils for preaching the faith of Christ, and thereby become a witness for Christ.

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It is the consensus throughout the Bible and the church history that Agabus was telling the truth.

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Both the Bible and church history record that these gifts of prophecy and apostleship ended when the apostles died because their message had been wildly successful.

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That is, it had been preached to the world. The known world, of course.

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There's much more world to get to, mind you. But before closing, what

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I want to do is I want to explain to you why this matters and the reason that I wanted to stop here and return to the text.

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The book of Ephesians is all about the church. It's all about Jesus Christ as the head of the church and about what that means and what that means for all of us.

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And what we need to understand if we're going to understand how we are to function as the church is we need to understand that the scriptures are sufficient to tell us about the head of the church and how the church is to function.

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In other words, the reason that this doctrine is so important is because, yes, it helps us not to dishonor the

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Holy Spirit, but it also helps us to understand the sufficiency of God's Christ and his scriptures.

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If the foundation has truly been laid and there are no apostles today and there are no prophets today in the

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New Testament since, then we have but one place to look and that is in this book.

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And anyone claiming to be an apostle or prophet today and having a better understanding of God for how his church ought to be ran is a direct assault upon the sufficiency of scripture.

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Children, would you look at me? How do you know what God says by reading the

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Bible? By reading the Bible. How do you know what

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Jesus is like by reading the

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Bible? Christ is sufficient. His word is sufficient.

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And friends, we must understand that when people stand up and assert such things, that there is apostles and prophets and all of these sorts of things happening, they are cutting away at the foundation as it were.

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But oh, the foundation has been laid and Christ stands atop it as the key cornerstone with pierced hands, with a pierced side.

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And it's his gospel that springs forth from this foundation.

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And what's so beautiful is that Christ is so amazing that in Hebrews chapter 1,

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Hebrews chapter 1, the author asserts that God, having spoken long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways, that is, he used to do these things.

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And these last days he has spoken to us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds, who is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature, and he upholds all things by the word of his power.

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Who, having accomplished cleansing for the sins set down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels as he has inherited a much more excellent name than they.

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So this foundation exists to promote the lordship, the beauty, and the glory of God's last word, which is

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Jesus Christ the righteous. And we come to him and we see him because of that foundation which was laid, that foundation which we stand on, and we rejoice in.

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So does that mean that God doesn't still work miracles?

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No, God still works miracles. He changes dead hearts into living hearts. He converts sinners into saints.

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Does that mean that God doesn't heal? No, God heals, which is why we pray for everyone in this church when they get sick. He just doesn't use men to do it.

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There's not another apostle going around healing people. If he was, he'd be at a children's hospital down the street.

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Could God talk to somebody in a language that they can understand if they're from a different country?

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God can do anything he wants, but it's not the New Testament gift of tongues.

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God is powerful. His Holy Spirit is amazing, and this Christ shows us that because the foundation has been laid.

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Do not let people tell you that this view lessens the Holy Spirit. No, it heightens and honors the

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Holy Spirit for what he is sent to do, which is to make much of Jesus through the apostles, through the prophets, and now through his word.

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And someday we will, having believed the word, bask in the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the

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Holy Spirit will illuminate the scriptures, and grow us, and sanctify us, and use this word to do what it was meant to do.