Apostles and Prophets - Brandon Scalf

1st Timothy chapter 3 verse 15 states that the household of God or the church is the pillar and support of the truth. That is, the church exists to steward and to promote God's truth to God's people and yes even to the world.

The question becomes after we hear such a thing is well what is the truth and how do we come to know the truth? 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 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 Apostles and Prophets and it is something that has been done and it is not something that continues to be done.

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

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. 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.

So getting this right is important. In fact it's the difference between spiritual life and spiritual death. It is the difference between growing in maturity or not growing at all. It is the difference between being a 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 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.

I will begin reading in verse 17 and conclude in verse 22. 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 Ephesians, who were far away and peace to those who were near, of course that being the Gentiles.

For through him, that is Jesus, we both have our access in one spirit to the 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 apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building being joined together is growing into a holy sanctuary in the Lord, and whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever. Amen? Amen. Please have a seat. As we begin this morning, 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 I believe and what I am arguing for.

My contention is that the signed gifts, the gifts given to the apostles and the prophets in the New Testament era, have ceased. And the reason that they have ceased is because they have done what God purposed them to do, namely, they validated the claims that Jesus Christ is who he said he was.

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

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 Holy Spirit is not active.

To that, I would say that's a misunderstanding of what it means to hold that position or to be called a cessationist. 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 I believe. It asserts something negative as opposed to something positive, which always causes people to look at you with a squinted eye.

But the truth is, and the truth of this passage, is that no, the Holy Spirit has not ceased working in general. The Holy Spirit is God, he is amazing, he is beautiful, and he does the miraculous all of the time.

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?

I believe that the Holy Spirit is very active and very present in the life of the Christian and in the life of the church. I believe and I have seen the 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.

And if you don't think that is an amazing work of the Spirit, then you need to revisit your Bible. He illuminates the Scriptures, and yes, as a cessationist, it's perfectly fine to say God heals people.

He just doesn't heal people through healers. 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 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. And so as we do that, we need to understand that there is but one foundation of the church, not many.

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

There is a singular word here, meaning foundation. So we are not to conclude that there are other foundations holding up this church. 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. It has been. This wonderful phrase here, having been, helps us tremendously. This is something that has been done in the past and has continuing results.

Namely, we stand on it. It's been built, we stand on it, and we proclaim the truth from it. This foundation has also been masterfully and forever laid by God's gifts of apostles and prophets. 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.

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.

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

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

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

It's all about Jesus. 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?

And then we're going to ask the question, what is the biblical payoff for answering and asking such questions? 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 Lord, they are not just mistaken.

They're wrong. And as the 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 God speaks to us and how he leads us. So let's look here first, this church, this foundation that we have been brought into, as Paul is arguing, right?

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. 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. 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.

And he creates one new man out of the Jew and the Gentile, the church. And this church has a foundation and that foundation has been built by the apostles and the prophets. So what is an apostle? Well, an apostle is not a pastor.

It's not someone who claims to be an apostle. It is a very specific thing. Now, to be sure, the word apostle comes from the Greek word apostolos, which literally means messengers or the sent-out ones.

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. But we are not an apostle in the biblical sense of the word. That is, we are not one of God's chosen messengers sent out for a very specific person.

The apostles spoken about here and the apostles that Jesus garnered, especially the Twelve, are those who were sent out to proclaim what 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. So when an apostle in the Bible speaks, which Paul makes clear that he is, in fact, an apostle. 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 was, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus.

By who? The will of God. It wasn't his choice. He didn't decide to be an apostle. He was made to be an apostle. Now, I don't know about you, but do you remember how this happened? Paul was not looking to be sent out by Jesus to proclaim the excellencies of Jesus.

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

When I get up in this pulpit, I am reading from this book, and I'm already here for me. But the apostles were given a divine message from God himself, and there was qualifications to being an apostle.

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. 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. Acts 1, 21, and 22 make this irrefutably clear, that the apostles were trying to discern who would replace Judas, who betrayed Jesus, and they said it was necessary that of the men who have accompanied us all, the time that the 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.

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

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

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. They're also taught by Christ. Taught by Christ. They followed Christ.

They believed Christ. They listened to Christ. They gained knowledge from Christ. And of course, lastly, they worked miracles. Working miracles was a staple to be an apostle. 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 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.". Jesus, when he summoned the twelve disciples, he gave them authority to do that which 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 God's words. Peter says that as they were carried along by the Spirit, they wrote. In 2 Corinthians 2, 12, we know that this is true because the signs of a true apostle, and I quote, "...were worked out among you with all perseverance by signs and wonders and miracles.".

So these specific miracles that were being done, they weren't just any miracles, they were signs of a true apostle. So how do you know if you are living in the first century, or now, who a true apostle is?

How do you know if you're being told the truth? Well, is the person speaking a friend of Jesus? Have they witnessed his resurrection? Have they been personally chosen by him? Have they been taught by him?

And have they been given the ability to perform miracles? I mean, Paul would heal the sick so much so that his handkerchief did it without him being around. This is absolutely unbelievable stuff. Well, doesn't this happen from beginning to end in the 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.

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

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 Moses came on the scene in about 1400 BC.

We have Moses and then we have Joshua. And there was a very real reason why Moses, specifically, was given the ability to do these sorts of miracles. If you remember, Moses goes to the burning bush and and Joshua tells Moses, I have need of sending you to get my people out of slavery.

And Moses asks a very logical question, how am I going to do that? And who am I going to say has the authority to demand such a thing? A burning tree? And Moses, of course, says, or God, of course, says, tell them I Am has sent you.

And this is how they will know that I sent you. 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. 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. And the reason for that was so that Moses's message could be validated as God's very words.

The second, of course, being Elijah and Elisha. So we have Moses and Joshua in 1400 BC, which lasted about 65 years. Now Elijah and Elisha, 800 BC, another 65-year period where God uses another man, or two men specifically, to do wild miracles.

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 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.

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. So the apostles healed, the apostles taught, and when they taught, what they taught was God's words about God's Christ, and so it's as if when they spoke, God spoke.

That is not true of me. When I speak, 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.

So the apostles were sent to carry divine revelation, as were the prophets. Now, we look back at our theme verse here. This household has been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.

Now, who is he speaking about? Well, many people trying to get around what I'm trying to teach say, well, this is speaking of the Old Testament prophecies, 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.

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

That's not to say that the apostles did not give prophetic utterance and the prophets were isolated by themselves. But of course, the word prophet means mouthpiece, and there would have been other people prophesying at this time.

We know in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, for example, when it tells women that they are to to be silent in church and not to prophesy, that there was prophesying going on in the first century. I have no problem asserting that.

That is absolutely true, and we'll get to that momentarily. 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 Messiah.

You were speaking on behalf of God. Moses, yet, is another good example of how we should understand the nature of prophecy and what prophets were all about. God tells Moses that he's going to speak his words.

But Moses was a very timid man, and he didn't like to preach, didn't want to speak on behalf of God, and so God says, you are to speak the words that Aaron, your brother, is given. In Exodus 4, 15, it says, and you, Aaron, are to speak to him, that is Moses, and put the words in his mouth.

And I, even I, will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and I will instruct you in what you shall do. So when Moses spoke, it was actually God who was the one doing the speaking. 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. He is clear, he is concise, he says what he means, and he means what he says. 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. 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. Understanding this reality is imperative because virtually every modern-day cult has been started by some self-appointed prophet or apostle.

If we believe that God is still doing what he did then, we have no sure method by which to refute their blatant heresies. In other words, if you are saying, or if I'm saying rather, this is what God has said, well I just trumped everybody in the room.

You can't fight against that. If God speaks to me the way that he spoke to Moses, then my authority is God's authority. But that is obviously not the case. There's qualifications of a prophet, and those qualifications are this.

Firstly, they must be theologically precise. When you look at the Old Testament, you realize that being in accordance with previous revelation is a prerequisite to speaking for God. You can't say untrue things about God, and God used you to say true things about him and what he has for you.

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.

For Yahweh your God is testing you to find out if you love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul. 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. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death because he has counseled rebellion against Yahweh your 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 Yahweh your God commanded you to walk, so you shall purge the evil from among you.

What God is saying to the 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 God, he's no prophet.

He's not speaking for me. This continues on in the New Testament in 2nd 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.

In order for a prophet to be a real prophet, he has to tell the truth about God's previous revelation. He doesn't add to it, he doesn't jettison it, he doesn't repackage it. What does this mean practically?

Well, there are a few names that I could throw out that I think everybody would know. For instance, Benny Hinn. Benny Hinn often teaches that there are nine members in the Godhead. That's someone who cannot be trusted, to say the least.

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

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

Secondly, in order to be a prophet, you must have moral integrity. This is littered throughout the 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 evildoers so that no one is turned back from this evil.

All of them have become to me like Sodom and her inhabitants like Gomorrah. Therefore, thus says Yahweh of hosts, 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. Much of our modern-day prophets and apostles are littered with moral failings. But one of the biggest charismatic churches, IHOP, not the Pancake Place, International House of Prayer, has just closed its doors because of the infidelity of their prophet and apostle.

And this is not unique to them. In order to be a prophet, one must have moral integrity. This is why Jesus says in Matthew chapter 7 verse 20, so then you will know them by their fruits. Thirdly, they must have predictive accuracy.

They must have predictive accuracy. They must be theologically precise, they must be morally upright, and they must get everything that they say right, or they are not a prophet. 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 Lord, was death. Why? Because God, when he speaks, he's clear. And when you speak on behalf of God, that's a big deal.

God hates, and I'll say it plainly and emphatically, God hates false and accurate prophets. And the sad reality, though, is modern prophecy boasts of their inaccuracy, 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. They behold worthlessness and lying divination who are saying Yahweh declares when 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 Yahweh declares? But it is not I who have spoken. Therefore, thus says the Lord Yahweh, because you have spoken worthlessness and behold, lie.

Therefore, I am against you, declares the Lord Yahweh. So my hand will be against the prophets who see worthless visions and utter lying divinations. 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 Lord Yahweh.

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

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 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.

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.

And those claims, if you look at our next part of the verse, are centered on Jesus the cornerstone. Of course, Jesus was the perfect prophet, he was the perfect apostle, he was the perfect king. Hebrews chapter 12 asserts that Jesus is the great apostle of our faith.

He is the greatest prophet who came to preach. 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.

He gave them specific words. In fact, Jesus' entire ministry was much like the apostles' ministry and the prophets' ministry. 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 Messiah.

You don't believe me? Acts 2, 22. Men of Israel, Peter says, listen to these words, Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which 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. You could trust his atonement. You could trust his words. You could trust his love. You could trust that he and the Father were one.

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. This is the foundation, friends. The foundation of the church has been built on the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus being the cornerstone, and that foundation is completely built.

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

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

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

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. 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.

A matter of years later, in 1906, he moved to California, and there was a revival of sorts that broke out. It was called the Azusa Street Revival. It was very famous. And there was this explosion of charismatic theology.

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

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

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

But it started at Fuller Seminary with a lot of different people, but the most famous name is probably 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 at these sorts of things continuing in a religion that never really saw it that way in the first place.

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

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

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.

A lot of people say who are in this camp, they are open but cautious. They're charismatic but with a seat belt, right? That is people like John Piper, Sam Storms, people who we love and respect but we disagree with them.

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. 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.

And the reason for that is because that's what the scriptures teach that teaches us here in Ephesians 2 .20. There is one foundation. That foundation has already been laid. It was laid by the apostles and the prophets, of course Jesus being the cornerstone.

Friends, this is so important. It's important because it helps us to understand one very important doctrine, namely the sufficiency of Holy Scripture. Like I said, this is not some theological exercise.

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

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

Children, would you look at me? Children, what is prophecy? Okay, all right, well let me tell you. Prophecy is when God speaks through a man the words that he has for his people. His words are God's words because God has chosen to speak through him to reveal himself.

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