Church, Part 10 - Spiritual Gifts Part 1 of What We Believe, Part 46

Discussing controversial things like the charismatic gifts? No, that never causes any problems.

Well, sometimes it does, but not this time. Coming your way on The Rap Report now.

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. We at Striving for Eternity are a ministry to help disciple the saints.

We, as a podcast, are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life.

With that in mind, we come to, again, another in our series on what we believe, and I encourage you to go to the website strivingforeternity .org.

You can go to the About section, What We Believe, under there, and we are in the section of the church, and we're going to deal with today, well, yeah, like I said in the intro there, a little bit of a controversial issue.

It is the issue of charismatic gifts, and before I bring my guest co -host in, let me just say this is one that some people get very emotional about.

There are those that believe the gifts continue, and some of those people will view the gifts as part of their

Christian life to the point where they find their identity for their

Christian life in these spiritual gifts, and that causes some problems, because when we disagree, what some people feel, you know, if we disagree on these things, that you're calling into question their salvation.

So before I bring my guest co -host on, I wanted to say I want you to encourage you to, even if you might disagree with the positions that one or both of us may take, because we may not agree completely, maybe not at all, but I want to encourage you to go to the

Word of God for the answers. Don't go to Harold, don't go to me, because we are just failed men like you as a listener, and our authority is the

Word of God. We could disagree this side of heaven, but we won't disagree on the other side, and so let's keep that in mind as we listen, as you yell it, your phone listening to us, maybe.

If you want to disagree, that is perfectly fine, and I'll give you two ways to disagree. You can reach out to us and email us at info at striving for eternity dot org, info at striving for eternity dot org.

The other thing you could do is just join me on Apologetics Live on a Thursday night, 8 o 'clock

Eastern Time. Just go to ApologeticsLive .com, and that's a place where I can always be found for two hours to answer your questions.

So let me bring Harold Smith from the Patriot Pastors podcast back on.

He is my guest host again for a couple more episodes. I hope you're enjoying his brilliance, because I know

I am. So welcome, Harold. Hey, thanks for having me on, Andrew. It's a blessing to be here with you.

So let's jump right into this, if we could, and I'm gonna ask you if you would mind reading the section that we have tonight.

Now this is a little bit of a longer section, so we're gonna do this in two episodes, because we're not gonna cover the whole thing, and I will make the decision later whether I will do a third episode by myself, going into more detail if we think we need it, because there is a lot of confusion in this area.

But what we're looking to do in this is, again, this is in a series of showing us not just the theology that we believe at Striving for Eternity, but a big part of what we want to do is help you as a listener to know how to read a doctrinal statement, to see all that's...

when it says these things, what's in there and what's not in there? What's it countering as well?

So Harold, if you wouldn't mind reading the section that we have, and if you're following along, strivingforeturning .org,

the About section, what we believe, go to the church, and this is about the third to the last paragraph.

It's a longer one there, and it starts with, there are two kinds of gifts, and with that, take it away,

Harold. There are two kinds of gifts given to the early church, miraculous gifts of divine revelation and healing were given temporarily in the apostolic era for the purpose of confirming the authenticity of the

Apostles' message. Ministering gifts were given to equip believers for edifying one another.

With the New Testament revelation now complete, Scripture becomes the sole test of authenticity of a man's message, and confirming gifts of miraculous nature are no longer necessary to validate a man or his message.

Miraculous gifts can even be counterfeited by Satan to deceive even believers.

The only gifts in operation today are those non -revelatory equipping gifts given for edification.

No one possesses the gift of healing today, but God does hear and answer the prayers of faith, and will answer in accordance with his own perfect will for the sick, suffering, and afflicted.

Thank you for that, and so hearing that, maybe some are going, I totally disagree with all of that.

That's okay. We can still be brothers and sisters in Christ and disagree. I realize even just on the reading of that may have triggered some people.

I get it. I'm not gonna condemn you for if you believe the gifts continue.

Please don't condemn me if I think they don't. Let's have some agreement there. Let's be nice to one another.

But what I do want to point out is I think everybody sees that there are spiritual gifts, and there seem to be really contention over what is referred to as the charismatic gifts.

We get that word from the Greek word charismata, and so that is the word for gift.

There's two words for gifts. That's one of them. It is a mistake to think that just because that word charisma is used that that is somehow like a separate set of gifts.

I'm saying this to say that some people will define it by the two Greek words as if one is one set and one is another.

I don't know that we can make that distinction, but it is the word that's used in 1st

Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 that is where it gets its name, and there is some debate that we could see whether these charismata gifts were always believed or held normative for all through church history.

Regardless, I think that even those that hold to the gifts continue do see something different.

That started, really, we could go before Azusa Street in 1905, but most people mark

Azusa Street in 1905 as the beginning of the charismatic movement, and so many will see that there's something that there were some what they called generals of the faith that kind of preceded

Azusa Street and led up to it, but I think most will agree that there was a change there, and historically.

Now, from a cessationist perspective, many cessationists, and when I say cessationists, it means that they believe the gifts have ceased versus them continuing, and that's really what's at debate here.

What I think we end up seeing is most cessationists end up saying, well, see, historically, you know, it just started in 1905, and therefore, we don't have that in history.

Well, you know, there are different cases that you'll see people refer to different gifts, and so I'm gonna be really clear.

In this doctrinal statement, I refer to miraculous gifts. There's only one

I mentioned specifically here is healing, but in Scripture, there's only three that we could say are mentioned for the purpose of that would cease, and that is in 1

Corinthians chapter 13, if you look at starting in verse 8 to the end of the chapter, and those three are the gift of prophecy, the gift of wisdom or knowledge, and the gift of tongues, and yet in my doctrinal statement here,

I said healing ceased. That's not listed there! Okay, so I cannot give you

Scripture to explicitly say that the gift of healing has ceased. I can give you explicit

Scripture to the other three because that's exactly what it says, and we can debate when they will cease, but Scripture does say they will cease, okay?

So ultimately, we're all gonna be cessationists if we hold to what the Scripture clearly says there, but the thing

I want us to do is to just say, again, with these episodes, I want us to look at what is in a doctrinal statement.

So even if you disagree with me, I want you to see how we go about putting something like this together, what it says, what it doesn't say, what it's saying is true, what it's saying would be false in my view, okay?

Harold, you had read through this, and you were kind of concerned because you said, well, I'm not a hard cessationist like you, we might disagree, and I said, that's fine with me!

I encourage that. So at any point you disagree, go ahead and pipe up. Well, I didn't want to come on your podcast and be like, no, that's not me,

I'm just sitting here quietly letting you talk because I don't agree with you. I do believe that the gift of healing, like healers, no longer exist.

I don't believe people have that power. Like Peter and John said, silver and gold have I none, such as I have

I given to you. I don't think anybody has that, but I do believe that what

I would call the hard -line cessationist view, that God's no longer speaking,

God's no longer giving revelation, in my opinion, in my view of things, is an overreaction to the charismatic view, or a charismatic, or the entrance of the charismania, let's say that.

I don't think Charles Spurgeon was saying, if you want to hear God speak, read your Bible. If you want to hear him speak out loud, read your

Bible out loud. That stuff didn't come about until after we had the abuse of tongues, after we had the abuse of prophecy, and I think the hard -line stance that it all ended and God's through, and God's now mute except through speaking through the written word,

I think, I don't think we saw that either until we saw charismatics come on the scene in 1905.

Well, I think that's a fair assessment in the sense that much of our theology is reactionary to issues that come up in their times, right?

I mean, how do we get the doctrine of the Trinity? Because you had a guy that was running around areas that was saying that Jesus wasn't

God, so in response to that, you ended up getting biblical doctrine, right?

And so, and what I may include in the show notes, I'm taking a note as we speak so that I can remember to include it, but I will include a link to a sermon that I did at the cessationist conference on the fading of the

New Testament miracles, and the reason is, in that sermon, and if you just go to strivingforeturning .org

slash miracles, you actually can get my notes for that sermon with all of my data and the graphs that I use, and that is one sermon where I just go through time and I show, basically there's only three times in history that where we do see miracles that were seen like they were almost normative, and they were all tied to new revelation.

So I will, I'll include that in the show notes so you can find that link. Easy. And so, let's dig into this and we can discuss our disagreements with this.

I mean, I would have maybe a harder line cessationist view, but with what you said,

I mean, a lot of this comes down to definitions. Let me explain.

When I listen to many charismatics and they talk about hearing from God and what they'll refer to as prophecy, and I often,

I look at it, it seems like what they're really defining or speaking about is providence, which

I say continues today. You know, they got a feeling, pray for someone, and they call that brother, and oh, that brother just got in a car accident and needed the prayer.

Is that a revelation, or is that God's providence in the way he works through believers, or actually just the way he works through people?

I put it in the category of providence, and this is why some of, I think, a lot of what I see is we talk past one another.

I see this a lot. I hope to be doing a long discussion slash debate with Michael Brown on this subject.

We keep trying to get that together, and we had it scheduled.

We were going to do it early part of this year, and there's some things going on with him, so we're holding off a bit.

Get those things straightened out first, but I think it's good for us to have discussions, and I do think that a big part of it, and he agreed with me, is we need to define terms, and I think a lot of the debate and disagreement is over terminology, and so...

I'm sorry, Andrew, I would agree completely. Terminology needs to be defined.

This is the crux of the matter for me, and we can talk about some other things, but if we say

God can only speak through his word, then God has muted himself from speaking in any other way, and I can't find that in Scripture, and I would think that would be such a historic event for mankind, because God's been speaking since Genesis 3 audibly, or Genesis 2, let's say that, and now all of a sudden, at the completion of Revelation, God says

I'm no longer going to talk the way I've talked for the first 4 ,000 years. That would be something in my mind that should be more evident than the word that in 1st

Corinthians 13 verse 10. Well, let me give an argument that some would think would be against my position, even.

Some would argue that, well, you see at the end of Revelation it says don't add to this book. If you add to this book, these plagues will be added to you, and nothing else should be added.

Yeah, the problem when people try to use that to say you can't, God can't give any revelation using that,

I just want you to realize that God said that earlier in the book of, I think it's Proverbs?

Oh, wait, even earlier in the book of, I think, Deuteronomy. So there's three times in Scripture where God used language like that.

So the language is not saying this will not be added to, it is saying that, you know, man shouldn't be adding to it.

In other words, God can add to his word all he wants, but men shouldn't.

Yeah, I'm sorry, pause you for a second. So do you believe God could speak to mankind and it not be recorded in Scripture?

Like where Paul saw things he couldn't speak of. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. When I say

New Revelation, I don't mean book 67, and I've had people say, well if God speaks, then you have to write it down and record it.

I'm like, no, God is still able to speak in my view. Yeah, I would agree with you, and I was gonna raise that actually before we get into breaking down the statement, because the difference

I would make is this, can God speak and has God spoken without it being written down in Scripture?

Yes, because the first writing was to Moses and yet we know he spoke to Adam and Abraham, and we have it recorded from Moses, but you know, and even in the book of John it says not all the things could be written down.

But here's the thing, if God does speak, and this is where many charismatics would disagree, and where I get to the definitions,

I think they get a different definition of what Revelation is. I would say that if God is revealing, even if it's not written down in Scripture, it is equal in authority to Scripture.

Not because whether it's written down or not, it's not that that makes it

Scripture. What makes Scripture Scripture is that God breathes it out,

He speaks it, it's His Word. So if anyone was to get a revelation from God, I would say it is equal in authority with Scripture because it is

God's revelation. I understand that some, and I'm gonna say that when we look within the charismatic movement, it's a broad thing, because you have those who are just the really crazy types, you know, the

Benny Hinns and all those guys, which, I mean, at that extreme I don't think they're even,

I'm gonna get myself in trouble, but I think I don't think they're even brothers in Christ when they start believing they could be little gods and they're, you know, it's just...

but so many charismatics will defend them over the issue of the charismatic gifts, and there's more moderate charismatics that I think are not crazy, we could disagree, and so...

but they will talk about revelation, but then they see these people, like all these people who made prophecies of Trump being reelected in 2020, and he didn't hold that office.

Even Michael Brown has condemned that over and over again, these false prophecies, and he told people they need to repent of that, so even a charismatic can recognize that, okay?

But the thing is, when they say that that's a revelation, they then want to say, but that could be a prophecy that doesn't come true, that God gave them, and now they start going, well, it's about the person who said it, they misinterpreted it, or something like...

I think when God gives his revelation, it is clear, it's from God, and it's not based on how we interpret it.

God says it. Do we disagree there? No, I agree. When God speaks, it's accurate, but let me ask you, can

God still do this today? In Acts chapter 13, I'll give you an example here in verse 2, and we're talking about the church at Antioch, and it says, as they ministered to the

Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto

I've called them. So how do we determine the call?

How do we experience that? Because I've heard people say, there is no call, you just go out, if it works,

God was in it, if it didn't work, you shouldn't have been doing it. Well, this is where I put this...

see, I'm gonna make a distinction between what you said of the call and Acts 13, right?

Because Acts 13, it's very clear that the Holy Spirit said this, you know how we know it? Because the text says so.

Right? But when you refer to the call, like a call to ministry and things like that,

I put that under the term of providence, the way

God works, in the feelings we have, things like this.

I cannot explain how he does these things, you know, no more than I can explain how, you know,

Luke can write Acts, and it's God's Word. Somehow he works through the human being to bring about what he is doing.

Can I ask you a question? You just did, you want to ask another? Your answer sparked another question, does that make sense?

I'm just saying, so I'm a missionary. Do I just attempt to be a missionary and see if I was called?

I mean, how do we distinguish this? Because the Spirit, I believe the same Holy Spirit exists today that existed there, and I don't think this is apostolic in the fact that Barnabas is included, so this is not something unique to the

Apostles. It is in their era, but what happened in 1st

Corinthians 13, verse 10, that ended the Holy Spirit's ability to call people to a specific work in the ministry, and make it clear to the entire church?

I mean, that has to be God speaking in some way. Well, okay, so yeah, and I'm not, so my point is that I wouldn't say that,

I would say God can still work through that missionary. The difference being is he's going to do it through his providence, he's not going to be giving him revelation, and people may accuse me of, you know, word games here.

I'm trying not to be, I'm trying to be precise, but I look at it this way and say, you know, when we're saying the miraculous, if we say that God doesn't do any miracles, well, no one's saying that, right?

We both agree, God can do miracles. God can, you know, that's why at the end of this statement we're gonna, when we talk about healing, it's gonna say

God can heal, but there's, I want to make the distinction, what

I'm making a distinction here is between a gift and a fact, okay?

Fact is God heals, God reveals. The gift of this is different.

I don't think someone has a gift of healing, so if I have a gift, so let's think about the gifts.

There's different gifts that we mentioned in the last episode, you guys could go back and re -listen to those, but there's a gift of teaching, administration, service, exhortation, mercy.

Nobody argues that those don't continue for today, those aren't miraculous in any way.

The issue is is that when I have those gifts, if you're gifted to teach, you can teach.

You can exercise that gift when you choose to. Same with mercy and giving and all the others.

So if you have the gift of healing, I would say that you can heal, walking up like the example you gave, right?

The Apostle could just walk up and heal somebody. I don't think anyone has that gift today.

I think that now it is God who does the healing, not through a giftedness that he gives to someone.

Does that make sense? Oh sure, and I agree with you. I guess where I'm at,

Andrew, is if we say when the Bible came, God quit talking, I can't go that far.

That's why I say I'm a little bit softer on cessationism. I don't see the gift of healing today as a gift that people have the ability to do.

I don't see tongues as commonplace, but I do believe that God is able to take my broken

English language, and if he so choose, let someone in Chinese hear it in their language, because God never said

I'm gonna stop. Okay, so when you look at that, if that could happen, that again would not be a gift of languages.

It would be God doing something, right? This is where I guess

I'm missing. Would that not be miraculous if a Chinese person? Yes, but it's not

God giving you a gift to do that on demand. Now, I believe when it comes to the gift of languages, and that's what tongues means, languages.

People want to use tongues, I think, because they always want to say that they speak an angelic language. I've never met anyone that claims they speak a language that we can actually have them speak it, and you know, and there is confusion with it.

I listened to podcasts that would talk about it, and they couldn't even define what the gift of languages was.

Was it a gift of the, was it a miracle of the hearer or the the speaker? They were saying, well, you know, this one guy said that he was speaking

English, but the Portuguese person was hearing it in Portuguese, right?

And so we don't want to let experience define the gift, right?

The only thing we have on this gift is Acts chapter 2, and what happened was, it says they were speaking these different languages that they didn't know that was the gift, and so I think that we can't go beyond what

Scripture says with it to start saying, well, you know, this is what happened to me, therefore this is what it means.

It kind of doesn't matter what happened to you. You know, I'm just, this is a lot more buildup than we've done it for any other one in this in this series.

I'll be quiet, Andrew. No, no, no, no. I planned it because I know for some people how emotional this can get.

I'm not questioning your salvation if you believe that these gifts continue, okay?

That's not what I'm doing. But what

I do want to point out is that, you know, when we look at these gifts, what

I'm saying as far as the church, that we do, the church was given two different gifts, and I think everyone can agree with this.

There's, whether you want to call them miraculous, charismata, or as I refer, revelatory gifts, versus the servant gifts.

Everyone agrees the service type gifts, as I mentioned, continued, right? The giving, the exhortation, all that.

It's these more miraculous ones, and so we have to first recognize there's not a lot of Scripture that details it.

We only really have 1st Corinthians 12, 13, and 14. You only need one passage to provide doctrine, so just because it doesn't speak often on it, but as we look through this, let's break this doctrinal statement down a bit and show you as a listener how, you know, what all we're saying in this and what we're not saying in this, because that's the purpose of this.

So we say there were two kinds of gifts in the early church, and I mentioned those, right?

The miraculous gifts of divine revelation and healing were given temporarily for the apostolic error for the purpose of confirming the authenticity of the

Apostles' message. So I'm going to stop there. What am I saying in this? What I believe is that God gave miracles for the purpose of affirming the

Scripture. Three periods of time that we see miracles.

In the time of Moses and Aaron, in the time of Elisha and Elijah, and the time of Jesus Christ.

Now I'm not going to get into all the numbers and details. I encourage you to go to strivingforeturning .org slash miracles.

You can look at all the information I have there. Feel free to reach out to me, and if you want to challenge me, that's fine.

I don't mind. Let's have a good civil discussion, and we could do that. But I see, when

I look at all the miracles done by human beings, okay, I distinguish the ones done by God from that.

Over the 4 ,500 years of biblical history recorded, we look at Scripture that covers the span of about 4 ,500 years, and as we look at that time, we're only seeing three periods of time where human beings are doing miracles.

Now it doesn't mean that's only times, but if we exclude those three time periods, we only have like seven or eight miracles in that 4 ,500 years, which tells me that miracles were not very common outside of the new revelation of Scripture, and that's what

Hebrews 2 says when it says, I'll just really, I'll start with verse 1, but it says, for this reason we must pay closer attention to what we have heard so that we do not drift away from it, for if the words spoken through angels prove unalterable and every transgression and disobedience received is a just penalty, how can we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?

After it was at the first spoken through the

Lord, it was confirmed to us by those who heard it,

God also testifying with them both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the

Holy Spirit according to his own will. So this is, and by the way, that gift there is not the word charismata, but this is what we would see.

This is a passage I could turn to to say what this is clearly saying is that God testified, verse 4, to the new revelation by signs, wonders, and miracles and the gifts of the

Holy Spirit. So when I'm looking at it, this is what

I'm seeing. I'm seeing that Scripture supports that when there are miracles, one of the purposes of miracles is to vindicate the person that is providing new revelation.

It's to authenticate and vindicate that this is God's Word. I would agree, and that's why the

Bible says the Jews were seeking a sign. They were looking for the evidence of the

Messiah by this miraculous, and even when John the Baptist was doubting Jesus in prison, they said, are you the one or should we wait for another?

And what did he tell them? The blind see, the deaf hear, and the poor hear the gospel. He gave them the miraculous sign to testify to his office as Savior and Messiah.

Yeah, and so I understand that some are disagreeing with me on this, and I get that, but just understand my position and at least understand how

I approach this and why we come here at Striving for Communion to the conclusions we come to.

If these gifts are giving revelation and the miracles are to vindicate that, then

I would look at this and say, okay, if we're not getting new revelation...

Now, Harold, you and I might disagree on this a bit, right, on what revelation is, but I'm gonna say canon, right?

Scripture being written down, because if you tell me you got a revelation from God, I can't really prove it other than...

I mean, I can listen to what you say and compare it to what Scripture says. That's testing the spirits in 1

John. If you say you got a prophecy, I can see if it comes true. If you say, hey,

Trump is going to be president in 2020 and he wasn't, and they all said it was gonna be...

it's not like they said, oh, it was in 2020 he was gonna retain the office. Well, then that's wrong.

What about Pat Robertson? I mean, didn't he pick Mitt Romney? Didn't God tell him Mitt Romney was gonna be president?

That never happened. Yeah, good point. Yeah, I mean, it's a thing where when they do that,

God's revelation will never be wrong. But the problem is that when these guys were wrong, what people want to do is then kind of put it in a different category of revelation, or to say, well, it was the person gave the revelation that misinterpreted

God's Word. I don't think God's Word gets misinterpreted.

I mean, we have Scripture, and yes, people can misinterpret it. So in that sense, yes. But when he gives it,

I think it's clear. I agree with you 100%, Andrew.

When God speaks, people know it. They may not recognize it at first. They may be like, you know, young Samuel, but God speaks, they say like Isaiah, woe is me,

I'm undone, I'm a man of unclean lip, I shouldn't be here. It's terrifying when God speaks.

It should be. I mean, I look at Peter, who can read

Paul's writings, and he refers to it as Scripture. I think that when we have, as part of how we get the canon, in the

Bible, we say that we believe that it was accepted as God's Word at the time that it was written.

It was recognized. How? We don't know. Why is it that Paul wrote, I believe, four letters to Corinth, but we only have, today, we only have two of them.

Did we lose the others? No, they weren't inspired. They must not have been seen as being inspired at that time, and so that's the point that I would make with that.

But what we're saying here is, this one sentence is really trying to emphasize a lot more than just saying, hey, we believe that the gifts don't continue.

There's a lot of people that didn't even believe they are real then, but the miraculous gifts were real to testify to the authenticity of Christ and the ministry of his chosen apostles.

And I think every Christian has to affirm that that's the reason those were given. I mean,

Jesus says that we're given the apostles. It's throughout Scripture, and I think the only people that would debate that with us would be the textual critic person who doesn't believe in any miraculous things in the

Scriptures and try to explain away the part of the Red Sea and stuff like that. Yeah, well, it was actually the

Reed Sea, and it wasn't, it was shallow. Yeah. They knew where the rocks were.

Yeah, even though the Scripture says dry ground, and I mean,

I don't know what happened with that Reed Sea, because all of a sudden, the Egyptians, they must not have known where the rocks were that their horses missed those rocks and just fell in and drowned, right?

And I'm taking the time to give lots of caveats, and I'm just doing it because I know that there's people who are getting upset with what

I'm saying, and so I just want you to hear my heart, hear my position, and understand what

I actually am saying here, so you don't misrepresent. I mean, that's the one thing.

You wouldn't want me misrepresenting your position if I said, you know, all charismatics believe that we all should be healed, we all should be wealthy, we all shouldn't have any sickness ever.

Most charismatics would go, no, no, no, we don't believe that. Rightfully so, and you would call me out if I do that, and you should.

The issue being is, don't do it to me, is the point. So, all right, let's see if we can move forward with this.

So, one of the things I do want to say is, I have in here that these gifts were temporary for the apostolic era.

There is a view Sam Waldron has written about and holds to, I don't kind of like it, is that this argument, they refer, some people refer to these as, instead of miraculous gifts,

I refer them as revelatory gifts. Others refer to them as charismatic gifts.

Sam Waldron and others refer to them as apostolic gifts, and so the argument that they have is, there's no more

Apostles, therefore there's no more need for these gifts because only the Apostles had them.

I'm just gonna say, I don't think that's a really good argument, even though I have a lot of good friends that hold to that, and calling it an apostolic gift,

Scripture doesn't call it an apostolic gift. Scripture does call it a miraculous gift, we just saw that in Hebrews chapter 2 verse 4.

So, we see miraculous gifts, that would be fine. The Greek word is charisma, charismatic gifts would be fine.

You could challenge me on the revelatory gift because that's not in there, but what

I mean by that is just that I say revelatory gift to say that the purpose of it is to authenticate the revelation, but it's still,

I would say, a miraculous gift, but calling it an apostolic gift and saying that it was only the

Apostles, I don't think that's a good way to represent it, and I think that if we look in Scripture there were other people who are not

Apostles that did miraculous gifts. In fact, there were people before there was the

Apostles, period. Some of these miraculous things that happened,

I wouldn't call them gifts, but they were clearly miracles. Like Philip, after he baptizes the

Ethiopian eunuch, he's carried away in the Spirit. I mean, he travels like Spock off Star Trek, and he arrives in another town instantaneously.

That's a miracle that God does that we don't understand, and he was not an

Apostle. He was basically a deacon in the first church of Jerusalem, and so I have a hard time labeling them as apostolic gifts, and I do tend to lean toward them being all pre the completion of Scripture.

Like, you know, I would concede to you, these that we have in Scripture clearly all happened before Scripture ended.

John being carried away in the Spirit on the island of Patmos, seeing the vision, the last book of our New Testament came by miraculous divine vision, instruction.

Yeah, and so the thing is is that we have to, I just think we have to be careful not to make arguments that are strong arguments.

We do have to be careful on all sides, and so, to the point that you had, again, this is a hard concept

I think for a lot of folks to understand, and I detail it in that sermon.

Again, you could go to strivingforcurtain .org Miracles to read it, but I lay out the difference between a gift of miracles and the fact of miracles.

The example you just gave with Philip, I would say that's a fact of a miracle. Philip didn't have a gift that was given to him where he could just, whenever he wanted, well, teleport the way you described with Spock.

He didn't have the gift of teleportation. So this is helpful,

Andrew, and do you have just a moment to kind of help me because I think you're hitting on something that would, I'm in agreement that people don't have the gift of prophesying, they're going around predicting the future, you know, winning all the racetrack horses and all.

I agree with all that, picking presidents, but most cessationists that I know of wouldn't accept the fact of a miracle today other than healing.

Yeah, okay, you're saying other than healing. Yeah, let me give an example.

You're talking like that maybe what someone would call a feeling that I just have, and I wake up in the middle of night with this thought, urge to pray for someone, and I call them the next day and find out they were in a car accident, or something happened.

No, that's nothing miraculous about that. What I would be talking about is let's go to the gift of, or not the gift of tongues, let's just go to the one -time use of tongues.

Somebody is preaching in a known language, and another person hears them in their language.

It's not the gift of tongues, doesn't do it all the time, maybe the only time it ever happened in his life. Would that be possible today, or is that no?

So now I have friends that would disagree with me, but I would say yes, it's possible by the work of God, not the gift given to men, and that's the distinction.

And I'm okay with that, because I don't think these are things we pursue.

I don't think we pursue trying to go speak in some tongue, or we try to discern and get some prophetic vision, but I don't think

God has said, okay, I'll never do this again, and that's why I'm okay. And you called it the fact, and this really helped me,

Andrew. I believe in the fact of the miraculous today, and God can still do anything

He did in the apostolic era. He can do it in the Harold Smith era, and I'm just a blip in history, but I don't go around looking for God to do the miraculous through me, but I believe

He's capable, and I don't believe He swore it off. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, because I think most of the charismatics that I speak to would agree that the gifts, like teaching, administration, giving, they're given at salvation.

We see outside of Acts 2, when we see a gift of tongues, it seems to be tied with salvation.

Even in Acts 2, it's tied to salvation in the New Testament sense. We're the

Jews every time. Yeah. And I would say that these gifts are given at salvation, which is an issue

I have when people say, well, you get saved, and then you get a second blessing, you get baptized in the

Spirit. I think salvation is being baptized in the Spirit. That happens at salvation.

You get all the gifts at that time that God wants to give you, and you can use them. And so this is where I make this distinction.

I don't hear a lot of people make that distinction, but I find it helpful for me, because what we're actually talking about is not whether God does miracles, but whether God gives the gift of miracles, the way

He gives a gift of teaching, administration, exhortation, mercy, giving, and so on.

Yeah, that helps, because I think when you say everything has to end with the completion of Scripture, I think you put a

Band -Aid over God's mouth and say, oh, no, no, no, you can't talk that way anymore. You've got to tell me from chapter and verse.

Because when I hear someone say, hey, God told me, and I hear the typical

Reformed Baptist, chapter and verse, please. Well, I just don't think

God's going around whispering in people's ears and appearing at the foot of people's beds, but at the same time,

I don't think God's mute either. Well, first off, I thought that was the fundamentalists that say chapter and verse, but if the

Reformed Baptist stole it, they came later. The fundamentalists, God told the fundamentalists what to preach.

They'll get up and say, hey, the Lord told me to, the Lord laid this on my heart. But yeah, no,

I think this is an area, I think there are some people that are hardline sensationists.

What I find interesting is many of those that would be hardline cessationists say,

God won't give any revelation anymore. My question to them is, are you premillennial?

And the reason I ask that is because most of the times they are, in which I say, oh, so you believe that Jesus is going to come back, reign as King and be silent?

I mean, everything that comes from the mouth of God is revelation. And when

God reigns as King, whether we have new revelation provided in writing, which

I think we might, so I don't believe the canon is closed to the point where there can't be more revelation given in the millennial kingdom, but we might not need it because Christ will be there to reign, but anything he says will be revelation.

It will be God's word. And so yeah, I do think there would be more revelation in the future because premillennial.

Now, if you're amillennial, just throw that argument out. I'm struggling to believe what he's already said.

Yeah. So I don't think it's good to argue that only the apostles had these gifts and saying that, you know, if you don't, we don't have apostles anymore, therefore we don't need these gifts.

I don't know that this is the reason or not that we see the third, what's referred to as the third wave of the

Holy Spirit, something that Peter Wagner, C. Peter Wagner made popular, but you started to see the rise of what's called new apostolic reformation, where now all of a sudden you have people calling themselves apostles again.

I don't know if it's in response to people using this apostolic gifts argument and they're saying, well, there are apostles today.

I'm an apostle. I don't know. I think if that is the case, it'd be a bad response to it.

I think we can make good responses because scripture doesn't call these apostolic gifts, and we see people other than the apostles that are given these gifts throughout time.

Does that make sense? Makes good sense. I've enjoyed our discussion, even though we're not 100 % in agreement with each other.

I've really enjoyed hearing your perspective. I've tried to sit quietly and listen and soak it in, and it's really helped me understand, and I think that's kind of the way

I'm going to present it in the future, is I don't think these are gifts given to people that go around and possess them, but I still think

God can do whatever God wants to do. It wouldn't be wrong if God wanted to speak audibly.

If he thundered out from heaven, that wouldn't be out of his character, and I don't think he expressly said he wasn't going to say that again.

Yeah, I think there's somewhere in Revelation where it even speaks about God revealing things in the sky.

If he's doing that, that would be Revelation, right? So let's try to wrap up the other type of gifts that we mentioned here in the time we have left in this episode.

Continuing on, it says ministering gifts. So the first one that we referenced was miraculous gifts.

The second category of gifts given to church are ministering gifts were given to equip believers for edifying one another.

Okay, this is the thing that I see with gifts. Gifts are not given to edify self.

Gifts are given for the building up of the body of Christ.

Now, this will take you back to a previous episode that Harold and I did when we talked about the purpose of the church.

I think it was episode 43, but when we talked about the purpose of the church, we talked that you can't do church in your living room by yourself.

You can't have the fellowship. Well, one of the things that you can't do by yourself is use your gift that God gave you for the body of Christ.

Because you sitting in your living room, in your pajamas, and your fuzzy slippers on, you can't show mercy to that monitor or TV screen that you're watching church happen on.

That's not how it works, right? So we have the miraculous and what

I'm calling the ministering. The ministering gifts are those that are given for the body of Christ.

I will argue all of the gifts are really given for the building up of the body of Christ, including revelation, speaking in languages, healing.

I think all of them build up the body. However, healing and things like that weren't done in the church often.

They were often done outside. But guess what? If you have the gift of teaching, you could teach outside the church as well as inside the church.

So I don't want us to think that it's got to be within the confines of a Sunday service.

It's the idea that you're given a gift for the greater body of Christ, and that's who we give gifts.

That's who the gifts are meant to serve, and I think that's true for all of them. So as we wrap up,

Harold, I'll let you kind of, you know, we're going to dig in a lot more in the next episode on this because we just touched the surface because there's a lot of things we had to kind of give caveats and make sure you hear our hearts.

And next episode, I'm just going to tell you all to re -listen to this one if you haven't. But, you know, any things you want to wrap up and get the last word here,

Harold? Yeah, I just want to caution people. If you're upset at what Andrew and I are talking about today, you're probably on one of two extremes.

You're extreme cessationist, or you're extreme charismatic, and I would caution you from being anything extreme in a secondary issue like the continuation of these gifts.

So if this upsets you, and you're like Andrew said, you're wanting to yell at your phone for what we're saying, man, is this really a doctrine that we should split company over?

I mean, the answer's no. This is not a draw your sword, stand your ground.

This is not the atonement. This is not the deity of Christ. This is not faith and repentance for salvation.

These are secondary issues. And if you disagree with me, that's okay. I still love you.

Andrew still loves you. We still love each other, he and I. It's not something that we should be at odds with.

So if I've made you at odds, it's not been my intention. Please consider your motives, and just consider

I'm a hillbilly from Arkansas, and I don't know any better. I'll give back to you, Andrew. Well, you raise a good point.

This is a secondary issue. Some make it too close to a primary issue, but it is a secondary issue.

I can guarantee one thing for sure. Harold, in heaven, we will all agree.

And maybe that is a great place to end. So with that, that's a wrap.

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