WWUTT 1588 Gifts of Faith, Healings, Miracles, and Tongues (1 Corinthians 12:9-11)

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Some of the most miraculous spiritual gifts that we see talked about in the Bible are not in regular use today, but God still gives us

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His Spirit, and the Spirit still gives us giftings when we understand the text.

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This is when we understand the text studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ.

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Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of 1 Corinthians 12. We've been looking at Paul's direction concerning spiritual gifts here, and we'll pick up where we left off yesterday.

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I'm going to begin by reading verses 4 through 11 out of the Legacy Standard Bible the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth.

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Now, there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministries, and the same

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Lord. And there are varieties of workings, but the same God, who works everything in everyone.

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But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for what is profitable. For to one is given the word of wisdom through the

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Spirit, and to another the word of knowledge, according to the same Spirit.

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To someone else, faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one

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Spirit. And to another the workings of miracles, and to another prophecy, and to another the distinguishing of spirits, to someone else various kinds of tongues, and to another the translation of tongues.

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But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually, just as He wills.

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And remember that as we're talking about spiritual gifts here, this is for the purpose of building up the church.

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Back to verse 7 again. To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for what is profitable.

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And that's specifically the church. That it may benefit one another in the body of Christ, building us up in love.

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Now yesterday we looked at verse 8. To one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, and to another the word of knowledge, according to the same

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Spirit. So we have, first of all, the spiritual gifts of teaching that are mentioned.

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The next one, in verse 9, is a gift of faith. To someone else, faith by the same

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Spirit. Now hang on. Don't we all as Christians have faith? Yes, of course we do.

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You must have faith. For as it says in the book of Hebrews, without faith it is impossible to please

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God. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek

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Him. So we all must have faith. We are not justified without faith, right?

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Romans 5 .1. Therefore now we have been justified by faith through our

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Lord Jesus Christ. You have no forgiveness of sins. You are not innocent before God unless you believe in His Son, Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again from the grave.

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Whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life. Romans 10 .9.

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If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised

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Him from the dead, you have faith and you will be saved. Ephesians 2 .8.

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For by grace you are saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

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We must have faith. You are not saved without faith. So yes, every believer, every

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Christian has faith. But what does this mean here about a gift of faith?

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Does someone else faith by the same Spirit in the context of spiritual gifts?

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Well, keep in mind this is right after Paul had mentioned gifts of teaching. One is given a word of wisdom, an utterance of wisdom in the

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Spirit to another, a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit. And as we considered this yesterday, this is with regards to teaching.

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So I believe that at the start of verse 9, we're still flowing with the same kind of thought here. To someone else faith by the same

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Spirit. And they may not necessarily be a person who has an ability to teach, but they are very mature in their faith.

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Because a person who is gifted in teaching needs to be mature in their faith in order to teach, right?

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Well, a person who has this gift of faith doesn't necessarily have the skill to teach, but they are very mature.

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They are able, let's say it's a person who knows how to recognize how

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God is working in the midst of that situation. Whatever the situation might be. Maybe a great situation.

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Maybe something worth rejoicing in. It may be something that is very difficult and trying. And this is a person who knows, according to Psalm 115 .3,

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our God is in the heavens. He does all that he pleases. And whatever happens to this person, they endure and hold fast.

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And they serve as a witness to the rest of the church. Of somebody who is strong in faith, even in the most trying circumstances.

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It could be a person also who knows how to come alongside others in the body of Christ who are going through difficult trials.

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And they know how to encourage or strengthen that person in their faith. This is the kind of blessing that a spirit gives to whom he wills.

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Remember, I read to you yesterday from Romans 12 .3, for by the grace given to me.

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This is Paul speaking, right? By the grace given to me. Now, let me pause there for a moment.

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That even goes back to the beginning of the letter. Because Paul talked about as a prophet, he had been given, well, as a prophet, as an apostle.

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Sure, a prophet, but an apostle specifically. That's the office he was granted by our

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Lord Jesus Christ. So as an apostle, he had a certain measure of grace that was given to him.

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So he comes back to that reference in Romans 12 .3 to say, by the grace given to me.

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By his calling as an apostle, he's speaking authoritatively here because of the grace

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God had shown to him. By the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

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So there are some to whom God has assigned more faith, right? Paul being one of those.

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As an apostle, you know, as the apostles, they could demonstrate all of these spiritual gifts.

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There really was not a spiritual gift that an apostle was lacking yet. But every person in the church may be blessed in different ways.

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And you have that one or that few, okay, who are really mature in their faith.

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And they're the ones to whom the church is going to look to be encouraged, to be admonished, to be rebuked, to be exhorted.

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It may not be that they have a platform to teach. They may not even have a gift of teaching. You could have a deacon who doesn't necessarily have a gift of teaching, but he has a gift of faith and he knows how to encourage and build others up in their faith.

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So we're talking about a mature believer here, given a certain measure of faith by the spirit that they may be a benefit to the rest of the church and encourage the brothers and sisters in the

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Lord in their faith. Makes sense. So there's our gift of faith.

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The spiritual gift of faith, as mentioned there in verse nine, we go on to the second part of verse nine to another gifts of healing by the one spirit.

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Now I'm going to make the argument here that from this point on, midway through verse nine to the end, we're talking about apostolic gifts here.

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They may not be gifts that are limited or exclusive to the apostles because I think of speaking in tongues, for example, more than just the apostles spoke in tongues.

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But these were certainly sign gifts that were only for the church at a certain period of time.

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And we do not see these sign gifts exercised with any kind of regularity anymore. The speaking in tongues is not speaking in gibberish as charismatics practice it today.

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It is speaking known languages. I'm going to I'm going to delve into that a little more when we get to first Corinthians 14.

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In the meantime, as we're just kind of taking down the list of spiritual gifts, we're just getting a an overview of what this gift is, a basic definition of this gift.

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So as we get to the middle part of verse nine, gifts of healing is something that was limited to the apostles and maybe a few others, but still connected with or associated with the apostles.

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It's not like healing was happening all over the world or all over the Roman Empire during this first century church age.

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It was a sign gift that the apostles had to show that the word that they spoke came from God.

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They clearly had some kind of supernatural blessing about them. And the gifts that the apostles did or the healings that they did rather were clearly supernatural.

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Like it was not it was not what you see in a charismatic church happened today of somebody being healed of their blood pressure or something like it's like in Pentecostal and charismatic circles, they will claim to do healing, but you cannot see how that person was sick before the healing and you cannot really therefore see how that person got better after the healing either.

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There have been no occasions of verified miraculous healings by faith healers.

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None. I'm staking my reputation on that. There have been none.

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Now, that does not mean that God does not heal. That doesn't mean that you won't see some kind of evidence of a miraculous healing that has taken place.

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I've witnessed that. Like when the doctors gave somebody no chance, there's no way that that person is going to be healed.

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And yet they came through it. Okay, I would call that a miracle. God had mercy on that person, healed them, and they were brought from death to life, essentially.

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Not that I've seen the dead raised. I'm just you know what I mean. The doctor said it's hopeless. They're going to die. But God had mercy on them, and they were healed.

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And we prayed for that healing. And God granted them that healing. That's different, though, than a person having a gift of healing.

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And there are not faith healers today. The gift of healing was given to the apostles.

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It was given to a select few others so that it could be seen that the message that was being spoken came from God.

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And it was evident. It was clear. It was plain. This was a miracle.

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You just think of the apostles speaking in tongues in Acts chapter two at Pentecost.

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The Holy Spirit comes upon them. They go into Jerusalem speaking in every language that's being represented there that the people hear the gospel proclaimed in their own language.

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How did the people respond to that? Some of them said, well, these guys are drunk, but they recognized it was said that these are

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Galileans. These are uneducated men. How do they know these languages?

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How are they able to come in among us like this and speak these languages that we can all hear what they are saying in our own tongue?

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See, they knew it was something miraculous, even though they were saying things like, well, these guys were drunk. It was it was still obviously a miracle when people speak in tongues today.

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It's not miraculous. No one's looking at that. No one, nobody is looking at the gibberish that someone says, which they claim is speaking in tongues.

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No one's looking at that as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. There's no evidence of anything miraculous occurring there.

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And that's not what the gift of tongues was in scripture either. So we're talking about clear, verifiable miracles, and they were given during a certain season and for a particular time.

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In Second Corinthians 12, 12, the apostle Paul says that the the signs of apostleship were performed among you.

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So, you know, I'm an apostle because you've seen me do the miraculous signs before your very eyes.

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In Hebrews 1, 1 and 2, Hebrews starts out like this. Long ago, at many times and in many ways,

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God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things through whom also he created the world.

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So there was a time when God spoke through the prophets. But now he speaks through Christ and Christ speaks through his apostles going on in Hebrews to verse verse three.

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The message of the gospel was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the

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Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. So God bore witness to the message of the gospel through signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the

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Holy Spirit. That's what they were for. They were sign gifts to verify that this message that's being spoken comes not from man.

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It comes from God. And we already have that message. That's what we have in the Bible. It's already been verified by these miraculous signs.

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And all of that has been observed. We have it written down in the pages of Scripture. The Book of Acts shows us the gospel going out through the apostles and the different miracles that they performed, testifying to this word being from Jesus Christ himself.

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So as we speak here about gifts of healing, we're talking about something that was for the church to a limited number of people at a specific time in history.

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It is not going on today. And again, that's not to say that God won't do some kind of a miracle and heal somebody.

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There isn't a person who is a faith healer. They've not been granted some kind of gift of healing that they may now heal whoever it is that they want.

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Even the apostle Paul had that gift for only a certain time for a particular purpose.

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He didn't always have it. When Timothy was experiencing his stomach ailments, as Paul addresses him about this in 1

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Timothy, he didn't heal Timothy of his stomach ailments. In 2

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Timothy 420, Paul talks about leaving Trophimus ill at Miletus. Why didn't

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Paul heal Trophimus? Well, there was a particular reason why Trophimus needed to be left there, and he didn't need the gospel verified to him, nor did the people around them, apparently.

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Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, when he asked God to take the tormentor of Satan away from him,

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God said, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

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So there is a time and a place in which this gift is supposed to be exercised. It's not something happening in every charismatic church on a

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Sunday morning. If there was such a thing as a faith healer, they'd be going into hospitals and clearing them out, and they don't.

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As Justin Peters has said, and I've said this too, be careful about anybody who claims to be a faith healer and wears glasses.

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They're obviously lying, and it's as plain as the glasses that sits on the nose on their face.

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OK, so this is a gift that was for a time and a place to testify to the message that was being proclaimed as being from God.

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Some are given faith by the same spirit to another gifts of healing by the one spirit verse 10 to another the workings of miracles.

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Now, how does that differ from healing and speaking in tongues?

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Well, the miracles here would be like the word is synonymous with power. The word for miracles here is talking about a spiritual power.

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So it would be the ability to cast out demons. That would be the miracle thing.

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Now, the apostles did not do many of the most supernatural things that Jesus did.

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Those things that are just absolutely defying of nature like they didn't walk on water.

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They didn't calm a storm. Jesus transported a boat from the middle of the Sea of Tiberias to the other coast, right?

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They didn't do that. They didn't cast demons into pigs and then a herd of thousands of pigs go running off into the water.

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They didn't raise themselves from the dead. Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead, just as the apostles also did.

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But they did not raise themselves from the dead. As Jesus said, he had the authority to lay down his life and take it back up again.

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So the apostles didn't do these things. Then what did Jesus mean in John 14, 12, where he said to his disciples?

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Truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do and greater works than these will he do because I am going to the father.

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If the disciples did not do some of the greatest miracles that Jesus did, then was Jesus mistaken there?

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No. What Jesus was talking about was that they would go out into the world doing works more far and wide than he did farther and wider, more far and wide.

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Yeah. Anyway, they would just go out into the Roman Empire. Jesus had stayed right there in the

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Holy Land in Israel, Judah in Samaria. That was the limit of Jesus ministry.

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But the apostles would go out even farther. So in this way, they did greater works.

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But even with the gift of healing, like the time in history where we see the most healing being done is during the first century.

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It's during the time of Christ and the time of his apostles. Healings were not a regular thing in the Old Testament.

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You rarely see healings in the Old Testament. I don't know if you've ever really given thought to this before, but go back and look for all the times that you see healing in the

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Old Testament. It was not a common thing. There were not prophets who just had this ability to heal.

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They only did these things on occasion. But then you get to Jesus and you get to the disciples and the apostles, and Jesus did thousands of healings and the most healings that had ever been done by anybody.

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Jesus did them and then gives those gifts to his apostles to verify their apostleship, that they continue to speak the message of Christ.

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And some of these miraculous things were not just limited to the apostles. Of course, you think about Peter going to the house of Cornelius in Acts chapter 10.

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And after preaching the gospel, the guests there in Cornelius's house, the Gentiles, they start speaking in tongues, showing that the

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Holy Spirit has come upon them. And this is to affirm what was prophesied in Joel 2, 28.

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And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

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Your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions. Now, this wasn't everybody, but you could see that the

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Holy Spirit was being poured out upon all kinds of people. Philip's daughters who prophesied, right?

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Because it says your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. But there was a certain time and place in which these things were done to verify the message that was being delivered came from God.

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It's not something in regularity today. And even as Paul is speaking here to the church in Corinth, he's very, very limited in the way that he talks about these spiritual gifts.

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He's not saying that everybody's going to continue to have these gifts even for 2000 years to the present day.

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He's very limited in the way that he talks about it to someone faith by the same spirit to another gifts of healing by the one spirit to another, the workings of miracles to another, the distinguishing of spirits.

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We call that discernment. I'm going to talk about that more next week to someone else, various kinds of tongues and to another, the translation of tongues.

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But one and the same spirit works all these things distributing to each one individually just as he wills.

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And it was the spirit's will to do these more miraculous things in a certain time and place.

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And it's not something we see with regularity today. And I want to say once again, that doesn't mean that you won't observe some kind of miracle happening.

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It's just not often. If it was all the time, it wouldn't be a miracle. And these gifts are not designated to particular persons in that they always have them.

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Again, there's no faith healer. And as Paul says about a gift of healing to another gifts of healing by the one spirit, he could simply be talking about 30 or 40 people and that's it.

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But the point that's being made to the Corinthians is that not everybody will have these gifts.

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You go to the end of the chapter. Verse 29 are all apostles are all prophets are all teachers are all workers of miracles.

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Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all translate? The answer to those rhetorical questions is, of course, no.

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So not everybody has those gifts and they were for a certain time and place. The spirit works all those things according to his will.

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May we be grateful to God for the gift of salvation that we have by faith in the

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Lord Jesus Christ, whatever spiritual gift that you have been given, exercise it to the glory of God, but don't pout over it and wish that you had one of the cooler gifts serve faithfully and great will be your reward in heaven.

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Heavenly Father, thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit, God himself dwelling within each and every one of us who have faith in the

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Lord Jesus Christ by the measure of faith that we have been given. May we continue to rejoice in God today and serve you faithfully and share this faith with others that they may know the good news of the gospel of Christ that has saved us and is guaranteed for us an inheritance in glory above with God our