The Great Gift of Prophecy

The Biblical Basis for Prophecy and Spiritual Gifts

1 Corinthians 14 verses 1 through 5. Pursue love and desire spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy. For the person who speaks in another tongue is not speaking to people but to God, since no one understands him.

He speaks mysteries in the spirit. On the other hand, the person who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouragement, and consolation. The person who speaks in another tongue builds himself up, but the one who prophesies builds up the church.

I wish all of you spoke in other tongues, but even more than that, you prophesied. The person who prophesies is greater than the person who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets so the church may be built up.

Let's pray. Father, empower your messenger Cory today and just bring to remembrance all those things he has studied and just give him that gift of preaching today. And Lord, we invite you by your Holy Spirit to invade our space and to just control our thoughts and give us direction and how we might apply all this truth so that your church is built up and she conquers the community and the state and the nation and the world through the power of your word, in.

Christ's name, amen. Today our sermon is called The Great Gift of Prophecy. Have you ever met someone who is full of questions? Just lots of questions. It's not a bad thing. It's a great thing. Both the inquisitive mind and the simple faith are to be cherished in the church, but have you met someone who is full of questions, yet when you answer they simply jump to another question and then again and again and again?

All of a sudden you're 20 answers deep in a storm of questions that only seem to multiply. I've had many experiences with this and it can be difficult. They are not asking questions so they can hear and answer.

They are asking questions so they can continue in doubt. Have we adopted this same attitude when it comes to spiritual gifts, especially prophecy? I recognize this path is likely a new thing for us. I've never been part of a church that earnestly desires all the gifts and conducts them in good order.

My hope today is to settle questions that have kept us from obeying God's commands, to hasten us towards obedience, and to desire the blessings of the Holy Spirit. So I want to start with addressing those questions.

What Prophecy Is and What a Prophet Is

What is prophecy? Simple layman's terms. Prophecy is communication from God in one form or another to a person who then delivers it to others. Prophecy is communication from God in one form or another to a person who then delivers it to others.

That's the simplicity of prophecy. So what's the meat? What's inside of prophecy? What does it contain? Prophecy contains judgment, correction, comfort, conviction, guidance, and foretelling. With that definition made, it should be kind of easy to surmise what a prophet is.

A prophet is someone authorized to receive and then deliver God's words to others. I'm getting as bare bones as you can get. It does get more complicated than that, but it's as bare bones as you can get.

For this reason, a person in this position holds authority that can be dangerous. God told me, and that's a dangerous thing. Our hyper-cessationist friends have great qualms with that possibility, and I understand why.

It's a dangerous thing. They ask, well if they prophesy inaccurately, don't we then have to stone them? And that's what Deuteronomy says, so let's see what they're referencing. So through this beginning text, we're going to go through the questions that are keeping us from wanting to embrace the clear commands of Paul.

And so we're going to go through a number of questions to help get us there. So if someone prophesies inaccurately, do we then stone them? Deuteronomy 18 .15. Moses is speaking, the Lord your God will raise up a prophet for you from your brothers like me.

And he's speaking to Israel. You shall listen to him according to all that you ask from the Lord your God at Horeb, the day of the assembly, saying, we will not continue to hear the voice of the Lord your God, and we will not see this great fire again, or we will die.

This is Israel begging for a mediator, someone that is between them and God. Verse 17, and the Lord said to me, all that they said to you is right, that's correct, you do need a mediator. 18, I will raise a prophet for them from their brothers like you, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he will speak to them just what I command him.

And whichever person does not hear whatever the prophet speaks in my name, I will exact vengeance on that man. But the prophet who acts impiously to speak in my name a word that I did not command him to speak, and who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet will die.

But if you say in your heart, how will we know that the word that the Lord did not speak? How we know it's from him? Whatever the prophet may speak in the name of the Lord, and does not come to be, and does not come to pass, this is the word that the Lord did not speak.

In impiety the prophet spoke this, and you shall hold, you shall not hold yourselves off him. So Deuteronomy is intense, I think we got that. It can be some fearful stuff. God is holy and terrifying, and they desire a mediator because of that.

The people who do not listen to the prophet will have the Lord's vengeance, and a fraud who plays the mediator is to be killed. That is what we just learned from that text. Israel wanted a mediator because just before God and Moses communed together on Mount Sinai, as Moses waited upon the Lord for the Ten Commandments, during this time God descended on this mountain as a cloud, a dark cloud full of thunder, and lightning, and fire, and smoke.

Can you imagine seeing this giant mountain in front of you, and then God descends in terrifying form? You would want a mediator too. In a parallel passage, Exodus 20, the people say to Moses, you speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us or we will die.

So there's this idea of a mediator. I hope I'm driving that home a little bit. We are talking about a mediator here. All that in mind, this is about a prophet stationed as a mediator between God and God's people.

This prophet represents God to the people and he represents the people to God. He was part of founding a covenant with God, and he also increased the revealed scriptures of God. These are very special and unique things that some prophets partake in, but many prophets in scripture do not have these roles, and that's because they are different types in scripture.

That is the answer to, well, if they get it wrong, do we stone him? This is not about all prophets. It is about a mediator prophet, a founding covenant prophet. It's about one that reveals scripture. Thus saith the Lord.

If we go back in time of needing mediators, and the prophet claimed to be a mediator, and they issued incorrect prophecy, they would die. This is correct. Yet if we went back in time and someone had prophecy, but they were not claiming to be a mediator, this does not apply.

I'll show you. Paul's writings in 1 Thessalonians, he says, do not quench the spirit, do not despise prophecies, but test everything. Hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil. When he says, hold fast everything that's good, he's talking about hold fast to the good parts of the prophecy.

When he's saying abstain from every form of evil, he's saying forsake every prophecy that's not good. Then he goes on in Corinthians and says, let two or three prophets speak and let the others weigh what is said.

Paul is telling people to test and weigh that prophecy is to be given, it's to be interpretive, it's to be delivered to the church for multiple participating parties. Paul never condemns prophets who don't prophesy perfectly, rather he tells them to be listened to by others and see if the prophecy needs to be delivered, clarified, or rejected.

You see no ecclesiastical authority in the New Testament of us to kill our prophets, nor do you ever see the word false prophet in scripture ever associated with a man after God's own heart who got the interpretation wrong.

That is not what false prophet means. A false prophet leads people away from Christ, they'll manipulate teachings, they'll say I heard from God and I saw these tablets and I interpreted them and now we're Mormons, we get multiple wives.

Somehow that stuff tends to play in the favors of what they want. Big surprise there. Josh spoke two weeks ago about the prophet Agabus and he had a minor detail technically incorrect when he prophesied about Paul, yet we never heard about Agabus being stoned.

If every jot and tittle must be exactly God's word and God is never wrong, then we know that Agabus was wrong in the minor detail. No death, no condemnation, instead his prophecy was a major help and a blessing to the church.

In 1 Thessalonians, Paul declares that there were all good things to, there are good things for us to hold fast to and the wrong things are to reject. Paul calls us to test, to evaluate prophecy and that involves multiple measures.

Is it compatible with scripture? What's their character? Does it glorify God? Does it help the church? Is it even true? And then lastly, is it my own imagination or is this the Holy Spirit? And I think the easiest way to decipher that last one, because it's difficult, is someone with the gift of discerning spirits.

That would make that part easier. What I'm trying to clarify is that we are talking about two different types of prophets. There are actually more, but we're going to break this down a lot more simply.

Moses didn't ask anyone if his words were prophecy of the Lord. He didn't need his words evaluated. He didn't bring it before other people to see, does it need clarification? Moses spoke the words of the Lord.

This is completely different than what you see the prophets doing exercised in the church in the New Testament. Not the apostles. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about specifically what we're dealing with in this text.

Federal Prophets and Congregational Prophets

So I'm gonna try to break down the prophets. It's a little complicated. I'm just gonna oversimplify it. I don't care. Some things are gonna fall in multiple categories. The oversimplification is needed.

There are federal and mediator prophets. Like I said before, these people founded covenants. They mediated between God and man and they increased scripture. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Paul, John, Jesus.

They all fit that category. It's mine and most continuationist belief that this order of prophets is ceased until Christ comes back. We have the new and final covenant. No new covenant heads. Scripture is complete and Christ is our only mediator.

We need no more mediators. So this list is complete, but the other category is called congregational prophets. I don't know why we name these things the things that we do, but we do. These prophets simply deliver God's revelations to others for a building encouragement and consolation.

These can be in the Old Testament or the New Testament. You're not going to recognize a lot of names on here. Some of them you will. There's Agabus, Nathan, Gad, Ahijah, Micaiah, Huldah, the sons of the prophets, Anna, Simeon, Lucius, Manan, Judas, Barsabbas, Silas, Philip's daughters, Corinthians prophets, Ephesians prophets, Antiochian prophets, and Jerusalem's prophets.

That's a lot of prophets and the vast majority of them are in the New Testament. And they might sound strange and vague and you're just like, I just don't remember them that well. It's because all their prophecies, most of them, are not even recorded in scripture.

They're just simply referred to as prophets. So the next question, which this tees me up, that we need to deal with is, is every prophecy supposed to be scripture? I think we can see by that second list that definitely not.

All scripture is prophecy. All scripture is God's words, but not all God's words are captured in scripture. Sometimes this offends our minds a little bit, but let me give you a clear-cut example. Most of what Jesus said is not captured in scripture.

The gospel of John reveals this. Was Christ God? Of course. But John tells us that the world couldn't hold all that he said, indicating that there's more. Saul met with a group of prophets, borrowing off of Josh's example.

He didn't know and they prophesied together. We don't know what they said. Saul sent men to capture David three different times and they all got stopped and prophesied. And then Saul got so mad that he went there to capture David and then he ended up prophesying.

But we don't know anything of what they said. We don't know the prophecies of Samuel's prophets or the sons of prophets that were with Elijah and Elisha. We explore the questions often raised in contest desiring prophecy.

So, the ones that we deal with is, well, if they get it wrong, shouldn't they be killed? And then, well, if they speak it, shouldn't it be scripture? These are two questions that I've been hearing for decades, for a long time.

They just echo chamber. Believe it or not, I've always been sympathetic to our hyper-cessationist brothers. Three years ago, I just thought it would just be easier. It really did. It just sounds cleaner.

It's a clean cut, clean boundaries. You feel more comfortable in it. But this is why we have to be urged to learn our scriptures. Because these questions are answered by a brief look in scripture. I've been hearing the worst arguments for so long about why prophecy has ceased.

John MacArthur's, well, there's three periods of time, 70 years where God does major miracles. There are eight pages of miracles outside of that time period. It's just blatantly false. That's not to disparage a brother.

We just need to know our scriptures. Because if we know our scriptures, then we know that Paul tells us that we're to eagerly desire the gifts, especially a prophecy. If anything, this should be a reminder to us to meditate on the oracles of God.

His commands, how we see easily answer these questions. We are to know scripture, give a defense of our faith. So church, what I want us to do in light of answering these questions is to dive deeper in scripture.

Don't we want to obey the whole counsel of God? Meditate on God's word. Let it wash over you. Now, what does prophecy do? What are we missing out on? Like, we might be thinking like, okay, prophecy, we're supposed to do it, said in scripture, okay.

What am I missing out on? What does it do? What's it supposed to provide the church? Well, in my text today, Paul says that it's upbuilding, it's encouraging, and it provides consolation. But they all kind of sound like they overlap.

So I'll dive into what each one of those terms mean. For upbuilding the church, it's clarifying doctrine, it's teaching truth, it's strengthening your obedience to God. It's helping believers grow in wisdom.

I know the word, how do I apply it? I have the knowledge, how do I apply it? Encouragement. It's calling believers to faithfulness. So many times in scripture, when you see the word encouragement, it's not the same encouragement we always think of in soft terms.

It does include that, but often it's corrective, right? In the New Testament, Old Testament, it's a little different. But oftentimes we see encouragement, and it's corrective, and it's soothing. But specific, we have consolation as well.

That's the soothing one. So we call believers to faithfulness. It's urging repentance. It's inspiring courage. It's stirring someone to action. And then finally, the last one, it comforts the afflicted.

The whole reason for the book of Revelation is because there was so much persecution going on. He talks about it over and over again, and it provides a comfort of things to come. It's reassuring the fearful.

It's bringing hope to the discouraged, and it's calming fears. I'm almost out of the boring stuff, I promise. You see, the Corinthians seemed to have had a similar problem with valuing prophecy like we did.

Rather, they would speak in tongues. So Paul is having to say, no, you should seek prophecy more. That actually uplifts the body. When you're speaking in these tongues, you're speaking privately with God, unless you have an interpreter, which it sounds like most of them didn't have an interpreter.

The passage also expresses the vital need to pursue love. And we talked about this last week. What do these spiritual gifts matter if we don't have love? It must be our lens for doing it all. And it applies the same way with prophecy.

We cannot be puffed up in pride if we see that, if we do that. When Moses heard God in the bush, you know what Moses didn't say? He didn't say, you know what, God, I actually have your oracles from before.

I don't want to hear from you now. Did John the Baptist desire to meet Christ that he was prophesied of heralding in? He did. He desired to see God, to hear from God. But he had the law before him. Why talk to God?

You have the law. In no way am I proposing that scripture is insufficient. In no way. It's perfectly sufficient for saving faith and righteous living. Yet God desires to speak with his children in addition to scriptures.

We saw it through our entire Christian history. You see it through the entire Bible history. At no time did they have God's word. And did they say, now, I got your word. I'm good. They did not say that.

Does this threaten sola scriptura? No. Scripture is always the highest authority. This is what you use to evaluate. This is what you use to weigh. This doesn't threaten it at all. Sola scripture is the reason we obey when Paul says to evaluate prophecy.

When Christ says to look at their fruit. How can we test them without knowing scripture? We should love scripture and know it so well that we can easily smell a duck when we smell a duck. It should be so apparent for us.

Just like you right now are using your knowledge of scripture to evaluate my preaching. The reason we believe in prophecy is because scripture is sufficient and because of sola scriptura. The Bible commands us to do it.

Paul commands us to do it. And he's not asking our preferences. The people of God never rejoiced over periods of God being silent. You don't find that in scripture. When God says that he's silent, never was it that the people were rejoicing because of it.

There were times of darkness, suffering, and sin. So are we Nazareth? Are we the ones that Christ doesn't want to do miracles near because we lack faith and we wouldn't give him glory anyway? Church, I don't know about you, but I have felt guilt.

On wrestling with this scripture for years and trying to come up with options on why not to follow it. I would urge you to beckon to the Lord, to the Holy Spirit, to see if this offends you. Does what I'm saying right now offend you?

Because it invites opportunity for danger, just like someone who teaches falsely invites opportunity for danger. Lord, unless I hear you this way, I do not want to hear you. Paul tells us in three different letters that there are prophets, and he gives us explicit commands to not forsake it.

I don't think we should tarry much longer about despising prophecies. Is it wise to make theology on bad actors? Is that how we do theology now? Is it that Christianity is defined by the people who make us look bad or the people that we're scared of?

Is that how we revere our Lord? If so, let's just stop preaching and teaching just because more people go astray from that than false prophecy. So we really should stop preaching and teaching. If so, then Paul should have abandoned all the Jews that he loved and would have switched places with them because they persecuted the church.

If so, then we should stop praying for each other because we're at risk of gossip. Let's stop driving because some people drive drunk, and you know what? Why don't we stop slicing tomatoes because we'll cut each other with knives.

I think if we bolster this idea of something dangerous might happen, therefore we cannot do the commands of God. We need to be careful. I just kind of want you to entertain a thought with me, and this part's under blessings of the Spirit.

Say we were doing prophecy, and there's no guarantee. Truly, we can love the whole counsel of God, and we tell the Lord, you know what, Lord? We do want to see prophecy. We do want to hear you on other things.

We do want to be encouraged in those ways, and He may never deliver it to us, and we need to be satisfied in that. But we should still desire it. I want you to think about this. For those that are blackpilled and hopeless, young people who can't hope to make enough money with rising home prices, those in despair with the direction our country is heading, those who mourn the sins of our culture, if you heard feats of miracles and prophecies in your church, would you have hope that God will accomplish great things in you, your family, and your church?

Would you not feel a little bit of fire in your gut, and steel in your spine, and resistance to pleasing man? Would you not just be bolstered in every way of just seeing the Lord be extra benevolent, more than He's already been to us, more than saving faith, which we owe Him everything for this.

We cannot ask for a greater gift. And yet, for some reason, He decides to pile blessing on blessing on blessing. But if you saw that, and you had fire, wouldn't you be just so encouraged to go forth and conquer?

We're barren couples. If you heard a prophecy that said, hey, listen, the Lord told me to tell you to fast and pray for three days. I don't know. I think so. And what I thought I heard Him say is that He would deliver you a child.

Even if you didn't believe in it, maybe, wouldn't you still kind of do it? You could just say, no, I don't believe in that at all. I won't do it. But if your wife became pregnant, wouldn't you rejoice and praise God?

That story happened three weeks ago. My neighbor had been trying to get pregnant for years. And we just rejoiced. And it was beautiful. You know how encouraging that is? My wife and I have been barren for six years.

And we praise God that we have jubilee. That is a miracle from God. I don't care how you want to sort it. It is a blessing upon blessing from the Lord. Don't you want to see miracles? Don't you want to know that Lord is with you?

You can move forward. And then a lot of times we move forward and then we look back to see, are we doing it? I think we're doing it. But I'm not sure if I'm feeling peace here. And I'm trying to read scripture and I can't find the situation on where it applies to me.

And then you have this unquestionable peace from the Lord. I want that. Lastly, if someone prophesied the Lord's anger regarding your secret sins and they were exposed, laid bare and naked, wouldn't you just be full of grief that you've offended a holy God, but he loves you so much to discipline you?

Wouldn't you want to repent so quickly? So what do we do? I know there's a lot of questions. Okay, if prophecy exists, fine. But what's the function? Okay, maybe that's a function. How can it be encouraging?

Okay, maybe that, maybe. So what can we do? We can pursue love for one another. That is absolutely what we can do. We can follow 1 Corinthians 13 and desire love. Our gifts are useless without it. If we don't desire the spiritual gifts of God, we can ask him to change our desires.

That simple as that. Just like how we want to sin, we ask God, Lord, make me not want to sin. I want to sin, but believe help my unbelief. We can pursue using gifts to build up the bride and proper order for her benefit.

We meditate on the Holy Scriptures to evaluate all spiritual gifts. Lastly, if the Lord delivers us prophecy, we evaluate the person and prophecy with loving hearts. Church, like I said, we're all new to this.

I've never, I told you, I've never been a part of a church that does this in order. I was saved in an assembly of God church. I love that church. Our hearts desire to just simply strive to obey the counsel of God.

That's where we want to be. We're going to make some mistakes. You're going to make mistakes. There's abundant grace. I think, I think I just want to finish with this. And I've said it before, but I don't understand why, why we would do this.

If God is promising us these gifts and they've been repeated in the epistles over and over again, and I'm not just talking about prophecy, but all of them, if he's promised us these gifts, why are we so intent on tying our arms around our backs and forsaking these gifts and just trying to do church otherwise?

The Holy Spirit is a person. He is God. He is here. He indwells in you personally, and he indwells in us corporately, and he is the provider of those gifts. And we should be very scared to hesitate to take the gifts that God has given us.

There were servants with talents, and two of them multiplied, and one of them decided to bury them. And he was called a wicked and lazy servant, and he was cast out into outer darkness. Not saying we're in threat of that, but I'm just saying we should desire all the gifts that the Lord has given us.

With that said, let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your kindness and grace. You are holy and wonderful. Lord, we ask that you would just walk us through what to do here. Lord, that we would desire to pursue love, that we would desire to just follow your counsel.

And whether that comes with prophecy or not, Lord, we just desire to follow you. We just want to follow what your scriptures say, to be obedient in it, and not make excuses for why we won't. Lord, if you do some weird things, we praise you for that.

If you keep things pretty normal in here, we praise you for that. But Lord, we would love to see some mighty things done for the Northwest Arkansas to hear the gospel, to be saved, and lives to be changed.

Lord, that we would see converts with broken background, and we would see children raised up faithfully by God-fearing families. We want to see it all, and we want to praise you all for it. In Jesus' name, amen.