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The Apostle Paul was leaving the next day,
so he spoke until late into the night.
A young man named Eutycus was falling asleep
while he sat in the window.
When he was sound asleep
he fell to the ground from the third story
and he died.
[Roman soldier] Over here! Someone fell!
What is a miracle?
The birth of a child?
A close call?
Surviving an accident?
A miracle is a supernatural act of God
in which he interrupts the normal course of life in an
extraordinary and remarkable way to accomplish his purposes.
When the natural order is reversed.
When a deaf person
is now able to hear, a blind person is now
able to see
where out of death
someone is resurrected to life.
God can do anything he wants,
any time He wants.
When most
people think about miracles,
they think they're on every page of Scripture.
The average person throughout biblical history
witnessed miracles all the time.
The truth is absolutely not.
There were intermittent times in biblical history
when God directly, without the use of a person,
simply performed a miracle.
If we get a little bit
more specific, we might ask What is the gift of miracles?
Or who was a miracle worker?
The gift of miracles was a gift given
to a supernaturally endowed person.
God worked miracles through that individual, confirming that
that individual was a spokesman and representative for God.
When Moses said, What if I don't believe me,
God says, I'm going to give you the power to work miracles
so that I will believe you that you're speaking on my behalf.
The miracles were given to validate
that they are a mouthpiece for God, that He is
a man sent by God to speak on behalf of God.
In First Kings 17,
we have Elijah meeting with the widow.
There's a famine in the land.
And then we have the widow's son dying.
The widow thinks that she's under
some sort of judgment.
Through Elijah,
the Lord miraculously raises this young boy
back to life.
The widow's response in
verse 24 is very instructive.
And the woman said to Elijah,
Now, I know that you are a man of God,
and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.
There were times three of them in Scripture
when God gave to men the power to work miracles.
There is, first of all, the time of Moses and Joshua
1400 years before Christ, a period of about 65 years.
Then you fast forward to the time of Elijah and Elisha.
You're about 800 years before Christ, and there again
you have a period of about 65 years
when God was giving men the power to work miracles.
The next period of time like that comes
in the time of Jesus and the apostles.
And that stems from the beginning of his ministry
to at the very latest, the death of John.
There you have another period of 65, 70 years.
Those were the three epochs.
And in each case it was to confirm those men
as his messengers.
The purpose of miracles
in the Ministry of Christ in the Apostles fits exactly
in line with the patterns we see in the Old Testament.
So when God gave extraordinary
signs and wonders to people like Moses, Elijah and Elisha,
he did the same thing to the Lord Jesus Christ.
But here is the Son of God
coming in person and human flesh.
He did miracles as his day to day
work to show that he was the Son of God,
the messenger from the Father, the true and ultimate prophet.
We ought to give more earnest heed
to the things that we've heard than what people heard
under the old Testament prophets,
because God confirmed
by signs and wonders
and gifts of the Holy Spirit,
the words of those who heard Him,
who were the apostles.
The word apostle comes
from the Greek word Apostolos, which means sent one.
And it wasn't something that was unique to Jesus apostles.
If the Emperor ever sent somebody out with a message
from the Emperor, he was called an apostle of the Emperor.
And the message that he carried was every bit as authoritative
as if the emperor was speaking himself.
So if you were to reject
the message of the emperor’s apostle,
it would be like rejecting the Emperor.
Or if you were to attack
the apostle, it would be like attacking Caesar himself.
And the Apostle Paul's letter to the church of Ephesus,
he uses the metaphor
of a spiritual temple to describe the church.
And he says in chapter two, verse 20 that it is
built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
with Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.
So as God was establishing the foundation of the church
upon the person and work of Christ, he called men,
known as apostles and prophets to be foundation builders.
As his apostles, they’re the foundation of the church.
What they say,
Christ says, what they assert about his ministry is true.
The Stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone of the Church.
Jesus chose the Apostles
to further reveal the mystery of the Church.
And finally, God provided various other prophets
within the Church
while the New Testament was still being written.
This is the foundation of the church, according to Paul,
in Ephesians 2:20, the Apostles and Prophets
with Christ as the chief cornerstone.
It doesn’t make any sense to think that the foundation
of a building goes all the way to the roof.
It's the foundation.
This is an historical assertion that the Apostolate
was limited to the foundation period of church history.
When you see the early discussions about the canon
and which books are canonical, as we would say,
one of the tests of canonicity was
Does this book have apostolic origin?
Or is it given a kind of stamp of approval by the Apostles?
Now, why is that?
It's because the Apostles had certain promises granted to them
by the Lord Jesus Christ,
and those promises related to the ministry
of the Holy Spirit in their speaking and in their writing.
And so the reason why we can say with confidence that the canon
is closed
is because
we no longer have those apostles.
To be a legal proxy
for Jesus, to be a true apostle, four things had to be true.
You had to be hand picked, chosen by Christ.
You had to be taught by Christ.
You had to witness the resurrected Christ.
You had to see him risen.
The fourth qualification it's found with the 11 in
Matthew 10, when Jesus said, I'm sending you out to represent
me and I'm going to give you the power to work miracles
to confirm the revelation that's going to come through you.
Miraculous gifts were given during those early years
where they were proclaiming in many cases for the first time
in a region the event and the significance of Christ's
life, death, resurrection and ascension.
When Paul defends his Apostleship
in Second Corinthians 12,
he refers to these gifts as the signs of an apostle
miraculous abilities
that either
the apostles alone had or there were cases where they
could lay hands on someone and give them those gifts.
But always in the New Testament,
when those miraculous gifts are manifest, it is in
in the presence of an apostle.
We know that
there is no apostle today roaming around planet Earth.
So with that, the actual gifts that were associated
with those apostles have likewise ceased.
The gifts that authenticated the apostles,
which were the sign gifts,
particularly gifts of healing and miracles,
and then the gifts that were associated
with prophets, which were the revelatory gifts
which would have included tongues.
A Cessationist is one who believes
that those gifts ceased after the apostolic age
with the death of the Apostle John around the year 100.
Those gifts passed off the scene.
A Continuationist
is someone who believes that the extraordinary gifts,
prophecy, tongues and healing have continued and therefore
they should be pursued
and exercised by Christians today.
Continuationists, including Pentecostal
and charismatic groups,
believe that the New Testament
encourages them to participate in the miraculous gifts.
They find this idea in chapters 12 to 14 of First Corinthians,
where Paul discusses the gifts of healing
tongues and prophecy at length,
and even charges the Corinthian church
to earnestly desire these gifts of the spirit.
Yes, we should be seeking the gifts for sure.
We want the Holy Spirit to gift us so that we might care
for one another in the body of Christ.
But in the era of the Corinthian church,
the foundation was still being laid.
They did need the sign gifts.
We're not in that era anymore.
There is no mention in the second half
of the first century of signs and wonders and miracles.
Once you pass the book
of First Corinthians, there is no more mention
of any miracles being performed by any apostle.
He writes nine letters to different churches, six
different churches after the First Corinthians.
You look at the pastoral epistles written for the ongoing
life of the church.
First Timothy.
Second Timothy Titus instructing pastors
how to conduct life in the church.
And there's no mention of the miraculous gifts.
You have this lessening of the miraculous
as the canon of Scripture moves toward its completion.
You have in Acts, for example,
Paul would send pieces of fabric out.
People would be healed by that.
That's not happening anymore.
And it wasn't happening in Paul's time
either, because when he learned that
Timothy had a stomach ailment, he writes to him and says,
Take a little wine for your stomach’s sake.
He doesn't send him a handkerchief.
There's no expectation
that some healer is going to come and heal Timothy.
Paul in Philippians, when he was so overtaken
almost by grief
because of the sickness of his dear friend, and certainly if
if the Apostle Paul still had this miraculous gift of healing,
he could have done something about it.
But instead he
recognized there's no sense
in which that's still happening,
even at the time of Philippians.
Then you see the next generation.
It becomes churches like ours where there aren't apostles,
but they're looking back on that time.
The writer of Hebrews writing just before the destruction
of the temple, he says, the Lord spoke this gospel.
It was confirmed to us by those who heard meaning the Apostles
and the Apostles were allowed to work.
Signs in miracles to confirm that message.
And so even the writer of Hebrews,
writing under the auspices of the Apostles, he says,
I'm not working miracles.
That's not happening now.
The writer of Hebrews
is looking back and saying those things were foundational.
That's not the norm anymore.
Miracles, signs,
wonders, and especially direct Voice of God only occurs
in three significant eras, which then was written down
and inscriptuated in the inspired Word of God.
He spoke directly to Moses.
But then Moses wrote those things down.
Same thing with the prophets.
God did many miraculous things,
but then those were written down and became inspired Scripture.
Same thing with Jesus and the Apostles.
Many miracles confirming that Jesus was the Son of God.
But then the revelation that was given
during that transitional period
is what we know today as the New Testament.
And between those key eras in the progress
of redemptive history
there are long periods in which God did not
directly speak to people as a normal experience.
Rather, he expected them to trust the sufficiency
of what he had written.
And we are in one of those
periods now where we ought to trust the confirmed word
that God has given to us,
looking for that blessed hope when Jesus will come again.
But we ought to not expect that God will be doing
miraculous things, signs and speaking directly from heaven
because we have a sufficient word.
Jesus rebuked even those in his own day
that sought signs and wonders to validate putting their faith
in Christ, saying in Matthew 16:4, a wicked
and adulterous generation looks for a sign.
Later, the apostle Peter described the glory
of personally seeing Jesus during his transfiguration.
Peter was an eyewitness of Christ glory,
but he says in the second Peter 1:19, that the prophetic word
is even more sure than his experience.
Peter even participated in miracles himself.
But he points to the Scripture as a more sure
foundation.
The Bible does
not instruct us to seek after signs and wonders.
Instead, we are told to stop seeking those things
and to trust in the finished Word.
The early church fathers knew that they were not apostles.
They knew that there was something distinct
about the apostles and distinct about the apostolic age.
And so when you get to, for example, John Chrysostom
in the East and Augustine around that same time
period in the West,
both Chrysostom and Augustine are very clear
that they believe that the extraordinary, miraculous
sign gifts ceased after the end of the apostolic age.
And that was the de facto view of Bible believing
Christians throughout really all of subsequent
church history, including the Reformation.
The view of the church has been decidedly Cessationist.
Then you had a group of Continuationists,
especially Evangelical Continuationists
who have tried to find examples of miraculous
gifts throughout church history.
But the reality is, in order to find evidence
of the miraculous gifts throughout church history,
the modern continuationist has to redefine
what those gifts are, what those gifts were.
They generally do so
by pointing to fringe movements and fringe groups
like the Montanist movement, which was declared a heresy
by the early church.
Now, in the case, the
Montanists, they make claims that they are actually
the fulfillment of Christ's promise of the Comforter
of the Holy Spirit.
They are the ones who are bringing new revelation
to the church, as well as declaring that
that Christ was coming very soon,
even right after their lifetimes or before the
end of their lifetimes, which didn't come to pass.
Montanus and the Montanist movement
was soundly rejected by the early church.
And so in the second century, the early church rejected
what was tantamount to the charismatic movement.
Later on, as we see, particularly after
the periods of persecution, Constantine has come into power.
Christianity has become legalized.
That's the time period where we see mass expectation
of the miraculous.
You do have a kind of
continuationism developing in Roman Catholicism.
Their notion of
canonizing certain people as saints was built upon
the notion of the continuation of miraculous signs.
One story says that
when Saint Patrick was baptized as an infant.
The priest was blind
and couldn't read the baptismal order.
So he took the baby's
hand, made the sign of the cross over the ground,
and a spring of water burst forth to wash the priest's eyes.
And his vision was restored and he could perform the baptism.
Oh, that's just crazy
legendary stuff.
Other miracle stories are associated
with the supposed power of relics of dead saints,
or the bread and wine of the Eucharist,
which were, of course, believed to be Christ's
actual body and his actual blood.
And then you come to the period of the Reformation.
It's very clear that the magisterial reformers,
Lutheranism and reform movement coming out of them
rejected on the one side, Roman Catholicism.
On the other side, they were rejecting
the anabaptism,
believing in the revival of the miraculous gifts.
The Zwickau prophets, Thomas Muntzer,
Melchior Hofmann, Jan Matthys,
all of whom demonstrated themselves to be false prophets.
They claimed that the Holy Spirit
was telling them to incite revolution,
telling them
that the New Jerusalem would be in places
like Strasbourg or Münster, Germany.
Obvious false prophecies.
And the reformers denounced them in no uncertain terms.
In fact, Martin Luther quipped that the radical reformers
had swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all,
which was his way of saying they had a distorted view
of the Holy Spirit.
And then they had gone headlong after that distortion
to be in Rome with a Roman
pontiff who believes that he's speaking on behalf of the spirit
and in doing so is burying the word of God.
To be there is not to be Protestant
and biblical and to be an Anabaptist.
The Charismatics of his day, or someone who believes that
the Holy Spirit is speaking through all sorts of people
outside of the Word of God and thus bury the Word of God
is also not to be Protestant.
In other words, to believe in Sola Scriptura
is to be a Cessationist.
That's fundamental to Protestantism.
Thus, if you are not a Cessationist,
you are not historically a Protestant.
The reformed Orthodox
in the Puritans consistently dismissed
the idea that miraculous gifts of the Spirit continued
after the foundational period of the Christian church.
in terms of the origins of the modern charismatic movement.
I think we have to start
with someone like John Wesley in the mid 18th century
in the Evangelical Awakening in England.
He held a two stage view of sanctification
that believers are converted and then they live
kind of an up and down Christian life for a while.
And then it's possible at a later point post conversion
to have an experience that elevates you
to a higher plane of spiritual existence or living.
And in Wesley's view, you could actually attain
perfection in this life prior to glory.
He called that second experience the second blessing.
And one of his successors, a man named John Fletcher,
actually associated that with the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Then, a century later, during the second Great Awakening,
you have that two stage view
of sanctification combined with the emotionalism
that was popularized by Charles Finney and others.
You set the stage for Charles Parham,
who was a Wesleyan Holiness minister, to suggest
that maybe the second blessing ought to elevate us to a place
where, as Christians,
we experience the same miraculous sign gifts
that the Apostles experienced in the Book of Acts.
It wasn't really until the beginning
of the 20th century
that the Charismatic Movement began in earnest.
There were people who had tinkered with
healing gifts and healing claims up to that point.
But the gift of tongues first manifest itself really on
the very first day of the 20th century.
on January 1st, 1901.
Agnes Ozman, who was one of the women
who was studying under Charles Parham,
she began speaking in tongues.
Other students also began speaking in tongues,
became known as Pentecostalism,
because the idea is that they were speaking
in the very same kinds of tongues as the apostles
on the day of Pentecost.
And that, of course, is important
because the Apostles on
the day of Pentecost were speaking in genuine human
foreign languages, which they had never learned.
And Agnes Ozman, Charles Parham, they all insisted that
they also were speaking in genuine human foreign languages,
which they had never learned.
In fact, Agnes
Ozman claimed to be speaking in the Chinese language.
Pictures of her writing survived.
You look at those pictures
and it's not Chinese text at all.
It's just scribbling.
One of his students, William J. Seymour
came out to Los Angeles,
and it was while he was teaching in
some of those churches that revival broke out.
And it's known as the Azusa Street Revival of 1906.
And it was characterized again by speaking in tongues.
Azusa Street
is what got Pentecostalism really started.
And you have a number of Pentecostal denominations
that grow out of that,
such as the Foursquare Church and the Assemblies of God.
Azusa Street Revival represents the first wave
of the Pentecostal and charismatic Movement.
You have
the original Pentecostal first
wave Asuza Street,
the second wave, the Charismatic Renewal Movement,
and the third wave, the continuationist
charismatic movement within evangelicalism.
Some of the
best known leaders
throughout the 20th century in the Charismatic Movement
turned out to be fakes and frauds and
and for various reasons, discredited themselves.
John G. Lake, Amy Semple McPherson,
Smith Wigglesworth or Kathryn Kuhlman
They were theological heretics.
They were prolific false prophets.
Most of them were sexually immoral.
So how is it that these great generals
of the Charismatic Movement, these men and women
that God supposedly used to bring about the greatest
move of His Holy Spirit since Pentecost were false
prophets, liars, charlatans,
and sexually immoral?
And now here's the host of the PTL Club
the president of the PTL television network, Jim Bakker.
It actually got worse from there.
Please welcome the Colonel,
Colonel Sanders to PTL.
The once sacred turf of television evangelism
has been slipping and sliding of late due
to the disillusioning scandals of some of the key players
In the eighties and nineties you had a series of scandals
with Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart
Swaggart is stepping down from his powerful TV ministry
while the Assembly of God Church investigated him
for having an affair with a prostitute.
I have sinned against you, my Lord.
I have sinned against you,
and I beg your forgiveness.
Jim and Tammy
Faye Bakker and the continuing saga of the PTL Club have taken
on the irresistible dimensions of a national soap opera.
Jim Baker was found guilty on all 24 counts
of wire and mail fraud and conspiracy.
What's remarkable
is that every one of those men
continued in ministry and were still accepted
by segments of the Charismatic Movement.
Dr. Michael Brown is here.
A joy to be back with all of you.
Thank you.
That doesn't disqualify a Charismatic.
If you can prove he's a fraud
that works all the way up to someone like Todd Bentley,
who is probably as despicable a character as ever,
took the stage
in the name of religion.
He had these ugly fascinations with violence
and low brow means of supposedly healing.
It took a long time, a remarkably long time
for even some of the better Charismatics
to say, no, this guy is not real.
He's dangerous.
I remember early on when he came on the scene,
people asked John Piper what he thought of him.
Piper was reluctant to say anything.
He said, I just want to watch and see.
To turn to
the miraculous gifts tongues, healing, prophecy.
Where would you say the place for those gifts
would be in the life of the church today?
Yeah.
I would want my people to know I believe in those things.
I want them to flourish in those things.
You could say ‘got a word of knowledge for us?
Got a word of prophecy?’
If you're scared of that kind of language, you can say
has got impressed upon you, in some way,
Something that you think somebody in this room
or all of us need to hear from your walk with God?
And open yourself up to that.
Piper, Storms,
and Grudem, and Carson
describe themselves as open but cautious.
So here you have
guys with at least some reformed inclination.
They have been working really hard to say
They believe in a closed canon and Sola Scriptura,
even though they also want to say that they in some sense
they believe in the continuation of prophecy in tongues.
Once you open the door to the modern charismatic teachings,
how is your urge and your prompting
of the Spirit of God different than Benny Hinn?
And who's to say who's right in the issue?
I'm not suggesting that anyone who claims to be a reformed
Charismatic should be classified in the same category
as a Benny Hinn.
But Benny Hinn’s
positions are very much connected to the idea
that God is still speaking today.
So if someone says God spoke to me, it
becomes the ace of spades and it trumps everything.
Really, that's the historic trap.
If you go all the way back to the Garden of Eden,
you see that the serpent that he tempts Eve
in such a way as to suggest that God's Word wasn't enough.
Charismatic theology has influenced
and affected so much of our thinking and our
our theology in ways that we don't often recognize.
And I think that's probably the most true with our worship
Worship today,
there is this expectation
that if
the Holy Spirit is present and if we are truly worshiping,
there's sort of going to be this tangible felt presence of God
which doesn't find any root in Scripture.
There's no description in the New Testament of that
sort of expectation that comes from the charismatic movement
in this expectation
of the signs and wonders and the felt presence of God.
In fact, the praise and worship movement,
the praise and worship theology comes directly
out of Pentecostalism and Charismaticism.
But it has now branched beyond Charismaticism
to where even churches who don't affirm
the continuation of sign gifts, who claim to be Cessationist,
nevertheless worship as if we are expecting
this sort of felt
presence of God in the context of corporate worship.
The Charismatic Movement is extraordinary in church history.
It's the first time
that these
sort of miracle claims have moved in to the mainstream
and become what probably if you just did a numerical count,
you'd find it's a majority who believe these claims.
And yet most of the claims are pretty easily falsifiable.
My name is Andreas.
I come from Switzerland and I'm a former
Charismatic, now Cessationist.
Virgil Walker.
I have been involved in
what was called the COGIC Church. Church of God in Christ.
I'm Kofi and for really 17 years of my life,
I grew up as a Pentecostal charismatic.
My name is Becky, and I come from a Pentecostal
Foursquare denomination background.
I think what attracted me to the denomination was the passion,
you know, the excitement to being actually
excited to go to church, wanting to go to church.
We went to church.
People spoke in tongues,
People laid hands on people and they fell out.
Friday night you would come to church.
They would have these purging sessions
and the pastor would walk down the aisles and lay
hands on people and they would kind of convulse to the floor.
He was speaking in tongues over us.
My sister was there, and then she fell.
And then I'm like, I'm going to fall.
And then I just eventually fell.
People prophesied.
And for me, that was just normal.
Everyday Christianity is what Christians did.
You're expecting to have those things happen to you.
Everyone else is in this state of mind.
I want to say it's some sort of hypnosis.
All the spiritual exercises that are there really began
to cause cracks somewhat in my Christian worldview.
So I had to figure out what's really going on
in this movement.
When you compare the biblical gift
of prophecy, tongues and healing to the modern
continuationist version, what you find
is that prophecy, tongues, and healing in the New Testament
meant something way different
than the way in which those same terms are being used
In the modern charismatic world. Continuationists have redefined
the gifts showing the disconnect between what's happening today
and what was actually happening,
that was truly miraculous in the New Testament.
The first time the word prophet is mentioned in
the Bible is in Genesis,
but there's not much definition given to it. The first time
there's definition given as an Exodus
chapter seven.
It's a fascinating passage because what the Lord does
is he explains to Moses
how his relationship to Aaron is supposed to work
and how Aaron is supposed to preach to Pharaoh.
And what he says is Moses, in this scenario,
you are going to be like me and Aaron is going to be
like a prophet.
You'll speak to Aaron, and Aaron
will say what you said to Pharaoh.
And so it shows the relationship between the Prophet
as the recipient
of God's revelation and what he is charged to do.
What the real prophet does is quite simply,
he's given a message by the Lord and he proclaims it to the one
to whom the Lord told Him to proclaim it.
The biblical word
that we translate as prophet literally means mouthpiece.
The prophet
became God's functional mouth by which God would speak.
God use the man as an instrument
to immediately deliver his exact message,
not by bypassing the Prophet's mind,
but by preserving the exact words that God intended for him
to speak.
A true could not speak error in the name of the Lord
because God supernaturally protects his own message.
As with everything else in the Bible,
you have the real thing and you can have counterfeits.
And so the Bible speaks a great deal about false prophets.
I mean, they were actually to be executed.
Why would that be?
Because God guards his own revelation.
He magnifies his word.
Above all is his holy name, we're told, in Scripture.
And so those who come claiming to speak on God's behalf
in the name of God with the very Word of God, are
held to very, very, very high standards of accountability.
And those who are proven false ended up therefore
having to suffer very, very, very high forms of
punishment as a result.
You go back through the Old Testament prophets
and you read in Ezekiel and Jeremiah
about how the Lord describes the false prophets
who took his name and his word upon their mouth
and began to say things that God had not directed them to say.
And the Lord has these scathing rebukes
for these false prophets, where he says,
they say that I sent them, but I have not sent them,
and they claim to speak for me, but I have not spoken by them.
And then the Lord says,
I will therefore judge these false prophets.
And some of the severest judgment is upon
those who claim to speak for God
but were not in fact hearing from God.
What are the gravest dangers of the Charismatic movement is
that they will put words in God's mouth
and they think nothing of it at all.
I believe prophecy,
if I can steal Wayne Grudem’s simple phrase,
is simply speaking forth in merely human words
What God has spontaneously brought to mind.
They’re subtle faint impressions, like little nudges
and divine hints, and that individual then
speaking forth what they sensed God had been saying.
They say things like, I feel the Lord is telling me.
I sense the Lord is speaking to my heart
and that and He might want me to do this.
I think this is what the Lord might be trying to tell me.
Here's what I believe
the Holy Spirit has impressed upon my heart.
For the year of 2023, the rise of the Wild Ones
to be able to confront systems
that have been oppressing God's people.
The Lord's also been speaking to me
significantly about relationships,
and He's going to change your circles
to change your levels.
You need to evaluate it, need to determine whether or not
this really,
in fact, is something that we could have
some degree of confidence is from God.
I gave prophetic words to people, to someone
have a word, and it was like that adrenaline starts to come.
And I remember just saying something like,
you know, the Lord wants our obedience.
If we could only obey God in 80 percent
of that obedience,
then give that 80 percent.
Give 100 percent of that 80 percent.
You know?
So dumb.
the way it was often explained was, yes, God
gave us the Bible for sort of general moral direction
and telling us the truth about him,
but for a specific direction.
This is how God acts as a loving father to us.
You know, he doesn't just leave us to figure out things.
Sometimes he will directly speak to us and tell us what we need
to know, Tell us what to do, give us direction in real time.
For example, if I say that the Holy Spirit spoke to me.
Take this job.
Don't take this job, but take this job.
It's a word from the Lord.
So there is love Bible, the Word of God.
And then through history, God has led his people,
spoken to His people, directed his people.
He continues to do that, but it's not the Bible.
So there are two completely separate animals.
The view of continuing revelation would in fact lower
people's view of Scripture.
When we have these two sources of revelation,
the the me-specific voice inside of my head,
and then this object of thing that was spoken 2000 years ago
when those two things were in conflict,
which one do you think ends up giving way to the other?
It's always the word of God that ends up getting redefined,
reinterpreted or pushed off to the side or ignored in favor
of the personal, fresh, modern, intimate revelation from God.
The problem with the Charismatic Movement today
is that they don't have
a single prophet who has been 100 percent accurate.
The honest Charismatics will admit that they are wrong
far more often than they are right.
If you used a magic eight ball to make all of your choices,
you'd be right at least half the time.
And charismatic prophets are wrong more often than that.
So I ask what is the value of this gift?
As a younger prophet, I've tried to do the best
that I can, you know, to kind of navigate
the plans of the Lord that I had had a series of dreams.
At the end of 2020,
I had seen Donald Trump being elected president.
Many of the modern day prophets made a lot of news
with their presidential
prophecies, their prophecies of who would win the 2020
United States presidential election.
Of course,
all of them, 100% of them, prophesied that Donald Trump
would win reelection in November of 2020,
and he would serve a second
consecutive term in the White House.
The fireman prophet also predicts the church will
thrive. Will be an eight year presidency?
Absolutely.
When I woke up this morning, I heard
four years.
TRUMP!
Well, obviously that did not happen.
And they just did this massive face plant.
I really want to apologize, sincerely apologize,
for missing the prophecy about Donald Trump.
I prophesied that he would win another term,
and I was completely wrong.
We went through this season of me offering a letter of apology
to the Body of Christ for what I believe was a miss.
It doesn't make me a false prophet, but it does
actually create a credibility gap.
I want to look into the reasons why there is a
disconnection there.
In what I heard.
They also failed to prophesy COVID coming
even when COVID did come
Then they began to prophesy
that it would be gone by April of 2020.
Well, that didn't happen.
I command this this, this virus
to to to leave both, to leave people's
minds, to leave people's hearts, to leave, to leave the earth.
I just, I command this virus to leave right now in Jesus’ name,
in biblical times, if you get up and you speak in God's name
and that's not God's Word, you were stoned to death.
But today somebody does that and either it's inconsequential
or it doesn't come true, nothing happens.
It's just another day ending in Y
in the Charismatic community,
They at least should be exocommunicated.
If the word ends up false
or wrong, let's call it wrong
False sounds like he got a demon or something.
You know, a false word.
That means like the brothers got horns, you know, he missed it.
He just missed it.
If they humble themselves and say, okay, we got this wrong.
We apologize for hurting your faith and misleading you.
Let's figure out what went wrong.
Great.
Then we don't throw them under the bus
and we work it out. How did this go wrong?
How did so many hear the wrong thing?
And I believe there are actually
some simple answers to those questions.
I was not aware that I was under
the power of witchcraft so severely.
I was confronted by a couple of prophets who said, We're here
to break the power of witchcraft off of you.
It's been a pretty wild ride.
And I was going to say, I can see the peace on you.
We've had some different things that are said over 30 years
and we've put out statements and said, this was wrong.
And you know what? We're not quitting.
But the guy said it was wrong.
It's not a big deal.
I’ve never had to make a public apology for a bad prophetic word
that I've given.
This is my very first time.
I know I’ll learn from it.
[sucks teeth]
And they're back on TV in the next week
filling auditoriums and conferences.
No consequences, whatever.
Charismatics will acknowledge that Old Testament
prophets were held to a standard of 100 percent perfection.
But they somehow say that, well, in the New Testament,
prophets today aren’t held to the same standard
that the Old Testament prophets were.
The New Testament gift differs from that which Isaiah or Daniel
or some other Old Testament prophet spoke
in the Old Testament
If you said it wrong once, you're false.
But in the New Testament we judge one another.
And the reason we judge one another,
because there are some things said wrong.
The Charismatic scholar Wayne Graham states
that prophecy in ordinary New Testament churches
was not equal to Scripture in authority,
but was simply a very human and sometimes partially mistaken
report of something
that the Holy Spirit brought to someone's mind.
The Continuationist view of ongoing prophecy,
allows for modern prophets
to speak on God's behalf with less than perfect accuracy
because they have concluded that prophets in the New
Testament operate differently than Old Testament prophets.
In their view,
God gives a direct revelation to the prophet’s mind,
but the mind of the Prophet
is not protected from mishearing, misinterpreting,
or otherwise misrepresenting God's true revelation.
They believe that this results in a prophecy that is a mixture
of God's true revelation and the prophets own thoughts.
The resulting prophecy might even be completely false,
since the prophet so misunderstood
God's word to them.
In this way they end up believing
that there are true prophets who can make false prophecies.
Prophecy when it comes, is like pure, like spring water.
It's delicious, right?
The person giving it is like a rusty old pipe.
And then by the time it gets to me, I'm like, Oh,
and they give me a word.
And I go, Yeah, that's not, none of that's true.
None of that's true.
I appreciate that the brother stepped out in faith to do it
right?
But he was, in fact, wrong. Okay.
And that's going to happen.
I'm not saying they're false prophets.
I'm just saying they're bad ones.
There's a difference between a false prophet and a bad prophet.
False prophet has an evil heart.
A bad prophet just gets everything wrong.
The question is what
What is a false prophet?
In Acts chapter 21, Agabus prophesies about Paul
Agabus said that the, that the Jews would bind to Paul
and they would hand him over to the Gentiles.
What actually happened is that the Gentiles
bound Paul and turned him over to the Jews.
Now, what's the point?
The point is,
is that there's a difference between a bad prophetic word and
a false prophet.
So in attempting to make the case
for the second tier of New Testament prophecy,
they look for examples in the New Testament
of prophets who got their prophecy wrong.
And the problem is there are no examples.
but they attempt to find an example
in chapter 21 with the Prophet Agabus.
So here's Agabus. He predicted a famine.
He's well known as a prophet in the Jerusalem church,
and well know probably amongst the apostles
because of the predicting that famine.
Agabus - a prophet - was wrong.
Agabus gave a prophecy.
He takes Paul's belt and he says,
thus says the Holy Spirit. Paul, when he gets to
Jerusalem, is going to be bound by the Jews with his belt
and delivered over to the Romans.
And then when you read later in Acts 21,
Paul gets to Jerusalem and he is accosted by a Jewish mob.
And then the Romans show up and take Paul into custody.
And Continuationists look at that.
And they say, see, Agabus got the general scope
of his prophecy correct, but he got the details wrong.
There are two core elements to Agabus’ prophecy.
Number one, that he would be bound by the Jews,
and number two, that he would be delivered over to the Romans.
Luke says that Paul was seized
and dragged by the mob there in the temple.
When Paul appears before Agrippa, he again
says that the Jews seized me in the temple.
Paul was restrained in some way
and the natural implication of the text
is that what Agabus said would happen did happen,
and Luke just didn't find it necessary to repeat the detail
That was obviously predicted from beforehand.
How did the Jews sieze Paul?
It's likely that they tethered him
using his own belt just as Agabus prophesied.
What about the delivering over?
When the Roman soldiers arrive, the Jewish mob
backs away and hands Paul over to the Romans.
And to make that point crystal clear all the way in Acts
chapter 28, when Paul is meeting with Jewish leaders in Rome,
he says explicitly using the exact same word
that he was delivered over from Jerusalem to the Romans.
Paul didn't think that Agabus
got any of the details of his prophecy wrong.
Luke doesn't imply
that he got any of the details of his prophecy wrong.
When you look through church history at Bible interpreters,
no one even imagines the possibility that Agabus
got his prophecy wrong.
It's not until the modern 20th century Continuationist
view of prophecy that anyone even suggests
that Agabus got the details wrong.
It's not so much that I'm defending Agabus’ reputation.
Agabus is in heaven. He doesn't care.
It's that Agabus is quoting the Holy Spirit,
and Luke records that quote under the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit.
So we have a quote from the Holy Spirit
recorded in the Holy Spirit inspired Scriptures.
If you're telling me that the details of that quote
are wrong, you're telling me that the Holy Spirit
got something wrong and that is blasphemous.
No new
definition of prophecy is given by Jesus Christ.
No new definition of prophecy
can be found any place in the New Testament.
And in fact, the Jews, to whom the teaching of Jesus
and the Apostles came,
would have rejected a new definition of prophecy
when they had in their canon
a very clear definition of prophecy already.
In Deuteronomy 18, Moses prophesies
the coming of the
ultimate New Testament Prophet Jesus Christ himself.
He then tells the people as they look
forward to this prophet, exactly how they are
to differentiate false prophets from true prophets.
He instructs.
If you say in your heart,
how may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?
When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord,
if the word does not come to pass or come true,
That is a word the Lord has not spoken.
The Prophet has spoken it presumptuously.
And again Moses tells us
how such a self-proclaimed prophet is to be viewed.
The prophet who presumes to speak a word
in my name that I have not commanded him
to speak, that same prophet shall die.
Deuteronomy 18 says that a prophet
who gets his prophecy wrong is presumptuous.
And second Peter 2
says false teachers will speak arrogant words of presumption,
meaning they're going to speak things
that will not come to pass out of their own presumption.
The gift of prophecy
in the New Testament was held to the same standard
as the gift of prophecy in the Old Testament.
Behold, I am against those who prophesy lying
dreams, declares the Lord, and who tell them and lead
my people astray by their lies and their recklessness
when I did not send them or charge them.
Do not listen to the words of the prophets
who prophecy to you, filling you with vain hopes.
They speak visions of their own minds,
not from the mouth of the Lord.
The Prophet Jeremiah makes it abundantly clear where the
visions and dreams of today's so-called prophets come from.
Their words are completely coming from their own minds.
God has not spoken to them at all.
I would go up to
someone and I would say I have a word from the Lord,
but to me it was more of like,
I want to encourage you and the Lord, but
looking back, that's a scary thing.
That's a very scary thing.
While that I think often is unintentional
and people sort of unwittingly say,
The Holy Spirit told me this or God told me this
when they don't mean that in the same way that others do.
Let me just encourage you.
That is not a biblical way to express yourself.
You're becoming, in biblical terms, a false prophet.
Because you're saying this is what the Holy Spirit said,
This is what God told me when God is not
in fact the source of that. To attribute
thoughts in your mind to the Holy spirit you become
a Jeremiah 23 false prophet.
You have your own visions, your own ideas, your own dreams.
They become a false prophet, de facto,
even if that's not their heart.
Now, if you think that I'm
overemphasizing something, maybe stressing a little bit
beyond reason, I would just simply point you
to first Corinthians chapter 14, verse one,
where Paul commands the Corinthians
and all believers earnestly the spiritual gifts,
especially that you may prophesy.
Paul is commanding us here, earnestly
desires spiritual gifts, especially prophecy.
This is not optional.
If you are not earnestly desiring spiritual
gifts, especially prophecy you are sinning.
They keep making the argument that we're sinning
because we're disobeying a command of God
by not seeking the gift of prophecy.
Sam Storms and others who make that kind of argument
know that all the commands of the Bible
come to us with an assumed context.
We might go to Matthew ten
and the commands that Jesus gave to his disciples
when they went out on mission for Him.
And we could point after point after point show how Paul
did not obey those commands in his own missions.
He did take money from churches.
He did take more than one cloak with him.
So we have to accept the fact that biblical commands
come to certain
specific people with certain specific assumptions.
The same thing is true with regard to the command
to seek the gift of prophecy and First Corinthians 12 and 14.
It came in the context
where God was still giving the gift of prophecy to the church.
If we can show that the gift of prophecy
is no longer being given to the church,
the command is no longer obligatory for us.
No one today has the ability
to see into tomorrow and reveal that to the Church.
The aspect of foretelling
has ceased.
There is a gift of forthtelling
to stand before group of people
and to take the Scripture that has already been given
and to declare it with clear teaching
that is a God-given gift.
We have the comfort of the Inspired
or authoritative inerrant Word of God
that is always true.
It is our guide for life.
Thank God Christians have a guide for life.
We have the privilege of having an authority
behind us in these 66 books
that can guide us in every area of life.
When the Day of Pentecost arrived,
they were all together in one place and suddenly
there came from heaven, a sound like a mighty rushing wind,
and it filled the entire
house where they were sitting
and divided tongues as a fire
appeared to them and rested on each one.
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit
gave them utterance.
The significance
of the day of Pentecost is great.
It was the crowning event in the life of Christ.
It's a Christ event,
and it was the pouring out of Christ's Spirit
so that Christ is with us now by His Spirit.
One of the manifestations of Pentecost
was the Apostles speaking in other languages.
The first time tongues appears in Acts chapter two,
it's very clear that tongues in that passage is speaking
known languages that the speaker had never before learned.
And we know that because there are two terms
that appear in that passage at Pentecost in the Book of Acts.
One is the word glosses.
It literally refers to the organ of the mouth.
That's where we get the word tongues.
It says they spoke in tongues. Well, what is that?
Well, later he uses the word dialecto, which is the word
for languages, and he uses it synonymously with glosses.
The people who are hearing the apostles
say, each of us hear these truths
in the language to which we were born in.
The gift of speaking in tongues was the miraculous ability
to speak in a foreign language
that the speaker had never previously learned.
Why did God give this
peculiar gift to many Christians in the early church?
Paul answers this question In first Corinthians 14.
He explains that the gift of tongues is a sign
not for believers, but for unbelievers.
Some Continuationists interpret this to mean that
people speaking in tongues
is an impressive thing for unbelievers to witness.
But Paul immediately debunks this idea.
He writes so if the whole church comes together and everyone
speaks in tongues and inquirers or unbelievers come in.
Will they not say that you are out of your mind?
So what does Paul mean, then,
that tongues are a sign to unbelievers?
You need to go all the way back to the Tower of Babel
and how the various languages and nations have warred
and murdered each other.
And God is then going to narrow in and speak to one man
who is a Hebrew speaking man, Abraham,
and we're going to have God speaking to that people
and revealing himself to that people
in their language, the Hebrew language.
But he promises that he's going to bless all the nations,
the language groups of the world through his seed.
God chose the nation of Israel and the language of Hebrew
as his primary way of revealing himself in the Old Testament.
But in Isaiah 28, the Lord tells the leaders of Jerusalem
that a sign of their impending judgment
would be that He would speak
to the people with strange lips and a foreign tongue.
The Lord speaking through his prophets, is warning
the Israelites, I have been sending you prophets.
If you don't want to listen to the prophets,
people of a strange language altogether will descend
upon you and bring destruction
to you as a people.
Isaiah was prophesying the coming Babylonian captivity
where Jerusalem and God's temple would be decimated
and the people would be carried off by foreigners.
But in first Corinthians 14, where we are told that tongues
are assigned to unbelievers Paul references
this same prophecy again in the context of explaining
the purpose of the New Testament gift of tongues
by people of strange tongues, and by the lips of foreigners.
Will I speak to this people?
And even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.
The gift of tongues wasn't meant primarily to be an impressive
sign to unbelieving Gentiles who spoke other languages.
It is actually a sign to unbelieving Israel that.
God was judging them, revealing himself to Gentiles
and choosing to speak in languages other than Hebrew.
You see that
sign to unbelievers sort of cutting both ways.
On the one hand, it was a curse.
It was a curse to the Jewish people
who rejected their Messiah,
but at the same time it was a sign of blessing
on the fact that God was going to institute a new thing
in which both Jews and Gentiles would come together.
As Paul says in Ephesians two into one new man
Glossalalia is a term
that comes from two Greek words. Glossa - meaning tongue
or language, and laleo - meaning to speak.
So when we use those terms together glossalalia is
used to refer to tongue speaking or to speaking in tongues.
The modern charismatic understanding
of the term allows for glossalalia to refer to ecstatic
spiritual speech that doesn't conform to any known language.
What many modern Pentecostals and Charismatics don't know
is that the earliest Pentecostals all believed
that speaking in tongues was the supernatural ability
to speak foreign languages.
None of them thought.
It is an ecstatic speech.
Parham was in the newspaper on multiple occasions
talking about how
now that the gift of tongues has been restored to the church,
no one is going to have to go to language school
to learn foreign languages and we’ll be able
to send missionaries all around the world
without them
having to spend years training and learning a foreign language
in order to be effective.
And the budding Pentecostal movement
actually sent missionaries to foreign fields,
trusting that they would be able to just show up,
be given the gift of languages and communicate
with the nationals in those foreign countries.
So they went off to China and India and other places
thinking they were
speaking in those languages while proclaiming the gospel,
only to figure out
that no one in the audience was able to understand them.
And of course, they all came back
utterly disappointed and dejected when they realized
that what they were doing in terms of their modern
glossalalia did not communicate in terms of a foreign language
with the people they were trying to reach.
And so consequently, the Pentecostal movement
had to change
its understanding of Scripture, to fit its experience
rather than acknowledging that its experience
did not fit the clear teaching of Scripture,
they opened up a second category of tongues
that included unintelligible speech.
You don't find the notion that tongue
speaking in the Bible
is anything other than real human languages
until you get to the modern charismatic movement.
The Charismatic movement has invented a new kind of tongues
because the tongues that they practice don't match
what the Scripture reveals as the real gift of tongues.
And as a result, they had to broaden the biblical category
to make room for their experience.
Yes, you can speak in tongues.
The more you do it, the better you'll be at it.
But we can at least get you started in this.
I just want to help you to activate your tongues.
It's very simple.
All you have to do
is just choose to step out and speak in tongues.
Now, I don't want you to overthink it.
Just don't speak in English. Don't think English.
So the first thing you need to do is just clear your mind.
I want you to flip the switch from your mind
to your spirit, man.
Don't let your mind take control.
Allow your spirit to take control.
You're going to start to feel this
almost like a bubbling up that happens
just as you feel it bubbling up. Begin to speak.
Don't fight it, don't resist it.
It may be a simple syllable, but continue to release it.
Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,
Even if it sounds weird to your mind, it doesn't matter.
It's not a language of the mind.
It's the language of the spirit.
Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,
I’m gonna give you the command of faith
And at that very moment,
you're going to no longer
speak in your native language, but you're going to speak
out of your spirit.
One, two, three!
[gibberish]
Yes, the man mind says It's weird, but the spirit says Hello
this is awesome.
[gibberish]
Oh ho ho ho ho ho.
[gibberish]
and congratulations
You've been filled with the Spirit
and you can now speak in tongues on demand.
I tried to speak in tongues.
I tried for years with the hope that that something
external would become internal
and would come out
probably the number one reason most people don't receive
the gift is they're just overthinking it.
People wonder, what if this is just me
praying this or worse, what if this is a demonic spirit?
What if this is not of God?
What if what I'm receiving is fake?
What if it's all just hype?
What if it's all just emotion and we become afraid?
So if you're waiting for your mind to comprehend
everything that's going on in praying in tongues,
you're not going to pray in tongues.
Then I'm listening to all of these people around me
speaking in tongues,
and I waited for this music to kind of drive
what was happening
till the point where I kind of grew in this emotional state,
where all of a sudden I may said a phrase or two,
and I thought, Oh, I got it, that's it.
I'm speaking in tongues. Right?
And it was a checkmark
for your kind of your spiritual journey, Right.
Did I have an experience?
Absolutely. I had an experience.
Would I examine the scripture, say that that what I experienced
looks like what the text of scripture says?
Absolutely not.
It's just babble for the purpose of an ecstatic
emotional experience.
You could study that language for forever.
You're never going to come up with a pattern.
It's just it's just plain gibberish.
But I read Romans chapter eight that
the Spirit speaks with groans that are too deep for words.
Maybe that verse is what is meant by this.
I feel this overwhelming urge from the Spirit
to utter something, and that's what comes out.
You have a choice.
You can choose to pray with your spirit,
to pray in the spirit,
or you can to pray with your mind in your own language.
So you can choose to
pray in mysteries, or you can choose to pray
in a known language.
You have the ability to do that, to choose that
there is no given permission in Scripture to speak some
gibberish nonsense that no one is going to understand it.
But think about what Jesus said when he taught us how to pray
in Matthew 6:7,
He said, don't heap up empty phrases like the pagans do.
And then he says, Pray then like this.
And Jesus taught us to pray, clear prayers.
He was never praying anything
that was some otherly language.
And if there was anyone who was going
to pray in such a language, it would certainly be the one
who was sent down from heaven. Christ himself.
What do you mean by speaking in tongues?
My sense is from reading First Corinthians 12 that it was more
of an ecstatic utterance that didn't have
any ordinary human meaning,
but tongues of men and of angels.
Tongues of angels.
Often people will appeal to First Corinthians 13,
where the Apostle Paul says, If I speak in the tongues of men
and of angels, but have not love,
then the practice of speaking in tongues
is not suddenly speaking French or suddenly speaking German,
but speaking allegedly the tongues of angels.
You can literally say whatever you want and justify it
when Paul is speaking of tongues, of men and of angels,
what he's trying to do is speak in hyperbole
or intentional exaggeration for the sake of effect,
to illustrate the point that even if you have the best
and the highest gifts that reach up to heaven itself
and you have not love, you have nothing.
For example, he says, Even if I give my body to be burned,
but I have not love, it profits me nothing.
Not that you ought to speak in tongues of angels,
but that you ought to love one another as Christ is loved you.
And that's the stress of the text.
It's actually sad and unfortunate
that while Paul is seeking to direct our attention
away from the gifts and to the grace of love,
we take one phrase
the tongues of angels and make it
the primary focus of what tongue speaking should look like.
First Corinthians 14’s
rules for the use of tongues in church
are simply ignored in our day and Continuationist churches.
The fact that only two or three tongue speakers should speak.
They want to be trampling on each other
and standing up and babbling at the same time.
The fact that Paul says in the context there
that women should not speak in tongues in church.
Those tongues had to be interpreted or
they were not to be permitted.
There are these rules that Paul gives that are widely ignored.
And this is just another sign that what's going on,
not biblical tongues.
You do have these and I've been in these meetings
five, ten thousand people
all speaking in tongues at the same time or,
you know, an individual to speak in tongues
with no interpretation, no one knows what's being said.
All we know is apparently the Holy Spirit is at work.
I'm sorry, that just doesn't work.
Either they’re actual languages like the Bible
describes them to be
or this is something else that's going on.
And yeah,
you could argue, okay, someone's making it up as they go along.
Is it demonic?
It's just not the biblical gift.
People say, I don't understand, Sam,
how you can preach verse by verse through Romans
and in your private devotional life
you speak in tongues, which I do every day.
And I say, well,
the apostle Paul wrote Romans and he says right here
in 1 Corinthians 14, I thank God
I speak in tongues more than you all.
Oh, well, I don’t think I ever thought about it that way.
It's good enough for Paul it’s good enough for us.
Paul says not to forbid, to speak in tongues.
To which I would reply,
I've never in my life forbidden anyone to speak in tongues.
As far as I know,
no Christian pastor has ever
forbidden anybody to speak in tongues.
However, the verse
doesn't say don't forbid people to babble incoherently.
I would forbid that, but that's not tongues.
Even though
it comes out of people's mouths and their tongue is involved.
It's not the gift of tongues.
And yes, I will forbid counterfeits,
but that's just what a faithful minister would do.
And that's why there is no room for open but cautious
Jesus’ enemies were on the lookout,
always trying to trap him
when he performed miracles.
One Sabbath, Jesus entered the synagogue
and the Pharisees
watched him to see if he would heal on the Sabbath.
Jesus came to a man
whose hand was withered.
Jesus said, Stretch out your hand.
The Pharisees were filled with fury
and sought to destroy Jesus Jesus.
If somebody has the gift of miraculous healing,
surely all he needs to do
is to prove it.
Assuming he went into a hospital
and cleaned out a ward of patients,
who are we to say that he hasn't got that gift?
Jesus doesn't owe you anything.
He doesn't have to prove anything to you,
nor does the Holy Spirit have to prove anything to.
You when it comes to a gift of healing.
If you've got the gift of healing,
then come to this children's hospital.
If you've got that kind of prove it to me attitude,
that is not confidence in goodness and character.
That is pride at its very core.
If somebody says,
Do you really have the gift of teaching?
Go ahead, teach us something.
I mean, I'm not going to balk at that.
I'm going to say, sure, let's sit down and open the word.
You know, do you have the gift of encouragement?
Well, encourage me.
I'm not going to say, well,
God doesn't need to prove himself.
We think God heals.
We think God does the miraculous.
He just doesn't do it through these agents
to whom he gives the power to work at will like that.
if you claim to have the gift of healing,
if asked to go ahead and demonstrate that
it really should be no problem
to go empty the children's hospitals or
or look at a just a dear brother who sits in a wheelchair
or sister sits in a wheelchair in the
in that space, in the aisle in church every week.
If I could just make walk, I would.
Right.
And if there is compassion in your heart
to help a fellow believer walk upright,
heal the man.
First off, nobody owes you anything
and nobody needs to prove anything to you.
However, I would be glad to do that.
Fly me out there
if I have open reign to pray for people in a hospital. I'm in.
I would love that.
Prayer is not the gift of healing.
The gift of healing,
Dare I say it, results in healing.
In the New Testament
It's always an authoritative command.
Get up and walk.
And he got up and walked.
To have the gift doesn't mean to pray to have the gift.
It is his gift to wield.
What is claimed to be
the gifts that have continued
bear no resemblance to the gifts
that were in the New Testament.
The idea that somebody has the gift of healing
is the false notion that a person actually can have
a healing crusade or a healing ministry.
And that's their gift.
I wish I could come down and lay hands on
every one of the thousands that are standing.
That's impossible.
I came all the way here from Delton, and I just wanted
to get healed by you.
I've been waiting so long to see you.
We see in its pretended state.
We don't see it in reality.
Jesus didn't just come
so you can have a passport Heaven.
And this is why we're called full gospel preachers.
Cessationists don't believe in a full gospel.
but I'm a full gospel Christian.
Some of you are going to get healed on this broadcast,
and I feel that anointing strong right now,
God's going to touch your body today
in Jesus name, that demon of cancer is
backing off your life in Jesus name. Any demonic assignment
against your mind, against your body, is being broken now
in Jesus name, whether the devil likes it
or not, he is losing your address from today onward.
Healings in the New Testament were immediate
and they were complete.
A man cannot walk and now he can walk.
A man is blind and now he can see.
Whereas the quote unquote miracles that are claimed today
usually are things that are not observable.
There's a claim
that there's been healing, but there's no way to measure it
or it is something that is only partial
or something that is gradual.
If there were truly healings where a man who was lame
can now walk, or a man who is blind can now see,
that would make world news, but you never see those sorts
of things.
Healings people claim to have happened
are gradual or secret or non observable.
When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead in John Chapter
11, there were some Pharisees
and unbelieving Jews who were present there,
and when they left
and went back to the other
Pharisees and began to have discussions
about how they would deal with Jesus,
none of them questioned the legitimacy of Lazarus.
What they did instead
was plot a way to kill Lazarus and kill Jesus
because they could not deny that that miracle had happened.
Neither believers nor unbelievers
ever tried to deny that the miracles were real.
The only thing the Pharisees could come up with
was that they
could attribute the miracles to someone other than God,
and they attributed it to the devil instead.
Matthew, Chapter 12.
The Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
They were attributing to the devil
the works of the Holy Spirit.
That was the best that unbelievers could come up.
When Peter and John healed the man who had been born lame
from his mother's womb,
and he was laid at the gate that is called beautiful.
This was a genuine miracle, a genuine sign and wonder.
And everyone knew it.
And seeing the man
who had been healed, standing with them,
they had nothing to say in reply.
What shall we do with these men
for the fact that a noteworthy miracle
has taken place through them is apparent
to all who live in Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it.
The New Testament miracles could not be refuted.
I can absolutely refute
the fake signs and wonders being purported
in the Charismatic Movement today.
I can absolutely refute
what Todd White does out on the street when he lengthens
people's legs by a half an inch.
That's a parlor trick
In the time of Jesus
and the Apostles, unbelievers were scrambling for explanations
as to how these undeniable healings could happen.
And today it's exactly the opposite.
The people who believe in gifts of healers
are scrambling to explain why nothing is happening,
as it happened in the days of Jesus.
A lot of people report healings and you look back a year later,
it wasn't real, was it a lie?
Some people lie.
They just lie about healings.
Other people feel pressured,
so they say they're healed when they're not.
Other people genuinely feel good.
They feel better two days and then check in a month
or two later.
Well, what was that? I don't know.
The very fact that there is a debate
is self-evident proof that these sign gifts do not continue.
There’s healing in the church today.
Of course. There’s instruction in the
letter of James about what's to be done,
and the elders are to be called for and prayer is to be made.
But there isn't someone who has a gift of healing.
One of my grandsons has got Klinefelter syndrome.
He has an extra male
chromosome.
There's nobody in the world today, nobody in South America
or Asia or Africa or North America that we can call for
who could heal him.
Or those that have Down syndrome.
There's no record of a miraculous healing like that.
That was something that was unique
in the ministry of the Lord and his apostles.
At the end of the day, when we pray for the sick,
we leave the results in God's hands.
We know that God has the power to heal.
He's the one that created their body.
And so we pray for their healing,
but we accept the outcome as the will of God.
We are getting today
of restoration and health restored
after illness, and the church
bringing a sick child, bringing a cancer patient
and crying to God that God would heal and God
hearing and answering and healing.
But everyone is going to die.
And so, you know, let's face up to that.
We see these things through a glass darkly now,
but in heaven we'll be at peace and we will know
why my wife died as she did, why I have a
grandson who's got an incurable condition
and God will make it plain. God is good.
There will be a day.
Jesus Christ will raise every body.
And everybody's dust,
which is precious in the eyes of God, will be
glorified and transformed.
They will be the resurrection unto glory.
We look forward to that.
But we don't see that today.
And we cannot see it today because it's not the time
for that to happen today
in the Bible, what we see is that
Christians are told to pray for one another,
but that's not what the modern healing movement teaches
with the modern healing movement teaches us that there's
some amount of faith that we generate
or some confidence we need to have in some particular healer
that that he can, as it were, by his own, will
heal us because of a gift that he's been given by God.
And the sad reality of it is
it is a tremendous source of confusion
and disappointment for so many people who believe the lies.
If it's always God's will to be healed,
but the healing does not come,
then the question must be asked Whose fault is it?
It cannot be God's fault because he's perfect.
So the only other one to whom to look is the one who is sick.
Lack of faith, lack of making the right confessions,
lack of giving.
Maybe you're not even saved.
It must be your fault because it can't be God's fault.
So for the last few years, I have believed in miracles.
And I have believed for healing, you know, and I'm so shocked
because every time I would pray, nothing would happen.
It gets discouraging.
Sometimes I’d even go oversees to where I'd hear about
all these miracles happening, go, Let me at least see it.
And I'd get there.
Whether Africa, India, whatever, and nothing.
And then
two weeks ago we were in Myanmar, Burma.
So I've heard of some evangelicals
who have gone to a place called Myanmar or Burma.
I can't even tell you how intense,
how amazing the experiences we had were.
This lady had built relationship
and somehow was able to work out
so that we could go into the village.
and while there have claimed that they actually came along
and healed everyone, they touched.
Everyone who touched them was healed.
People started coming forward for healing.
Every person I touched was healed.
You guys okay?
This is this is craziness to me.
I have never experienced this in 52 years.
And what's interesting about that story is
I actually know of men who are church planters
on the ground in that country,
who know the men
who arrange these healings.
Unbeknownst to the visiting preacher,
poor people of all ages in
a village are hired to act as if they are deaf or blind,
and they are instructed to play out a dramatic healing
when the visiting preacher touches them.
In this elaborate scam, the preacher is actually tricked
into believing that he is performing miracles.
I'm talking like a little boy
and a little girl who were deaf.
We lay hands,
she starts crying and smi -
Again these are not Christians.
These are not people you ever heard about Jesus?
There's fees paid out to various people to heal,
because what that does
is that brings more American preachers
and then more money into the country.
And so they arrange a series of healings
and these men come back with these stories.
And we’re like, lay hands on your little brother.
You know, we lay hands on him and he starts hearing
for the first time. You guys, this is out of my comfort zone.
This is stuff I’d read about, but I'm going, man, it happened.
It happened.
They're being suckered.
Unfortunately, we go overseas
and we lose all sense of discernment.
Things we would never consider acceptable here,
We just go overseas and discernment is gone
and we just we're just suckers
for every charlatan that comes along.
I thought I had faith,
but my faith was at another level.
One of the reasons I absolutely despise
the charismatic movement and all that it does
is because it teaches people to be gullible
and open to the idea of fake miracles.
And as soon as they discover
this isn't real, it's fake,
they don't just abandon their Charismatic convictions.
They sometimes abandon faith in Christ altogether.
What I'm struck with is not just
this doesn't fit with the Bible,
although it doesn't fit in any way with biblical teaching.
But but just the human cost, the spiritual cost of this
kind of false teaching at a moment
when when individuals are at their most desperate
and have the most openness to hearing genuine truth
God and know they need something from God, know that they’re
that they're insufficient
in themselves to do what needs to be done,
and they're looking to the Lord in some way.
And yet someone steps in and gives them this
this false, self-aggrandizing teaching.
I've seen many other lives be destroyed
when they finally woke up and realized
these things aren't even real.
They think nothing is real.
They question whether Christ is real,
and it's hard to get anyone who's gone through that
to come back and take a serious look at faith in Christ
focused on the Gospel rather than focused on
these phony miracles.
For the first 15 years of my pastoral ministry,
I was a very rigid,
dogmatic, cynical, snarky,
Cessationist
who did not believe that the Spirit of God
operates in the fashion as he did in the early Church.
To my everlasting shame for which I have repented many,
many times
when I read my New Testament
and I see the way in which Jesus and the Apostles
were confirmed through the miraculous signs
that they performed as messengers of God,
who brought new revelation from God.
And I read about the way in
which the gift of tongues operated on the day of Pentecost
and the 16 different language groups that were represented
in terms of dialects and languages spoken
by those who were giving praise to God
in languages they’d never learned before
And I read about the
way in which people were healed immediately and
undeniably with a spoken word or with the touch of a hand.
I read that on the pages of my New Testament,
it just makes me want to fall down and worship
because our God is a great God and the Spirit was doing
amazing things to confirm the person and work of Christ.
When I compare that to
fallible, errant prophecy
to speaking gibberish.
[babbling]
to hucksters
getting up and pretending to heal people.
It's my zeal
to see the true work of the Holy Spirit magnified
that motivates me to call out, and confront that
which uses the same language, but is not the same thing.
I think the most dangerous aspect
of those who believe in the continuation
of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit
is ultimately to confuse
their experience with conversion.
People can have many experiences
that maybe look exactly the same as what
Muslims and Mormons and other people claim.
You can look at people exhibiting Hindu Kundalini
and those look exactly like
you see in charismatic churches today.
They laugh uncontrollably,
they get slain in the Spirit and they speak in tongues
in exactly the same way that Charismatics do.
You literally cannot tell the difference.
Ey, Ma, ma, ma, ma
[gibberish]
They look exactly alike.
Pagans do it too.
It's very possible
for us to rest in extraordinary experiences
that we've had or believe that we've had,
rather than
resting safely in Jesus Christ.
Charismaticism was invented around
the turn of the 20th century.
They've had a hundred years to produce
anything that all Christians would look at and say
that really validates charismatic distinctives.
Just imagine
one person, just one
with the gift of healing going in and empty out
just one ward of children dying of cancer
They’ve had 100 years.
They haven't done anything like that.
If a Charismatic wants to make the case
that revelatory and attesting gifts are still operative,
he has to argue that case.
If they were still continuing, no argument would be necessary.
We'd all know it.
There is another possibility -
that these gifts did what God meant them to do
and they've retired, successfully.
Cessationism is false doctrine.
If you're going to a Cessationist church,
you need to go find a new church
‘cause nobody should be going to church
hearing about what God isn't doing anymore.
We need to be in a church
where we're talking about what God is doing today.
Cessationism is not about limiting
the work of the Holy Spirit.
It is instead about magnifying the true
work of the Holy Spirit and not being satisfied
with cheap substitutes or counterfeits.
We've got to really back up
and ask a really fundamental question about
who the Holy Spirit is and what he's doing.
The Son is sent by the Father on mission for a particular work
To redeem us.
And he pours out the Spirit for a particular reason.
He says he's sending the promise of the father upon us.
For what purpose?
That we would be his witnesses-
And particularly there he means the apostles, first
and foremost - in Jerusalem, starting there,
and then to the nations, to Judea,
Samaria, to the ends of the earth.
So the Holy Spirit’s mission - his whole mission - is to come
and proclaim the work of Christ through the Apostles,
and then the church they found
He's going to preach that
work through those preachers.
The Spirit
is going to take that Word, and he's going to transform them
so that they believe that Word.
In John 16, Jesus said that he would
send the Holy Spirit and He would convict the world
concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.
when God's Word is spoken,
and we see, according to the law that we've broken God's law
and our hearts are convicted
and we realize I am worthy of the judgment of God
when the Gospel is declared, the good news that Jesus Christ
died for our sins as an atoning sacrifice,
that he rose from the dead, conquering the grave,
that he ascended into heaven, and he’s seated at
the right hand of the Father, interceding on our behalf.
We come to receive and accept those truths
because of the power of the Holy Spirit.
As John 6:44 says, No man can come to me
except the Father who sent me draws him.
Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin
and nature's night.
His heart is a heart of stone.
God removes that heart of stone
and He replaces it
with a heart of flesh that is alive.
It is the work of regeneration.
God breathes into a dead man
and He brings a person to life,
Opening up somebody’s eyes
so that they see Jesus.
That is the miracle of the new birth.
That's what the Spirit of God is doing all over the place.
The Spirit comes into the soul
of the believer and enables their minds
to comprehend, to receive, with meekness, to believe,
to be impacted and transformed by that Word.
That I think is the huge mistake people make.
They think the Spirit
is going to speak to them outside the Scripture
when the wonderful reality, the joy of being a Christian
and coming to the Scripture
is the Holy Spirit turns on the light
to the Scripture itself and enables us to understand it
in a deep, profound, life changing way.
We need, really, a
clarion call to the substantial.
It's a lot more exciting
to go see someone stand up out of a wheelchair,
supposedly, than it is to be told from the pulpit
You need to die the self every day.
You need to take up your cross.
You need to be following the Lord Jesus Christ.
You need greater self-control
through the Ministry of the Holy Spirit in your life.
You need to be putting to death obvious sins.
You need to be growing in likeness
to the Lord Jesus Christ.
You're not going to gather a crowd
with those sorts of emphases.
But that's where the emphasis falls in the Bible.
The Spirit seals us, and sanctifies us and guides
our steps providentially.
He comforts us, he encourages us,
He illuminates the Word of God to us.
He regenerates us, He gives us spiritual gifts.
He empowers those for service.
He uses those gifts in the lives of other people that we serve.
In the power of those gifts, He builds his church.
He unites us around the truth.
All of these things, the Spirit of God does,
and they don't necessarily put goose bumps on our arms.
They are the unnoticed and everyday work
that the Spirit of God
does in His people for the glory of our God.
Peter's Pentecost sermon
He promised them that they would receive
the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The gift that He was talking about was the Person
of the Holy Spirit.
God has many attributes.
We talk about His love, His mercy, his justice, His grace,
another attribute of God
is that He gives His Holy Spirit to people, to sinners.
He gives Himself.
He gives the gift of himself.
Well, if we don't have the
miraculous gifts, what do we have?
We have the self-authenticating word of God
when we have Holy Spirit of God promise to bless that word.
There's no reason for disappointment.
Well, is that it? Yes.
We have the self-authenticating word of God, accompanied
and attested by the Holy Spirit,
and that is all we need.
What does Jesus say?
He says, if they don't believe the Word,
they're not going to believe
even someone who has been raised from the dead.
This word
is the final Word.
♪ I ain't got no money ♪
♪ I ain't got no change ♪
♪ I ain't got a dollar bill ♪
♪ to my name ♪
♪ I ain't got a dime ♪
♪ I ain't got a cent. No ♪
♪ But I got a lot, a whole lot of love ♪
♪ that I haven’t yet spent ♪
♪ wooooooooh ♪
♪ I ain’t got no rubies ♪
♪ I ain’t got no pearls ♪
♪ I ain't got no diamonds ♪
♪ to give to my girl ♪
♪ But what I do have ♪
♪ I’ll share with you ♪
♪ cuz what we got is all we need when this life is through ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ whoa, whoa ♪
♪ whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Oh I ain’t got no mansion ♪
♪ Here on this earth ♪
♪ All my posessions ♪
♪ they ain’t got no worth ♪
♪ But i put my stock in ♪
♪ my future rest ♪
♪ so if you’re asking me ♪
♪ I got all I need ♪
♪ and I’m truly blessed ♪
♪ Ain't got no money ♪
♪ ain’t got no change ♪
♪ I ain't got a dollar bill ♪
♪ to my name ♪
♪ I ain’t got a dime ♪
♪ I ain’t got a cent ♪
♪ no ♪
♪ but i got a lot ♪
♪ whole lot of love ♪
♪ that I haven’t yet spent ♪