Original subtitles

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

Yes, the man mind says It's weird, but the spirit says Hello

this is awesome.

Oh ho ho ho ho ho.

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.

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

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 ♪