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Hi my name is Dean Smith and welcome back to the second of my two-part series discussing the eight reasons why I believe the spiritual gifts are for today.
In my previous podcast, I provided my first five reasons. This included Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost where the Apostle said that the gift of the Holy Spirit that fell on the Day of Pentecost was intended for everyone who believed including those who were afar off.
In this second series, I will discuss my final three reasons,
The Holy Spirit is even releasing spiritual gifts among cessationists
With that, I start with my sixth reason. Incredibly it seems that the Holy Spirit is releasing His spiritual gifts among those who don’t believe in them.
The Holy Spirit is doing this because He loves us and wants to help cessationists and continuationists alike to build the Kingdom of God. And if this means sneaking in a spiritual gift from time to time, so be it.
The 13 million-member Southern Baptist Church is probably the largest denomination that holds to the cessationists views. They don’t believe in tongues or any of the revelatory gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Yet in 2005, the missionary board of the Southern Baptist Church passed a bizarre rule stating that no-one was allowed to apply to be a missionary if they spoke in tongues privately. In fact, they were asked if they spoke in tongues on the application.
So why did they feel the need to ask this question?
Obviously, people who were applying including graduates from their own Bible schools were speaking in tongues. In 2016, the missionary board reversed this decision.
Which begs the question, why did they reverse it?
Todd Friel of YouTube’s Wretched radio program is a convinced cessationist, but in a recent program entitled, An Earnest Challenge to Our Charismatic Friends, where he expresses his opposition to speaking in tongues, Friel admitted there have been credible reports from the mission field of people “receiving the gift of foreign languages.”
Friel continues, “We can reasonably conclude that while God may give someone the ability to speak in a foreign language that can be understood by a native or one with the gift of interpretation, there never was nor should be a gift of ecstatic language that doesn’t edify the body.”
While Friel insists that speaking in tongues must benefit the body, the Apostle Paul kind of disagrees with him and tells us in 1 Corinthians 14:4 that tongues also has a personal benefit, building us up in our faith, when we are spiritually down.
Or take what happened to R.C. Sproul, now deceased, a reformed theologian and major defender of the cessationist argument. Several years back, he had a teaching position at his Aalma mater Westminster College in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Because it was only temporary he applied for a permanent position at a school in Boston and was offered the job.1
But when Westminister offered him a full-time position shortly after that, Sproul needed to know where God wanted him to be. Even though, he wanted to stay at Westminster, Sproul and his wife, along with several students, decided to pray about this decision every night for a week.
By the seventh day, Sproul hadn’t received any direction from God that he should leave so he announced to the prayer group he would be staying. But a student challenged Sproul asking if he was genuinely open to doing God’s will even, if meant moving to Boston.
Sproul replied, “Well, I am trying to be,” but said he had seen nothing suggesting he should move, and Sproul and his wife went to bed that night excited that they had made the decision to stay.
But at three in the morning, a childhood friend that Sproul hadn’t seen for 15 years phoned. He was an airline pilot and after he arrived at his hotel room late at night, he was suddenly overcome with this urge that he had to urgently phone Sproul and tell him that he needed to take a job in Boston. It took the man an hour to track down Sproul’s phone number.
When Sproul asked why he needed to go to Boston, his friend said, “I don’t know, all I know is that I had to call you and tell you that you have to go to Boston. I am not drunk. I don’t know why this is. You do with it what you want.”
Sproul and his wife knew they needed to move to Boston and though the two years he spent there were among the worst years of his life, Sproul admitted the moved changed the trajectory of his ministry.
Or how about Billy Graham, the famed evangelist Billy Graham. Though he worked with Charismatics during his evangelistic crusades, he was a member of the Southern Baptist Church.
In his book, Just As I Am, Graham tells of the time he tried to contact then-US President John F. Kennedy, through a mutual friend, Senator Smathers, in November 1963. Graham wanted to warn Kennedy not to go on a planned trip to Dallas Texas.
Graham writes what happened next, “Instead, he (Smathers) sent me a telegram that the President would get in touch with me directly. He thought I wanted to talk about the President’s invitation to another golf game in Florida that weekend; the game was off, he said, and would have to be rescheduled. But all I wanted to tell him and the President was one thing: “Don’t go to Texas!”
Kennedy did go to Dallas and was assassinated on November 22, 1963
Maybe it is all semantics, because what Friel described was the gift of tongues, what Sproul received was a word of knowledge, and what Billy Graham got was a prophetic word.
So if the Holy Spirit is releasing His gifts among those who don’t believe in them, why is it wrong for the Holy Spirit to release the spiritual gifts to those who do believe in them and earnestly desire them as the Apostle Paul encouraged us to do?
My seventh point is that it is not true that the sole purpose of the gifts was to confirm the Apostles and their message.
As I mentioned in my first podcast, this was the main point of one person who commented on my articles on the spiritual gifts and the Holy Spirit.
He said, “They are signs of the apostles. When they died, those times and signs died with them.” He went on to say that quote “Today’s unknown tongue is either rehearse and fake, or they come from an unclean spirit.”
However, when we study the early church, it’s clear the gifts of the Holy Spirit were not limited to the 12 or 13 Apostles if you include Paul.
There are several examples of regular people moving in the spiritual gifts.
When the Holy Spirit fell on the Day of Pentecost, at least 108 of those 120 in attendance were not apostles. Other non- apostolic miracle workers included Philip in Samaria in Acts 8, Stephen in Acts 6:8-9 and Ananias, a regular Joe, when he laid hands on Paul and filled him with the Holy Spirit in Acts 9:17.
From what Paul wrote in his epistles, it’s obvious that the church members in Corinth were functioning in all the gifts, as were the believers in Rome according to Romans 12:6-8, Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 5:19-20), and Galatians (Galatians 3:5).
The Holy Spirit released His gifts to all believers, so they weren’t simply functioning as just signs of the apostles. As Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 14 verses 4, 5 and 12, the gifts were intended to edify or build up believers and the church.
Finally, cessationists argue the apostolic and prophetic ministries ended because they are no longer necessary, along with that the need of spiritual gifts
This argument is based on Ephesians 2:20 where Paul writes about the church, “having been built on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.”
Because the foundation ‘having been built by the Apostles and prophets’ is in the past tense, cessationists argue that their ministries are no longer necessary and of course lump in the spiritual gifts with this.
But, using this same logic it could be argued that Jesus is no longer involved in building His church because He was, past tense, the chief cornerstone of this foundation built by the apostles and prophets.
Even the cessationists would admit that Jesus is still actively involved in the construction of the church and if this is the case why couldn’t the same be true for apostles and prophets?
Sam Storm, who is currently pastor emeritus of Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City, is a strong continuationist. He believes the gifts are for today and he responded to the cessationists usage of Ephesians 2:20 by pointing to verses 21 and 22, which talks about the structure being built on top of the foundation, where we read, “in whom the whole building, being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord.”
As Sam explains:
“The cessationist argument fails to take note of vv. 21-22 where Paul refers to the superstructure of the church as under construction, so to speak, as he speaks/writes (note the consistent use of the present tenses in vv. 21-22). In other words, the apostles and prophets of v. 20, among whom was Paul, were also contributing to the superstructure, of which the Ephesians were a contemporary part.“
It’s obvious from other verses that apostolic and prophetic ministries have vital roles in the church other than just building the foundation.
In Ephesians 4:11-12, Paul writes that when Christ ascended He gave gift ministries to the church. We read:
“He gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.”
In addition to building the foundation, the apostles and prophets were actively involved in building the superstructure above which included equipping the saints to do the work of the ministry.
And we know there were several others serving as apostles in the early church aside from the 12 or 13 super-apostles.
This included Barnabus mentioned in Acts 14:14, James the brother of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15:7 and Galatians 1:18-19, along with Andronicus and Junia (Romans 16:7).
With the arrival of apostle other than the just the 12, it is obvious that the apostolic ministers was expected to continue and continues even today.
While some groups have people they refer to as actual apostles, other groups don’t but even they have people who essentially perform the same function. They function as apostles, but under a different title such as missionaries, who are going out and establishing new works and new churches.
And we see, even according to Friel, some of these missionaries that are building these new works, who are going into areas of the world where the Gospel hasn’t been preached, that the Gift of Tongues is being manifest.
While cessationists have philosophical arguments opposing the spiritual gifts, it’s obvious from the Bible that they are intended to be used till Christ’s return and will be a critical part of the believer’s arsenal as we enter the end times.
Thanks for joining me in this two-part series on why the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are for today and I will catch you again.
- RC Sproul is a cessationist, but listen to this story: Think Honestly Youtube ↩︎
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