← City Harvest Church Weekend Sermons
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Welcome to City Harvest Sermon podcast. We hope you'll be blessed by the preaching of the word by Craig Keener.
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I've been asked to speak today on the matter that spiritual gifts are for today, a biblical case for the continuing work of the Spirit. Now, why would anybody think spiritual gifts aren't for today? It's like, you know, somebody might say, well, the Bible doesn't say that spiritual gifts have to be for today, doesn't say that prayer has to be for today, that giving has to be for today, that the Lord's Supper has to be. I mean, why would anybody even have to ask that question? Our last marching orders in the Bible were. Spiritual gifts are for today. Last marching orders in the Bible. We have commands. Seek the gift of prophecy. Why would anybody think it's not for today? But just in case some people might think that, and some people do think that, we will go into some of the questions. I'm going to spend a lot of time in Paul, but before I go there, opening up with a programmatic quotation in the Book of Acts that kind of sets the tone for the rest of the book of Acts. And. And we'll deal with it more later, but just starting now. Acts 2, 17, 18. In the last days, God will pour out his Spirit on all flesh. Now, Peter applies that to the day of Pentecost in his own day. If it was the last days already on the day of Pentecost when Peter was preaching, how, pray tell, may it not be the last days now? Is it earlier than it was 2000 years ago? Or should we say if it was the last days then, if anything, it's laster days now, maybe even the lastest days for all we know, to make up some new words. And these are the things that he says will characterize the last days. Prophecy, visions, dreams. And Peter adds in a word that's not even there in what he's quoting from Joel. He says at the end of the line, and they shall prophesy, just to reinforce the point so you don't miss it. In terms of what Joel already said, Pentecost inaugurated the era of the Spirit, the era of the new covenant. Where we work, we minister by the Spirit. The same era according to the context in Acts chapter two and Joel, the same era when whoever calls on the Lord's name will be saved. Is this the era when we call on the Lord's name to be saved? Then it's also the era when your sons and daughters will prophesy. Same context, same passage, same last days. Now, Some people say, well, but the Bible says the gifts will pass away. And it's true. The Bible does say they'll pass away, although we can't be selective about which gifts, they all pass away at the same time. When does it say they'll pass away? When we no longer have need of partial gifts because we have the fullness of because Christ has come back. 1 Corinthians 1:7. You don't lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. As long as we're waiting for him to be revealed, it's ideal for us to be moving in those gifts. The partial will be done away with when we see Jesus face to face. 1 Corinthians 13, 8, 12. Love never ends, but as for prophecies, they'll come to an end. Same with tongues, same with knowledge. They'll all come to an end. And then he tells us when these things will come to an end. They're partial, they're not complete. They'll come to an end when we don't need what's partial. He says, now we see is in a mirror. So I took a picture of a mirror. Now we'll see. We see dimly as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. We won't need partial knowledge because we'll know even as we are known. When is that? That's when Jesus comes back. We see him face to face. We need all spiritual gifts to bring the body of Christ to maturity. So Ephesians 4, 11, 13, the gifts that Jesus gave and the context of this is that when Jesus ascended, a sign of his exaltation is he gave gifts like apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor teachers to build up the body of Christ. So we all minister to one another and we all reveal Christ's glory to the world. And we need these gifts, he says, until we come to the full stature of Christ, till the body of Christ is conformed to the image of Christ fully, that is, until Jesus return. Some say, ah, no, this refers to the completion of the New Testament. That's when we know as we are known. I have been a New Testament professor for decades now and I can assure you that I don't yet know as the Lord knows me. I'm still learning. We will know as we are known and will see face to face when our wonderful Lord Jesus comes back. And there'll be no barrier. And this is also taught in the old testament, Jeremiah 31, talking about the new Covenant. When the fullness of the new Covenant comes, they'll no longer say know the Lord, because all of them will know the Lord and notice what gift he mentions here. No longer shall they teach one another. Hey, that's a gift that'll pass away. The gift of teaching, which is what I'm hopefully doing now. When will it pass away? Well, when we know as we are known, when we see face to face. Until then, we need it. First Corinthians 13, 8, 12 reinforces this point multiple times to make sure we don't miss the point. Now we have prophecies, tongues and knowledge, then they'll end. Now we know in part and we prophesy in part. Like for example, John the Baptist saying, the one coming after me is going to baptize in the Holy Spirit and fire. And after a while he says, I don't see any fire. Jesus, are you the one to come or should we look for somebody else? John the Baptist knew in part. Thank God for what he knew. But we know in part. We prophesy in part. But when the completion comes, the partial will be done away. We won't need the current form of knowledge or prophecy because we'll have the fullness. Right now we speak and think like a child, but then we'll have full maturity. Right now we see dimly, then we'll see face to face. Right now I know in part, then I will know fully, just as I'm fully known. He makes it clear in context. And therefore almost all scholars today recognize that 1 Corinthians 13 is talking about the second coming of Christ. I'm not just talking about Pentecostal scholars, I'm talking about scholars across the board. Paul has various lists of spiritual gifts. And so I want to survey some of these to make a certain point. Some people say, okay, well, certain gifts, like say, knowledge remains today, but other kinds of gifts, supernatural gifts, they've passed away. Where does Paul say that? Where does that distinction come from? As we're about to see, it doesn't appear in any of the New Testament lists of spiritual gifts. Some want to distinguish between so called natural and so called supernatural gifts. They say the supernatural gifts have passed away. Coincidentally, those are the ones that might actually require faith that God will act. But the so called natural gifts, those possible by our own effort or education, remain. So teachers can say, well, we have the gift of teaching that's just endowed to us and so we can continue to teach. But you guys who speak in tongues, that's not for today. But the Spirit also makes a difference in our teaching. I wouldn't want to teach without knowing that God's spirit was working through me. The distinction is arbitrary. They would have to divide the following gift list into something like what follows. Romans 12, first gift on the list, prophecy. Oh no, that's not for today. What about these others? Serving, teaching, exhorting, giving, leading. Yeah, we can keep those. Does Paul make that distinction? 1 Corinthians 12, 8, 10, wisdom and knowledge. Are those for today? Well, yeah, those are for today. But not healing, not miracles, not prophecy. Where does that idea come from? It's not in this passage. Later in the same chapter, Apostles, probably the way Paul uses it beyond the 12. Because he does use it beyond the 12 in a number of passages. Probably Paul is referring to those who are starting church planting movements or things like that. But first apostles, second prophets, they say, no, those aren't for today. Teachers. Yes, those are for today. Miracles, healing. No, those aren't for today. Leadership. Yeah, that's for today. Where do they get this distinction? And often they'll pick on Pentecostals and Charismatics saying, you guys aren't biblical. We uphold the Bible. Well, I'm glad that they uphold the Bible on some things, but I hope you're noticing that on these passages, we're the ones upholding the Bible, not them. The next verse in 1 Corinthians 12, the same pattern, 1 Corinthians 13 that we already looked at. Prophecy and tongues. No, those are done away with knowledge. No, we got to keep that. But they're all said to be done away with at the same time when we see face to face. 1 Corinthians 14, 6, revelation and prophecy. No, those aren't for today. But knowledge and teaching, yes, we'll keep those. 1 Corinthians 14:26, worship and teaching. Yeah, we can keep those revelations. Those aren't for today. Ephesians 4:11. Now no apostles and prophets, but pastors and teachers, we can keep those. Have you noticed a pattern here? That the distinction that is made by cessationists, the people who say that certain spiritual gifts have ceased, that that distinction doesn't appear in any of these lists. It's not biblical. Same with 1 Peter 4. Where does the distinction come from? It doesn't come from the Bible. It's a post biblical theological distinction. Paul speaks of one body with many members and he gives samples in different lists. He gives samples of different spiritual gifts. And the point is we're all one body. We all need to minister to one another. He makes no distinction between natural and so called supernatural gifts. I didn't have a good picture of supernatural gifts. So I asked AI to make up a new Chinese superhero. Now, where did people get the idea that spiritual gifts or certain spiritual gifts have ceased? These distinctions are from outside scripture, based on extra biblical philosophy. And we'll talk later about historically where they come from. All gifts are empowered by God's grace. We call them charismata because it's based on the Greek word charis, meaning grace. Does God give us bad gifts? We're supposed to be grateful for God's gifts, not speak against God's gifts. And we have this in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4. In all these passages, it speaks of these gifts being from grace, from God's grace to us, and also in some other passages I didn't mention before. 1 Timothy 14 don't neglect the charisma, the spiritual gift that's in you that was given through prophecy with the laying on of hands by the elders or 2 Timothy 1:6, I remind you to rekindle the charisma of God that's within you through the laying on of my hands. Also in one Peter 4:10, one feature in common with all Paul's lists of gifts, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12:14 and Ephesians 4 is that all these lists speak of the gifts in the context of the building up of Christ's body. Is the body of Christ for today. If the body of Christ is for today, then the members of the body of Christ should be for today. And that means spiritual gifts should be for today. If you know it hurts the body, if you've got pieces missing, I could live with one eye. I could live with zero eyes. I could live without an arm. I could live without two arms. But I don't normally go around saying, oh, would you please poke out my eye, because I could live without it. We recognize that ideally we would like to have both eyes. We would like to have both arms. So why do we treat the body of Christ differently? It hurts the body if any parts are missing. 1 Corinthians 12:19 if all were a single member, where would the body be? If all were an eye, where would the rest of the body be? If all were a hand, where would the rest of the body be? If one member suffers, all suffer with it. If one member is honored, all rejoice with it. We're supposed to be affirming one another's gifts, not throwing out certain gifts. If we want to follow the Bible, has the body of Christ ceased? We're still one body, we still need all the members. Some churches amputate certain members. That's not good for that body. It's not good for those members. But then you have some other churches. So you have some churches that emphasize one gift, and they throw out the gift of tongues. Just because you have another church. And you pile up all those who've been thrown out of that church for tongues. Just because you pile that up. That's not a whole body either. We all need all the gifts. We need teaching. We need prophecy. We need tongues. Now, prophecy sometimes gets abused in my country. Oh, boy. There's been a bunch of abuses of it. But the way you deal with an abuse is not to. I mean, the way if you have counterfeit money, the way you deal with it is not to throw out all money. If you have a quack doctor, you don't throw out all doctors. You just use discernment. Some in the west today say only natural gifts remain. This adds to scripture. Scripture doesn't say that. There's no such distinction in Paul's lists. Furthermore, Paul gives direct commands of scripture. These are our most recent biblical marching orders. There's nowhere in the Bible where These are retracted first. Thessalonians 5:20, 22. Don't despise prophecies. Do you know any churches that do that? Don't despise prophecies, but test all things. Do you know some churches that don't do that? Hold on to what's good. Avoid everything that appears evil. Same with 1 Corinthians 14:29. Let people prophesy two or three at a time, then let the others evaluate it. So it's to be evaluated, but you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Revelation 2:2. You've tested those who claim to be apostles but are not. If you knew that there were no apostles, you wouldn't have to test them. But if you know that there are some, that's when you have to test. So we need to examine spiritual gifts, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and don't drown the baby in the bathwater. Direct commands, 1st Corinthians 12:31. Strive for seek the greater gifts. 1 Corinthians 14. 1. Pursue, love and strive for Seek spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. First Corinthians 14:39. Be eager to prophesy, and don't forbid speaking in tongues. Do you know some churches that claim to be biblical and yet they're not eager to prophesy? Some churches that claim to be biblical, and yet they forbid speaking in tongues. Is that biblical? It's based not on scripture, but on extra biblical ideas. The context of 1 Corinthians 13 about love tells us which gifts to seek the most, the gifts that will build up the body of Christ. We need love for the right motivation for the gifts, and then gifts are a way we can serve one another in love. The two verses that frame this chapter 12:30, one eagerly desire the greater gifts and 14:1 follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy. Now, prophecy was more edifying to the gathered church than uninterpreted tongues was, because it's intelligible, it builds up everybody, and teaching would have fulfilled that too. But the church in Corinth was only 2 or 3 years old in the Lord, so they didn't have a whole lot of teaching available to them when Paul was gone. Prophecy is in nearly all of Paul's gifts lists, and it's often near the top. In fact, when it's ranked in 1 Corinthians 12:28, you know, he says, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, hopefully, again, that's what I'm doing. And then he says everything else. In the New Testament, we have a number of prophets. It was the leading, most prominent ministry of God's message in the Old Testament. In the Corinthian churches, it was apparently ideal to have multiple people prophesying in each service. He says it's particularly valuable for building up Christ's body tongues is valuable for building up yourself in private prayer. Some people say, ah, you know, he says it's for edifying yourself. That's selfish. Should ministers only study the Bible for sermon preparation? No. We need to build ourselves up spiritually. That helps us to minister to others. But anyway, prophecy, he urges believers to seek it. Even if we didn't know of any true prophecies today, if we want to obey this command, we would pray that God would give us that gift for the body of Christ in the body of Christ. So going back to Acts chapter 2, the inauguration of the era of the Spirit. Acts 2, 17, 18, God pours out the Spirit. Did God pour out the Spirit and then pour the Spirit back? I didn't get very wet. If I were really good with this, I would have done it backwards so you could show the water going back up. But I'm not good with it, so we'll just do it like that. Notice again, last days throughout the New Testament. This is the present period. All the passages that mention it again and again talk about us being in the last days when you look at them in context. 1 John 2, 18 even says it's a last hour. He says that in the time that he was writing. So again, if it was last days then, it's certainly not last days now. And when he lists expressions of this end time outpouring in this passage, what does he listen to? Prophecy, visions and dreams. Now, I've never had a real vision, so I'm not saying everybody has to experience all of these, but I do have dreams. I guess that's how I know I'm old man. It says old men dream dreams, but I think these are samples. But also something else in this context, Peter describes, tongues is fulfilling Joel's prophecy. So the believers are speaking in tongues. And people who are listening, they say, what does this mean? Peter says, this, this speaking in tongues. Here's what it means. This fulfills what Joel meant when he said, you sons and daughters will prophesy. Prophecy is for the era of the last days. Tongues is for the era of the last days. If you want to be really biblical, you got to believe that. And this is very important. Peter treats this experience as the proof of Jesus exaltation. Acts 2:33. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, Jesus has poured out this. This experience of speaking tongues. He's poured out this that you both see and hear. Is Jesus still exalted then? This is still a gift of the Spirit. It's still an expression of his exaltation. Again, in Ephesians 4, spiritual gifts are expressions of Jesus exaltation. We should celebrate them because they give honor to the risen and exalted Lord. And he's explicit. Peter's explicit later in the passage about the same gift, the gift of the Holy Spirit. He's been talking about using the same language, gift, promise, and so on. When it comes to 2:39, at the end of his message, he says, this promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off. It wasn't just for the apostles. These gifts were meant to be for the church. The apostles were the first witnesses. But they become a model for the ongoing ministry of the church. Prophecy is for all believers. Now, that wasn't the case in the Old Testament. So you have in Numbers, chapter 11, God takes some of the Spirit who's on Moses, places the spirit on the 70 elders who are with him, and they prophesy for a while and then they Stop. But you know, it's showing that they've received the same spirit of prophecy that was on Moses. But Eldad and Medad were out in the camp and they keep prophesying. Nobody told them, oh, you have to stop now. They're still prophesying. And somebody runs to Moses and says, moses, Eldad and Medad are still prophesying in the camp. And Joshua says, my Lord, make them stop. What does Moses say? Moses says, I wish that all God's people were prophets. You come to Joel, chapter two, or if you're reading in Hebrew, Joel three, Joel two, 28 and 29. Moses wishes fulfilled afterward. And in the context, it means in the last days. It's at the time when God restores the fortunes of his people. Joel 3, 1. Afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy. It's meant for all of us. Now it says all flesh. And as Peter finds out later on in Acts chapter 10, he's quoting it here in Acts 2, but he doesn't understand it fully yet. All flesh crosses ethnic barriers, not just for Jewish people, it's for Gentiles too, and sons and daughters. Male and female servants crosses gender barriers. Young men and old men crosses age barriers, male and female servants. The wording in Joel crosses class barriers. So the difference between the Old Testament and the area in which we live is this gift is for all of us. First Corinthians 14:31. Paul even says, regarding the church service, you may all prophesy one by one. Now, how many of us are here in this room? If we all prophesy one by one, we're going to be here for a very long time. But keep in mind the Corinthian churches, these were house churches, so they're more like cell groups. And that's an appropriate setting where you could all prophesy one by one. We also express sometimes prophecy is a wide range of gifts in the Bible, so it can be expressed in a variety of ways. But yeah, just keep in mind the setting, also the encouraging of prophetic movements. Samuel raised up a prophetic movement. God did that through Elijah and Elisha. The Corinthian church, though, you didn't have senior prophets able to mentor the other ones. So they practiced peer review, where someone would two or three would prophesy at a time, and then the others would evaluate. Prophecy is a gift that appears throughout Scripture. You've got Abraham called a prophet already in Genesis. You've got Moses, definitely is a prophet. You've Got different prophets prophesying in different times, different ways. But the gift of prophecy is something that kept coming throughout church history. Why would God work in one way throughout biblical history and be so emphatic about it in the New Testament? And then suddenly, without any explicit warning, cut it off. Is that biblical? Or isn't it more biblical to follow the biblical pattern, to expect that God still works in various times and places the way God wants to, and often in ways like what we see in the Bible. So let me give an empirical example of this. You can see the one picture is I'm on the one side. My future, then future wife is on the other side. We didn't get married for like 10 years after that. But I know you didn't recognize that was me. I had hair at one time. But Medine went back to Congo after she was in the US and after she did her PhD in France, she went back to Congo. Three different people at three different times who didn't know each other prophesied to Medine that she was going to marry a white man with a big ministry. Now, there's not a lot of white men in Congo, but they prophesied this to her. I didn't have a big ministry back then. I was white. But, You know, sometimes people prophesy and it's off. But these people all got it right. In fact, they also prophesied to Medine, Medine's family. They told her such and such a date in January, war is coming to your town. You better get out now. On that very date, war came to her town. So people can speak the word of the Lord. Mesfen, a person with a gift of prophecy in Ethiopia, prophesied to me various details that there was no way he could know, including things about the relationship between me and my son. Also, he said, you're writing two big books right now, the second one bigger than the first. And I thought, well, that must be off, because the second one is not going to be as big as the first one. What I didn't know was they were going to come out in reverse order. And he was right and I was wrong about my own book, and he didn't know that I wrote books. So I'm just giving you examples of the true gift of prophecy. But some say, no, you can't have prophecy because that diminishes the unique authority of scripture. You can't have God speaking over here and God speaking over here and then be the same authority. Well, they're not the same authority. People can miss it. We know in part we prophesy, in part Scripture is the norm. It's what we use to evaluate everything else. So there's no question about that. Get your doctrine from Scripture. But there were people prophesying in biblical times whose prophecies are not part of the Bible. And that didn't mean that they were competing with the Bible. So Obadiah says in 1 Kings, chapter 18 that he hid a hundred prophets by fifties in a cave. Their prophecies are not recorded in Scripture. What about prophecies in the New Testament? Well, First Corinthians 14 talks about two or three people prophesying at a time. At least I understand it is prophesying at the time because later on verse 31, he says, you may all prophesy one by one, but let's just say the average house church in New Testament times in the first century, the average house church, two prophecies per week. So if you got two prophecies per week per house church to the end of the first century, that's about 900,000 Christian prophecies. Were they added to Scripture? Obviously they weren't. And I'm really glad because I'm a New Testament professor and I have trouble getting through the New Testament all in one semester as it is. Well, some, some fear. I mean, it didn't compete with Scripture while Scripture is being written. There's no reason it has to compete with Scripture now. But some are afraid. Well, it allows for new doctrines, but prophecy is not meant to introduce new doctrines. I mean, was it a new doctrine that Medine should marry a white man with a big ministry? Was it a new doctrine that all the world needs to know about that war was going to come to Dolicy on such and such a date? Or the two explicit prophecies that we have in the Book of Acts where they're explicitly quoted. A severe famine will come on the world in the time of Claudius, which was in the first century, or the Jews in Jerusalem will bind this man? Agabus was prophesying in both cases. So because these are in Scripture, we learn from them. But was Agabus prophesying a doctrine for the whole church? In fact, if you're worried about new doctrines, the word doctrine just means teaching. The gift of teaching is a lot more likely to introduce new doctrine or new teaching than prophecy is, because prophecy isn't normally supposed to be about that subject. Now I am myself personally against introducing new doctrines, which is why I'm against the doctrine that the gifts have ceased because the Bible doesn't teach that. And therefore cessationism, the doctrine that the gifts have ceased or certain gifts have ceased, is itself a post biblical doctrine. It's the very thing it teaches. It's therefore epistemologically self refuting. Now again in terms of all believers prophesying, all believers can hear God's voice and speak God's message to one another. And certainly we hear it for ourselves. So Romans 5, 5, God's love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has given to us. And then the next three verses go on to define that love in terms of the cross. So that what it's saying is the Spirit comes into our hearts pointing to the cross and saying see, that's how much I love you. Or Romans, chapter 8. God's spirit bears witness with our spirit, saying that we're God's children. When you hear the spirit of God within you saying my child, I love you, that's God's voice. And John, chapter 10. My sheep hear my voice. That's normative, that's biblical, that God's sheep hear his voice. And John, chapter 15, Jesus says to the disciples who are with him at that point, I've not called you servants, but I've called you friends. Because whatever I've heard from the Father, I've made known to you. Then in chapter 16, lest anyone think this was only for those who were with him at that time, chapter 16, Jesus says the Spirit will come and whatever he hears, he will speak. So Jesus hears from the Father, the Spirit hears from Jesus, and we get to hear so that the same Jesus who was with his disciples in the room that night, the same Jesus who washed his disciples feet In John, chapter 13 is the same Jesus who's in this room with us right now. He's the same Jesus who's with us at all times. God's presence didn't cease and God's speaking didn't cease. Obviously scripture has a cutoff point. That's the norm that all of us agree as the foundation of our doctrine. But Jesus continues to speak. And lest anybody think, okay, that can't be for today, first John uses the same language and applies it to all believers. You all have an anointing and so on. Preaching the kingdom in the Gospels. In Acts, people preach the kingdom. Jesus first and then those that he sent preach the kingdom. And it wasn't actually limited just to the apostles. Some people say that, but Ananias lays hands on Paul so that Paul can be healed and receive the Holy Spirit. It's not just limited to the original apostles, keeps on going. Most scholars of Acts consider Acts to be open ended, the mission continuing to the ends of the earth. And the book of Revelation. You've got miracles and prophets still there in the book of Revelation. These are not things that were meant to have ended and the gifts continued through history. Many of the church fathers talk about the continuation of these things. Irenaeus writing around the year 180, lists the same range of miracles pretty close to what you have in the Book of Acts. He actually talks about this one church in the area where he's a bishop, where people get raised from the dead periodically. Tertullian, late second century, early third century, says to the emperor, look, you know, God is really with us. If you don't believe me, just bring any Christian and you bring any demonized person. And the Christian can immediately cast out that demon. And if they can't execute them as a fake Christian, he was definitely not a cessationist. The leading cause of conversion to Christianity and the three hundreds was exorcism and healing. That was documented by Ramsay McMullen, professor emeritus of history at Yale. And he was very surprised by what he found. Augustine and others talk about these things. I'll come back to Augustine. Early Methodists, including Wesley, were very adamant that the gifts of the Spirit continued in their day and we should continue to expect them in the 1800s. Many Rosa Dorothea Trudel and others. And especially noteworthy was Lutheran pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt, who was known for his ministry of healing and exorcism in the mid-1800s in Germany. It was a prominent feature of the Korean Revival 1907 or so. There were a number of Western Presbyterian missionaries who had been taught in seminary that miracles don't happen today and that demons are merely psychological problems. Now I know that there are psychological problems distinct from demons. I'm not confusing the two, but they're also demons. And so they came and when they saw the miracles taking place and the exorcisms, they said, well, this can't be true. They commissioned a study and the study concluded, yeah, people really are getting healed. People really are getting delivered from demons. And as a result of that, the Korean Christians led many Western missionaries out of their cessationism to recognize that these things are going on today. The origin of cessationism. Some people talk about some of the early church fathers being cessationists, but you read the church fathers in context, those particular passages are saying, yeah, we don't have as many of these Manifestations today. Why? Because the Church is so sinful. They weren't saying God stopped it. They were saying we stopped it, not that it needs to stay stopped. One of the people that often gets cited for this is Augustine. But you read later in Augustine, in Augustine, city of God 22:8, he says, actually, I used to believe that some of the gifts had been quenched. I didn't believe healing was happening today like it happened in the time of the apostles. And maybe not as often as in the time of the apostles, but hey, it's still happening today. He encountered it, and then he started actually keeping affidavits. So those in his diocese who were healed were supposed to submit affidavits. Not all of them did, but among those who did, over the course of two years, they had 70 of these affidavits of healings that took place, including healings of blindness and people being raised from the dead. So he renounced cessationism, certainly with regard to healing. That's, by the way, 70 over two years. That's like one every week and a half. So where did it start? Well, Catholics and Protestants were not getting along too well around the beginning of the Reformation. We're doing much better today, thank God. But at the beginning of the Reformation, you had Catholics saying, look, we have all these miracles. What do you Protestants have? You don't have any miracles to show, so we're the true Church and you're not. But they were not just counting miracles going on in their time. They were counting. They were counting, like the past thousand years, which isn't quite fair. But the Reformers, they were Bible teachers. Their gift was teaching. It wasn't like miracles. Some of them said, okay, we don't believe miracles are for today. Those were given to the apostles for the Great Commission. They also didn't believe the Great Commission was for today. That was just given to the apostles. And Europe got evangelized, so that's done. Sorry, Singapore, sorry, North America, sorry, all those other places. So they had a misunderstanding in that respect. But for the most part, the Protestant response was. I mean, Luther still believed certain things were happening, but Calvin, he was trying to respond to the Catholics. He could have said, okay, you guys have these miracle accounts, but it's not limited to you. You just wait a few years, we're going to have some, too. It did begin happening among Protestants, even among those who didn't believe it happened. So, like the Scripture reading of a paralyzed woman being healed, a paralyzed man being healed. Mark, chapter two. Suddenly, during that reading, a Woman who's been paralyzed for years gets up and starts walking. And in the church, they say, wow, this looks just like in the Gospels. But we can't call it a miracle. That's what Catholics do. So we'll call it a special providence, call it whatever you want. But Calvin didn't take that approach. Calvin said, okay, your Catholic miracles are demonic, and we don't need miracles because we have the Bible. Miracles were to vindicate the Bible. But even Calvin wasn't, like, too strict on that. He said, you know, to reach. If there are unreached areas, God might still raise up apostles and do miracles to reach those areas where it really became a hardened form of cessationism was a result of the deists, the people who didn't believe God actively works in history. And David Hume, who carried their argument a little bit further. David Hume said, okay, you Catholics don't accept Protestant miracle claims. You Protestants don't accept Catholic miracle claims. I don't accept anybody's miracle claims. And part of his way of arguing was, I don't accept any testimony that's not from the Western world. I don't accept any testimony from anybody who's not white. I don't accept any testimony from anybody who's not educated. And what happens when somebody still had all the criteria that he was making? Well, then he would dismiss their testimony, saying, I only accept credible testimony. And if you say it was a miracle, you're not credible. That is circular reasoning. And yet that's the basis for most people who deny the reality of miracles is Hume's essay. Well, later cessationists, especially B.B. warfield. In the beginning of the 20th century, Warfield did some great work in many areas defending the Bible, but this was not something that actually defended the Bible. What he did, it actually undercut a lot of Christian apologetic. Warfield said, okay, New Testament miracles are authentic because they were attested by the apostles, but all later miracles, they're not really miracles because you can't trust any other testimony. He basically took over Hume's argument for all the miracles in history, but not the ones in the Bible. And of course, that left him wide open to skeptics coming back and saying he was inconsistent. Let's look at the empirical test. Do these things happen? Can one simply deny credible witnesses as David Hume did? There was a 2006 Pew Forum survey of Pentecostals and Charismatics in just 10 countries. And when you look at the totals in the surveys for these countries alone and for Pentecostals and Protestant charismatics in these countries alone, the estimated total of those claiming to have witnessed miracles or witnessed divine healing comes out to somewhere around 200 million people. But let's say you don't like Pentecostals or charismatics. Anybody here like that? More surprising is for those who don't claim to be Pentecostal or charismatic, but claim to be Christian. This is the control group. Somewhere around 39% of them claim to have witnessed divine healings. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people. I mean, Hume says uniform human experience shows us that miracles don't happen. No, no trustworthy witnesses. If Hume lived today with the knowledge we have today, Hume himself would not have made that argument. Because you can't say, I mean, you've got hundreds of millions of claims. You're going to say none of those can be credible. I mean, many of them are for people with PhDs. Many of them are from doctors. In fact, there was a survey of US doctors where over half of them claimed to have witnessed miracles, medical miracles. In the context of talking about biblical miracles. And this isn't just people who started with Christian presuppositions. Millions of non Christians have been converted to Christianity. Like 70% of global Christian growth in the last few decades has been due to signs and wonders. You have people changing centuries of their ancestral beliefs because of extraordinary healings that differed from indigenous healing traditions. China was not in the 10 countries surveyed above, but one source from within the China Christian Council around the year 2000 said that roughly half of all conversions in the previous 20 years were due to what they called faith healing experiences in the house church movement. Some estimates, especially in rural areas, came closer to 90%. These were not people who started with Christian presuppositions. They were converted because they believed God had done something extraordinary. Dr. Balkrishna Sharma shared with me that 80% of converts in Nepal are due to signs and wonders. His own wife was healed of brain tuberculosis. Eyewitnesses, some of whom I know, speak of well, what they would do. Actually, these are friends of mine, Roland and Heidi Baker. There was a prophecy given to Heidi that, that God would use her to reach the lost while people would get healed of deafness and blindness. And so she went back to Mozambique. She prayed for so many deaf and blind people for a couple years and nobody was getting healed. But she just, she kept holding on. And suddenly in one week, she hadn't changed anything. But this is just God's sovereignty. Suddenly in one week, three blind women were healed. And after that, they would go into villages Preach about Jesus, show the Jesus, film, whatever. Sometimes he will get healed spontaneously. Other times they would say, you have anybody blind or deaf in this village, bring them forward so we can pray for them. And people in the village who knew who was blind and deaf would bring them forward. They would get healed publicly in front of everybody. The next day, they'd start a church in this village that had had no church, that had had no evangelism before. And there was a region of Mozambique that had been classified in a different way, came to be classified as predominantly Christian. Because of this evangelism, a team went to Mozambique, documented the healings from blindness and deafness taking place during prayer, published it in the Southern Medical Journal in September of 2010. Professor Candy Gunther Brown, whom I believe you had here in November. Candy Gunther Brown was one of the people who was part of that team, and she answered the critics of the study in a book called Testing Prayer, published by Harvard University Press in 2012. One of the chapters is on that study in Mozambique. But I'm going to end with this in my research and come across a lot more extraordinary testimonies than this. But for reasons you'll soon understand, this was the one that really got my attention and cut into my Western skepticism. I mean, I'm never a complete Western skeptic. I was converted from atheism. But, like, two days after my conversion, I was just so overwhelmed with the presence of God that there was no way I could praise him enough, worthily enough, unless he gave me the words to do it. And God knows lots of languages. It could have come out in English. It would have been from God, but it came out in another language. And I've been praying in tongues ever since. So. But let me just tell this story about Antoinette Malambe. She heard her daughter Therese cry out that she was bitten by a snake. And she ran to Therese, found her not breathing. There was no medical help available in the village. So she strapped Therese to her back, ran to a nearby village where family friend, evangelist Coco Ngoma Muiz was doing ministry. Coco Muiz prayed for Therese. She started breathing again the next day. She was fine. I asked Antoinette Malombe how long was it that she wasn't breathing because, you know, six minutes with no oxygen, irreparable brain damage starts in. She had to stop to think to get from this village to that village. She said, about three hours. Now, I have testimonies that were longer than three hours. I have other cases where we have the medical documentation. One case where it's actually a doctor himself was dead for over an hour. But this one is really significant. Therese has no brain damage. Therese is about my age, so this was a long time ago. She's about my age now. She finished seminary, her master's degree and she went back and pastored in Congo. She just recently retired. But the reason this got my attention is Therese is my wife's sister. And Antoinette Malombe is my mother in law. So biblically, we have no reason to believe these things have ceased. Biblically, we have every reason to believe God still does these things. And God wants to show his power and his glory. And when we look at it in terms of what God does do, God is still doing these things. And it hurts the body of Christ for some people to want to amputate certain members or to hold back God's work. So let's welcome all that God wants to do in the body of Christ.
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And that's the end of this week's podcast. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Email us@connecthc.org sg.