Titled the New Testament gift of prophecy. I did not anticipate this but we had a Q&A last week healthy Q&A and Though it was not an emphasis of the message the topic of spiritual gifts came up and there were some questions regarding the gift of prophecy that is mentioned in the New Testament and There is some teaching out there that is advocated by some churches and individuals that the gift of prophecy, in fact, every gift, spiritual gift mentioned in the New Testament is all functioning today live. It's all going on just like it was in the New Testament when it started. There's a teaching like that. Titles like the charismatic movement and these kinds of things, the faith healing movement, there's a lot of titles that get thrown around and I'll try to avoid a lot of that. But as a church, Faith Baptist Church believes that the gift of prophecy is not a functioning gift today. The gift of tongues speaking is not a gift that is functioning today. And I wanna make just kind of a more simple case for that here today, though it could take weeks to get really thorough about it. Number one, The gift of prophecy to the church, which means prophecy means to declare. The gift of prophecy to the church was a New Testament gift of the Holy Spirit, enabling some believers to contribute to the church in that way, through that gift of prophecy. providing either predictive information, predicting an event or so forth, or declarative information, speaking the word of the Lord, revelation from God, without a Bible verse to point to, specifically. This happened in the context of church ministry, and it's mentioned specifically and clearly in Romans 12, verse 6, 1 Corinthians 12, and verse 10, among other places. It is a gift that God gave. It is not a gift that is functioning today. That is the position of Faith Baptist Church as we understand the scriptures. Number two, those with this gift, along with the gift of apostleship, provided a foundation for the church. The Bible clearly teaches in Ephesians two and verse 20, chapter three and verse five and so forth, that the church is built on the foundation of the gift of apostle and prophet. And through means of the revelation gifts, revelatory gifts, you might hear it called. Tongue speaking gifts of knowledge, gifts of prophecy and so forth. These are gifts that God provided. Abilities to speak in a language that is an actual language that you didn't learn in school, but it exists. Other people speak it, you just don't know it. Why was that? And we'll talk about that in a minute, but it's a revelation gift. God gives you the ability to say something in another language that you never learned in school, but it's a real language. You study the Hebrew on it, and you're gonna have to trust me on this, or you can study the Hebrew on it. You will find that in Hebrew and Greek, it's very clear. We are talking about a foreign language that exists in the world. That's what we're talking about. It's like me talking, I wish I had this gift. Faith Baptist Church, boy, it'd be nice to talk in French and all these different languages. It's just not something that church history demonstrates. It's not something that the Bible teaches. It's happening. But it did happen at the beginning for specific reasons. But the gift of the apostle and the prophet saying things from God without a verse to preach from were gifts that were given as a foundation. Does the word foundation mean anything? It does. Jesus Christ, in fact, is the chief cornerstone of that foundation. It's a foundation. A foundation is a temporary building project. It's how something starts and everything else is built on it. I could talk a lot about this, but the gifts of apostle and prophet and the revelation gifts are not happening anymore. The foundation has been established. It was before the first century closed. Number three, whatever a prophet said was relevant only if it corresponded completely with Old Testament apostolic doctrine. What an apostle said was more authoritative than a prophet. Even though what a prophet said, if he was enabled by the Lord was right. There were more prophets than apostles. An apostle was somebody specifically sent out by the Lord to lay the groundwork for the church and was given special information like the prophets of the Old Testament to record. And then their letters were distributed among the churches as authority from God. Once that happened, we no longer needed the apostles to produce that information. Prophets were provided in the absence of that information so that what God wanted a church to know was known when they didn't have a letter from an apostle or an Old Testament book that taught that specifically. So imagine you're in the first century church. There are apostles that God has sent directly to lay a doctrinal foundation to produce documents that say what we need to know to operate, to function, to love God. But here we are. We don't have an apostle in our congregation. Word travels slowly. We don't have the book of Ephesians right now. Only Ephesus has it. It hasn't been copied yet. Well, we're a church too. We need to know certain things as well about the functioning of the church. The gift of prophecy was the ability to stand up and to say what needed to be said. God would give that enabling. But once the documents of the word of God were available in some way, that was unnecessary. And even then there needed to be scriptural accountability. And even then there had to be congregational accountability. The gift of prophecy is not some special ability to see something in a person's life and get special insights like some spiritual soothsaying in a Christian way. It's not what it is. And we have to be clear about that. Loving but clear. The gift of prophecy number four, And other revelation type spiritual gifts, such as tongue speaking knowledge and so forth, were both partial and temporary. 1 Corinthians 13, eight through 10 tells us that. Let's look here. This comes right in the middle of the most extensive conversation about this topic of revelation gifts. 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verses eight through 10. Paul says in the context of what was happening early in the start of the church. I'll get to this in a second. The book of 1 Corinthians was one of the early epistles written. It was an early epistle written early on. Very little revelation had been provided in a written form when the book of Corinthians was written. So he writes and he says, charity never fails. But whether there be prophecies, they will fail and will close down. Whether there be tongues, they will cease. Whether there be knowledge, this gift of kind of knowing things that don't have a word written down for them from God, it shall vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. And I could make a case, we don't have time today, but The best conclusion I've arrived at, and many others throughout history have arrived at, is that which is perfect is the completed word of God. The revelation completed, not the revelation being provided temporarily. Number five. This is important. In the epistles, you will find a decreasing emphasis on and practice of the prophetic gift and an increased emphasis on the written scripture as the word of God for churches. One disservice that our Bible format presents us with though it has other benefits, is that it is not laid out in a chronological manner. Matthew was not written first, Mark second, Luke third, and so forth. Revelation was written last, but apart from that, there's a general kind of a mixture based upon letter type, size of letter and purpose of letter. That's more how the New Testament is arranged. But if you can look on the back, based on a lot of work that's been done based upon content, there's a lot of things that go into this. putting together stories, narratives between the different books of the Bible, things that happen in one book in one church, and then something that happens in another, and you can say, okay, so that happened first, this letter was written first, and so forth. Dating certain events in Paul's ministry based upon what history records, lining it up with the book of Acts, and when that letter could have been written then. There's a lot of work that's gone into this. You can generally lay the books of the Bible out generally accurately with a little margin for error, but it's a pretty stable observation. And if you look, the books that have something to say primarily about these gifts in an emphatic or practice these things way are the early epistles. And as the epistles develop historically in a ordered timeline way, you see nothing being spoken of regarding that unless it's with reference to an apostle, is what my studies to this point has indicated. For instance, Timothy is a later epistle. Paul talks about a prophecy that was given to him through Timothy, through Paul. Well, what is Paul? He's an apostle. He's laying the foundation. But you don't find him telling Timothy to practice prophecies and tongues. when the Timothy and Titus epistles are manuals for running a church. No mention is made of these things. There are later epistles as well. In fact, what you find when you look at the later epistles, you find an increasing, even an urgent emphasis on false prophets, on these deceptions, on these ridiculous questions and things that cause divisions and carnality. and you find an emphasis on this, preach the word, rightly divide the word, avoid foolish things and false doctrines and teach sound doctrine. The emphasis becomes what has been provided. Timothy, go with this now. This is it. We've got it. Preach it. Of course, you have Revelation, which is the latest epistle. It's of all things, it's a prophecy, right? And what is John? The last apostle alive. And if you study history and early church history, the generations of Christians that followed the apostle era, you don't find these things happening. In fact, you really dig into history, you'll find what's called the Montanist era. The Montanist error was a man who was saved out of an Asiatic mystical cult. He made a profession of Christ, may have been saved. A couple of other lady prophetesses followed after him and they promoted a teaching that introduced these kind of mystical sayings and prophetic utterances and shivery feelings and all these kinds of things, ecstatic experiences into the church. And before the early church fathers could really shut it down in all the churches, it began to spread. And the doctrine of the word of God that's provided enables us to refute that. It was an error then. It's very interesting that throughout the rest of church history, you find very little of this stuff happening. And it wasn't until early in the 1900s when the problem popped up in a vigorous way, again, many hundreds of years later. It is an error to be avoided. It tends though well-intended often. Not every person who espouses these kind of doctrines is themselves the false teacher trying to divide a body, okay? But these doctrines do cause division. They're contrary to the word of God. I will be as loving as I can about it. Our church will not teach that. We'll teach what I taught today. And if that is something that you believe, There are churches that believe that. Please don't cause division. These things must not be taught as doctrine in the pulpit. If I ever teach it, men pull me aside, lovingly confront me with scripture, the scriptures I provided for you today. And if a member is teaching these kinds of things lovingly, pull them aside and say, we don't believe that. That is error. Please don't teach that. And I need to know about it because my job is to provide doctrinal oversight and direction for the church so that we don't find ourselves waking up to a church split five months later. I do have to remind us that our church has experienced this on a couple of occasions, not on this particular topic, but on other things in the course of our 40 year history. Praise the Lord. We're here and we're going strong, but people left over some things regarding this. One case in particular was a false prophet prophesying events that were going to happen that never happened. Whether you're predicting events or declaring special knowledge, that's not, It's not biblical. It split our church before, and it's not going to happen again by God's grace. We don't have time for Q&A, but please give some thought to these things. And as we stand for the truth of the Word of God, may we always do it with love, considering ourselves, lest we also be tempted. understanding that all of us need to grow in some way or another. None of us stand here perfectly doctrinally correct in every detail. But there are things that are of such a level that will divide a church and that I must lovingly, meekly stand upon and not give ground to. Don't believe these things because I say so, because the Bible does.