Spiritual Gifts 101 #2

Last Sunday 16th October

I wanted to comment on the service yesterday because, apart from anything else, it was, (a) unconventional as our services go and (b) included some prophetic words and the exercise of spiritual gifts - which demand comment.

Second I’d like to make a personal comment.

Regarding being unconventional, perhaps like me, you prefer conventional. Personally I really don't like anything I cannot see is explicitly biblical, and I was a bit uncomfortable with how the service went - perhaps you feel the same? Or maybe you really appreciated the sense of freedom and openness? Perhaps you really felt that God is among us and we are ‘getting real’ with God? How we feel is not unimportant, but there are certainly more important things. Eg, never mind if Julian is pleased, are we pleasing the Lord? Wherever you are on that scale, I want to reassure and encourage us all in what follows. I hope that what I write will be helpful to us all.

There are three responses we can have to the Sunday’s service.

RESPONSES

1. “What a load of rubbish - let’s hope that doesn’t happen again - I really didn’t like that”.
2. “That was wonderful - at last we are moving in the Spirit! God was at work!”
3. We virtually ignore it.

None of those responses would be quite right. Certainly, alone they will quench the Holy Spirit. Paul’s instruction makes this point clear and gives us specific instruction on how we should respond … 

1 Thessalonians 5

19 "Do not quench the spirit. 20 Do not treat prophecy with contempt 21 but test them all. Hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil."

There are five imperatives (commands) listed in that verse … 

1) Do not quench the Spirit.

This means we can quench the Spirit - and if we do not want to, we must obey what follows, and to disobey what follows will result in quenching the Spirit.

2) Do not treat prophecy with contempt.

Remember, Paul is writing to a church. This suggests that prophecy was taking place in the church and at least some people didn’t like it, they were dismissive, contemptuous of it. So Paul corrects this attitude “Do not treat prophecy with contempt”. We will quench the Spirit if we allow such attitudes to prevail - therefore we must resist that temptation or repent if necessary. This shows us that RESPONSE 1 above is wrong.

3) Test them all!

This tells us, we will quench the spirit if we allow people to prophesy but fail to ‘test them all’. Sadly, where prophecy is practised, it is seldom tested. We must not just ‘accept it’. Prophecy should be scrutinised and weighed. This shows us RESPONSE 2 above is naive and presumptuous. It may have been good and of the Lord - but we don’t declare the results of the test before we have carried out the test - that is presumptuous. 

4) Hold on to what is good

This means, do not throw the baby out with the bath-water. That is, if while testing prophecy we find stuff that is clearly not of the Lord - or inconsequential - still we should not reject the whole thing. The implication is, that there is likely some good in it somewhere. This shouldn’t surprise us when contributions are born out of a desire to love and serve the church and God. We should look for any good and grab hold of it and hold onto it. Not forgetting it, not letting it go.

5) Reject every kind of evil

This means that in any prophecy - or anything else that is allegedly ‘of God’, there is the potential for evil to be in it. Any evil must be identified and outright rejected. However, it is also obvious that it is not just a question of good and evil. Imagine that pure good is ‘white’ and pure evil (you know what I mean) is black. In a prophecy, there could be both - not to mention ‘grey’ - stuff that is not evil - but also is not of the Lord - a bit of human ideas mixed in. Again, this is why prophecy etc must be tested. I suggest, though, that our expectation is that any prophecy a church member might bring is not likely to be ‘evil’.

If the above is true - whatever was or was not of God in the service yesterday will not quench the Spirit - but failure to reflect on it in a biblical way will quench the Spirit - and I don’t want to do that. In my next blog on ‘The Gifts of the Spirit, we’ll test/weigh the prophecy.