Matt Chandler - The Gifts of the Holy Spirit

If you have your Bibles, Hebrews chapter four is where we’re going to camp out in our time together. This weekend marks the end of our fall series, so if you remember back, we started the fall by discussing the kind of church God has called us to be and what the mission of the church is. For the last four weeks, we’ve tackled our distinctives as a church, which are those things about which Christians may disagree while still being Christians. Are you with me?

We began several weeks ago by talking about baptism and Communion. We said that Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Methodists are going to disagree with where we land on this, just as we disagree with where they land. Yet, we are brothers and sisters in Christ who love one another, and we will spend a lot of time in heaven together celebrating the same Savior. From there, we talked about the electing love of God—a love that existed for us before the foundation of the earth was laid. This is a good thing to be celebrated and should bring comfort to our souls. Then, we discussed inerrancy, emphasizing that we plant our flags in the ground as people of the book. We are unwavering in our commitment to Scripture, which may make the world think we’re a bit peculiar, and it will certainly challenge us personally as the Word of God bears its weight on us.

Last week, we talked about complementarianism, or how we see men and women as complements to one another—not one being subservient to the other, but each complementing the other for human flourishing. This leaves one last distinctive to cover: we are a church that is on the spectrum of theology—a continuous church. If you have no church background or don’t study theological terms, that’s fine; let me explain what I mean. The Village Church believes that the miraculous sign gifts of the Holy Spirit did not cease with the death of the apostles but are still available to the church today. That’s what we believe.

However, there is a very large group of evangelical Christians who reject this, and their marketing guys haven’t been as effective as those for the continuous belief because it’s labeled cessationism. You never want to have what you believe to start with a negative, right? They call it «ceased.» But they have their own perspective, and this is what they came up with. So, for fairness, I want to read a definition of cessationism—the opposite of what we believe—from a guy I respect and enjoy listening to, Tom Pennington. I could say a lot of great things about his preaching; I have a couple of his books on my desk right now, including some writings he did around the kingdom of God, as I prepare to preach on that in the spring. I value how he sees things; I just wouldn’t invite him here to teach on this issue.

Tom Pennington, who identifies as a cessationist—meaning he believes the opposite of what we hold—defines cessationism as follows: «Cessationists believe that the Spirit no longer sovereignly gives individual believers the miraculous spiritual gifts that are listed in the Scriptures and that were present in the first-century church. It is neither the Spirit’s plan nor His normal pattern to distribute miraculous spiritual gifts to Christians and churches today as He did in the time of the Apostles. These gifts ceased as normative with the Apostles.»

It’s important to note that cessationists do believe in miracles; they believe in supernatural moments. However, they assert that such occurrences are not normative or available to the church today. We would disagree on that point.

Now, for some background on me: when I became a Christian just a few days before my 18th birthday, I fell in with a group of kids who were genuinely on fire for Jesus Christ. Some were Assembly of God kids, while others were Church of Christ kids, and I was the lone Baptist in the mix. Talk about some theological confusion! My Assembly of God friends had been told by their parents that Baptists were closed-minded and crusty, not open to the things of God, even though I was zealous for Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, I had been told that my Church of Christ friends were perceived as extreme and that they trusted their thoughts more than the Word of God. My poor Church of Christ friends were often questioning why we played instruments in worship, and we were confused by that!

As I reflect on those early days of my faith, I see the grace of God in my relationships with Mark Allen, Benjy, and Rodney Engle Bosch. Those brothers and sisters, who were filled with the Holy Spirit, were a bit eccentric and wonderfully enthusiastic.