Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Well, right at the very beginning I have a little surprise for you because it was a surprise for me. It's kind of cool.
I don't know how many of you were here on last Wednesday night.
We had a wonderful time here teaching on the Holy Spirit. This is a lecture series, it's a teaching series, it's not a revival. But on last Wednesday night I just felt motivated to give an invitation to receive. No used to talk about the Holy Spirit in a contextual vacuum.
So I thought we may as well just ask. And some people, many seemed to receive the Holy Spirit last week. But in the context of that I was sharing about when I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit at a conference for Methodist ministers and it was 150 Methodist preachers there. And it was so dramatic what happened that the next day on the front page of the religion section, not the front page of the newspaper, but the front page of the religion section, the Journal Constitution put it right on the front page. It never would have dawned on me. That was in 1975. Why would anybody keep that newspaper in the first place or even have it? But Brother Ellis had it and he brought it to me and there it is. Is that not cool?
So we thank you. Thank you, Tammy, I appreciate that. Well, if you have your Bibles now, if you'll take those. And tonight I want to shift. We've been talking about the person and ministries of the Holy Spirit.
We approached by beginning talking about the theology, the trinitarian theology of the Holy Spirit. We talked then about the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. We talked about the idea of the Holy Spirit in symbolism wind, fire, oil, water and a dove and the things that that tells us about the Holy Spirit.
We talked about how people in the New Testament received the Holy Spirit.
And I just want to connect to that. And then tonight we're going to start talking about the gifts of the Spirit.
Let me just remind you of one thing that kind of bridges from the Old Testament view of the Holy Spirit.
It is that the Jews knew about the Holy Spirit. They we talked about that in the first couple of verses of the book of Genesis and the Spirit of God Ruachadesh brooded over the Face of the abyss. So there was a clear theology of the Spirit, of God, the wind of God, the ruach.
But the idea was that the Holy Spirit came upon select individuals. A prophet, a king, a judge, Jephthah, Gideon.
But the idea that just general people would receive the Holy Spirit, it not only didn't make sense to them, it kind of was frightening, the idea of such a thing.
Yet Joel, chapter two, prophesied that then in the second chapter of Acts, when that outpouring of the Holy Spirit came in the upper room on those folks there, Peter references that he says, this is that which was spoken in the second chapter of Joel.
So that's the initial experience of it. But then throughout the Book of Acts, we talked about how in the eighth chapter of Acts at Samaria, in the ninth chapter of Acts at Caesarea.
And then I want to zero in tonight on one more. The 19th chapter of Acts, okay?
It says, and Paul, having passed through the upper borders, came to Ephesus. Ephesus is on the coast of modern Turkey. The town now is Kushadasi. So I've been there. And it's right on the coast of Turkey.
So Paul leaves Greece.
He's at Athens, Corinth, Philippi. He goes through, across the top, across the Hellespont, and then down to Ephesus.
There is a Jewish evangelist named Apollos who is working with the Jews in Ephesus.
And he is a mighty orator and a great teacher.
He's been there for some time, working with the synagogue at Ephesus.
There are two messianic Jews there, Priscilla or Prisca and Aquila.
They take Apollos aside and teach him the fuller truth of the Gospel. And Apollos receives that.
But then he goes across the Aegean, this way to Greece.
And Apollos becomes one of the three great luminaries of the New Testament Church.
If you remember, Paul says, some say they are of Peter, some say they are of me, and some say they are of Apollos. So St. Paul ranks Apollos as between himself and Simon Peter. So he becomes one of the three great spokesmen of the. Of the Gospel in the New Testament Church.
So he has now left Ephesus and gone to Greece. Paul leaves Greece. So they literally. You've heard this phrase, they pass like ships in the night. They literally pass like ships in the night.
So Paul arrives at the synagogue in Ephesus, where which Apollos has left, okay, Acts, chapter 19.
And it says, and when Paul came to them, finding certain disciples.
Now, the problem with there is that when we hear the word disciples, we immediately assume it means disciples of Jesus.
They weren't disciples of Jesus, they were disciples of Apollos.
And what he had been teaching was repentance and preparation for the coming of Messiah.
Until at the end of his ministry. There Priscilla and Aquila lead him to Jesus and he leaves for Greece where his ministry changes from being a John the Baptist style Jewish evangelist calling people to repentance. That's what John the Baptist did.
So Paul arrives in Ephesus and it says, finding certain disciples. He asked them, have you received the Holy Spirit? So since you first believed, nothing in that question made any sense to him.
Because Paul I love it when the apostles foul up. It gives me hope for my ministry.
Paul has made a false assumption.
He thinks they're water baptized Christians.
They're not.
They're disciples of Apollos.
So Paul says, have you received the Holy Spirit since you first believed? The question makes no sense to them. So they answer an answer that doesn't make any sense.
They said, we didn't even know if there is a Holy Spirit.
Well that's a crazy answer.
All the Jews knew there was a Holy Spirit.
What confused them? Why would Paul the apostle say, have you received the Holy Spirit since you first believed? He must have asked that because he sensed something missing in their worship.
He must have sensed this doesn't feel spirit filled.
So finally he asks him, have you received the Holy Spirit since you first believed?
And they said, we didn't even know there is a Holy Spirit. That doesn't make any sense. They're all Jews.
All Jews believed in the Holy Spirit. What confused them? It was the verb received.
Have you received? If he had said, do you believe that the Spirit of God brooded over the face of the abyss? They would have said yes.
Do you believe that there is a spirit of God? Do you believe the wind of God? Do you believe the column of fire that led the Hebrew people in the desert? Do you believe in Ruach Kadesh, the Holy Spirit? Do you believe?
They would have said, yes, but that's not what he said.
He said, have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed? And that confused them because they didn't know you could receive the Holy Spirit.
So let me show you an example. Suppose I came here one Wednesday night and I said to Pastor, hey, I've just been to New York City and man, I had a great time.
So I don't tell him, but while I was in New York, I go to a deli and they have a sandwich that's so Huge it's got. So they load so much on it, they call it a pickup truck.
So I come to Joey, Pastor Joey, excuse me. I come to Pastor Grizzle, and I say, hey, have you ever eaten a pickup truck?
He would say, I don't even know what a pickup truck is.
Because the verb eaten confused him. He can't connect eaten with pickup truck. So he'd say, I don't even know what a pickup truck is. I'd say, you don't know what a pickup truck is. You live in Georgia. There are more pickups than people. What do you.
But it's because he doesn't understand the connection of the verb eaten with the noun pickup truck. Do you see?
So when Paul says, have you received the Holy Spirit since you first believed? They said, well, we don't know. We don't know what you're talking about.
And he says, then, now listen to. This is very, very important for trinitarian theology.
He says, unto what then were you baptized?
In other words, it must be that Paul believed in baptism through the Trinity because he is appealing to the ritual of baptism. He says that you must have at least heard of the Holy Spirit, because when you were water baptized, I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
So they said, no, we received John's baptism.
John Baptist.
We received John's baptism. That was just simply the baptism that he did in the Jordan river before Jesus, preparing the hearts of Jewish people in repentance and cleansing for the coming of Messiah.
So St. Paul says, well, you're not even Christians.
They said, no, you're the only one talking Christian.
And he says, john said, there would come another after me, the latchet of whose shoes I'm not worthy to loose. And he indeed would baptize you with the Holy Spirit. You're to believe on Jesus.
Faith arises in their hearts. They receive Christ as their savior. And one of the only places in the entire New Testament, the Paul baptizes them.
So he baptizes them in water.
And then Paul the apostle, who was a choleric, would never give an inch stamped in the middle of his forehead.
He says, okay, now we're all on the same page now. He says, now you need to receive the Holy Spirit. And it says, and he laid hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
So the issue that confused them was the idea of the individual believer by just simply by asking in faith could receive the same Holy Spirit that anointed Isaiah, that filled Jeremiah, that fell upon David that that was the, the radical leap into New Testament, Trinitarian and Pentecostal theology was that that same Holy Spirit, that brood face of the abyss, could fill individual believers when they ask and receive by faith. Have you received the Holy Spirit since you first believed?
Since that day?
That's exactly where we are in the New Testament Church and where we will be until the return of Christ.
Now that brings us to tonight.
Now I'm trying to bridge from Wednesday to Wednesday because I know that not everybody has come every Wednesday.
So tonight I want to move into another thing and I'm just going to keep track of the time and what I'm going to do is not try to cover everything about the gifts of the Spirit. Tonight I could teach a year on the gifts of the Spirit. I'm going to teach until about 8 o' clock and then we'll start on it again on next Wednesday night.
So what does it mean when we talk about the gifts of the Spirit in the first place? When we say gifts of the Spirit? In Pentecostal circles, we're almost always talking about that particular list in 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, the list of supernatural enduments.
But that's not the only list of gifts of the Spirit.
If you will turn to Ephesians, chapter 4, Ephesians, chapter 4 and verse 11.
It's interesting to start here because why?
This is the church that Paul, that we just talked about, the church that Paul left behind at Ephesus in Acts, chapter 19.
He's now writing back to them, dealing with some of these things.
So Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 11. And he, Jesus, he that descended is the same on verse 10. He that's descended is the same that also ascended up far above the heavens that he might fill all things. Verse 11. And he gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.
That little passage of scripture is often either ignored when people talk about the gifts of the Spirit or misapplied.
So look at what it says. What it is often taught and understood to say is, he gave some the gift of being an apostle. He gave some to be apostles. That's not what it says.
Instead of going by how you've always read it, read it as it says it. And he gave some apostles.
He gave some each of these things. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers.
In other words, he is saying a gift to the church is gifted People he knows what the church at any given time needs. He gives some churches, apostles, he gives some teachers, some preachers, some pastors.
So a gift of the Spirit is actually gifted people.
And that's what he's saying here.
I went to preach for a friend of mine in Kentucky one time, and we had gone to seminary together and I hadn't seen him in some years. So he asked me to come and preach for him. When I got out of my car in the parking lot, you know, you just have this feeling. This lady scurried out to intercept me. As I got out of my car, I could just see her coming.
She said, you're the pastor's friend, aren't you? I said, yes, I am. She said, well, let me just tell you something about your friend you may not know.
I said, well. I said, let's hear it. She said, I want you to know your friend thinks he's God's gift to this church.
I said, well, thank God. Finally a pastor who knows his place.
This passage of scripture is so often misapplied. People are trying to find out if they have the gift.
That's not what it says. Gifted people are the gift of the Spirit.
Now turn to 1 Peter, chapter four, if you will, please.
1 Peter, chapter four and verse 11.
All right. 1 Peter, chapter four and Verse 11.
If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God. If any man minister, let him do it as the ability of God, as the ability which God giveth, that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion forever and ever.
So a second way to think about the gifts of the Spirit is that the giftedness of the Holy Spirit is flowing through the church all the time.
That we want to separate out the gifts of the Spirit. We want to make a thing, a specific thing. But he's saying, what? When the power of God is flowing in a worship service, that that is the Spirit of God happening.
There is. There is something that you sense. And he's saying, that's the Spirit filled proclamation of the church, through the church, in the church, to the church.
However, having said all that, there are still other ways to think about it.
And I just want to offer some of these before we come to 1 Corinthians 12 in Exodus, we won't turn there. But In Exodus, chapter 35, the Bible refers to uniquely gifted craftsmen, those who build the tabernacle.
That in a sense the book of Exodus implies or even states that the Spirit of God was upon them to Fashion the tabernacle with unique that there was something beyond just their ability.
In the life of Joseph and Daniel, we see something which isn't categorically a New Testament gift of the Spirit. But you can't, one can't do it without the Holy Spirit. And that's the interpretation of dreams.
And I'm a big believer in that. I wrote a whole book on the interpretation of dreams.
I also believe that there is a difference between a talented songwriter or a talented poet and a spirit filled spirit anointed songwriter and poet.
Witness King David.
We may not think of King David as a spirit filled person, but certainly there's something beyond a.
Something beyond a disciplined and insightful poet to write Psalm 23.
So I believe that you may hear songs that just you sense this, this is beyond this guy.
This didn't come from this guy.
You can hear, in other words, the oracles of God. A sermon. I heard Dr. Tommy Tyson preach one night at Oak Grove United Methodist Church in a Holy Spirit conference. And he was preaching and preaching and then all of a sudden he stepped out of the pulpit and looked and he said, oh, that's good. He stepped back in and kept preaching.
Afterward I asked him about it and he had no memory of it.
And I realized what had happened was he heard that at the same moment we did.
There's no explanation for that except the Holy Spirit.
So in other words, when we talk about the gifts of the Spirit, we may be talking about gifted persons, we may be talking about uniquely anointed musicians or talented workers, we may be talking about the proclamation of the Word.
All of these things are the gifts of the Spirit. Don't just bundle up the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and say that's the limit.
So now let's turn to the passage everybody wants to talk about. And that's 1 Corinthians, chapter 12.
So let's just, let's just kind of work through the chapter a wee bit more than simply talking about the gifts with precision tonight.
Now, concerning spiritual gifts.
Now let's pause just a moment.
That's translated into English, spiritual gifts, but in Greek. It's a complicated little passage of scripture because there isn't a clear translation for might be translated spiritual stuff, spiritualities, charisma, those things that are of the Holy Ghost. Now he says, let me talk to you about Holy Ghost stuff.
That's surely a passage of scripture that Pentecostals can understand.
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.
Now that's the next key thing when it comes to spiritual realities in operation in the body of Christ, ignorance is not bliss.
You know that you were Gentiles carried away unto these dumb idols. Dumb not meaning stupid, but unable to speak.
You know that you were gentiles carried away. Does anybody have another translation besides kjv?
Anybody here have another? I'm not trying to pin you down.
People say, not me, not me.
Do you have. What is yours?
Okay, does it say swept away Right there?
Brethren, I would remember. You were gentiles carried away to these dumb islands. Led away. That's what I want. Okay? That's it. Led astray and swept along.
Okay, so the concept here is what he's dealing with is pagan worship.
The Kansai saying, remember he's dealing with people that used to be pagans. Okay, so there's been this huge revival in Ephesus that began in a Jewish synagogue and then reached into the, into the pagan gentile world. Remember they burned their magic books as all of this. They. So he's reminding them of how they understood pagan worship. We often think pagans don't worship, everybody worships.
But they. How did they. How does a pagan understand worship? Pagan worship believes that I must exit the natural, enter the supernatural, receive from God or the gods, exit the supernatural, come back to the natural, declare what I heard.
So how do I get out of the natural and up into that supernatural realm? The Native American peyote cult.
Have you ever heard of the peyote cult? I smoke peyote. Dope. I smoke dope in that state, I exit my natural self. I receive a vision, something, you know, I see something like that when I come down from the high, I come back and give that prophecy. I saw, you know, the white buffalo and all of this stuff.
That's the concept. Anybody ever heard the phrase whirling dervish?
Anybody ever heard the phrase, just a couple of people, whirling dervish. It actually is a para Islamic cult. The dervishes. And what they would do really is whirl. They would spin and spin and spin and spin. And if you know from when you were a child and how you could hold a pencil out and spin around till you fell on the ground and maybe even fell unconscious, that's what they would do, spin, dancing and dancing and dancing and dancing until they had an out of body experience, go before Allah, come back down and declare what they heard as a prophecy.
Paul says that's how pagans access the supernatural.
He says you don't have to whirl yourself. You don't have to drive yourself into some kind of a. Out of.
You don't have to force yourself out of the natural and into the supernatural. That's not the way it works. The Holy Spirit accesses where you are here.
So he says you don't have to rev yourself into a fever pitch in order to get out of this. He says that's pagans who are, as his translation said, you're swept away.
So it's a mistake when Pentecostals talk about I just couldn't help. I couldn't help myself. I was just, I was swept up.
I was swept up. Paul says that's not the way the gifts are supposed to work.
Because think about it. How can the gifts work in a way that are contrary to the fruit of the spirit? And one of the fruit of the spirit is what?
Self control.
So if you're out of control, then one of the fruit is not operating.
So maybe what you think is a gift is not so.
It's a very sobering passage of scripture when you read it that way. You don't have to, you don't have to foam at the mouth before you can access the gifts of the Spirit.
Okay, so I know what you're thinking, are we ever going to get to the gifts? But we just need to work through this. Wherefore I give you to understand verse three? Wherefore I give you to understand that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed. And no man can say that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Spirit. He doesn't mean you can't say it.
He means you can't proclaim it. You can't make it real in your life.
The lordship of Jesus Christ to be true in your life.
The Holy Spirit is the indispensable reality.
He is the sanctifying grace.
Now he says now verse 4. There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit, he's laying the platform for everything that's going to be said from that moment on rests on verse four.
The Holy Spirit operates different ways in different people, but it's not different spirits.
Now that's important to us. It was critical to pagans because they said, there's a spirit of the water, there's a spirit of the wind. There's. You know how paganism works. Spiritism. There's a spirit in the trees, there's a spirit of the dirt, all those kinds of things. He says there's only one Holy Spirit. And what that Holy Spirit does is make Jesus Lord in your life.
Once Jesus is Lord in your life. You don't have to.
You don't have to get yourself into an out of body experience to pluck the Holy Spirit out of heaven.
Because Jesus is Lord. He accesses the church through us.
Gifted persons are gifts to the church.
So verse five, there are differences of administrations.
God works in different people, different ways, and there are diversities of operations.
But it is the same God which worketh all in all.
But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.
So he's saying the Holy Spirit comes into us to profit. Think what that means. It doesn't mean to pay off financially.
It means there it's for a purpose.
So the Holy Spirit doesn't come to us through us and cause us to be gifted for us to consume it on ourselves.
It's for the profit of the body.
He's giving all this preparation.
Why? Why is he giving all this preparation? Because he's talking to the church at Corinth, which had become filled with division and argument and separation. And this guy's better than that guy, and this guy's above this guy. And I'm with Paul and I'm with Apollos, and I'm with Simon Peter and all of this confusion in the church at Corinth, and he's saying, wait a minute, let me say to you. What the Holy Spirit does is make Jesus Lord. And if he's Lord, he's Lord of everybody. Nobody's Lord over anybody else.
Furthermore, you don't have to choose and divide up.
We're on the red team, we're on the blue team.
He says the Holy Spirit operating in every life is for the benefit, the profit of the Body of Christ.
And all of us, all of us are part of that instrumentation.
All right, now we're finally to verse 8.
For to 1 is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom. To another the word of knowledge. By the same spirit another. To another faith by the same spirit to another. Gifts plural, of healing. By the same spirit to another, the working of miracles to another prophecy to another discerning of spirits to another. Diverse, Different. I'm reading from kjv. We don't use the word diverse anymore, but different kinds, plural, different kinds of tongues to another.
The interpretation of tongues.
Now just leave those for a minute and look at verse 11, how he sums it up.
For all these worketh that one and the self, same Spirit dividing to every man, person severally as he.
So what is Paul saying about the gifts of the Spirit? He's saying it Emanates from the Spirit that makes Jesus, Lord.
It is always through humanity to the church, for the benefit of the church, and God's the one who decides.
In the middle of that is the list that we call the Gifts of the Spirit. There are the Gifts of the Spirit. Now here's something controversial for you.
It was one of my goals in these nine Wednesday nights to try to offend everyone. I was afraid that I would just offend a few of you. And I want to be an equal opportunity speaker.
But here is a controversial thing, and that is this.
Is this list exhaustive.
So suppose as I leave tonight, somebody meets me in the parking lot and says, who was in there tonight? Oh, I say, Mr. Ellis was in there and Pastor Joy was there, and Pastor Jerry was there, Mia was there. And listen. And they said, wow, it wasn't a very big crowd.
I said, oh, well, no, you asked me. Those are people. There were a lot of people there.
So there is the possibility that Paul is listing the gifts of the Spirit, but in the context, remember what we just read, the beginning and the end of this. He's talking about the lordship of Jesus and the unique gifting of the Holy Spirit. And he says God gives one the gift of tongues, another one interpretation of tongues, one prophecy, one discernment of spirits. Maybe he's listing all the lists, gifts, and maybe he's not.
So maybe he's just naming some gifts as examples of the way that God works in the body of Christ.
Eyes see, ears hear, legs move, arms move, but they're all part of the same body.
The reason I gave you that whole long thing at the very beginning about all the different kinds of gifts, gifts of hospitality. What about the gift of giving?
What about the. That's. That's listed in Romans. That's the gift of giving.
Why don't we, you know, people say long for one gift or another.
I've never heard a person in the altar weeping before God saying, oh, Lord, fill me with the Holy Spirit and give me the gift of giving above anything else.
I'm thinking about making a theology around that, but it's a valid gift. So I think Paul is saying, look, here's how the gifts work and here are some of the gifts.
But if you want to say those are the only gifts, I'm okay with that too. But I just. It's not my interpretation of this passage.
All right, now let's begin. Let's talk about some of these gifts. And as I said, we're just, we're just nudging into it this week.
There. There's multiple ways to separate and deal with these gifts.
So let me give you two different ways to group them, if you will.
So one is to group them into three groups of three. This is a very common teaching. I'm not. This is not from me.
And there is the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, and the word of prophecy. That they are.
That they are gifts of what some people call prophetic gifts.
Then there is faith healing and miracles. Those are demonstrational gifts, miracles, healing, and then there is discernment, tongues and interpretation. One Pentecostal writer refers to those as the gifts, as the intuitive gifts. But he doesn't mean intuition in the sense that we use it, but the things that we just kind of know.
I think that there's a different way. So this is the way I group them. It's not the standard way to group them, but I group them into two groups.
Faith healing, miracles and discernment.
Those are miracles of action.
Those are gifts of action.
Then there is. Listen to how you say them. You don't say the gift of wisdom. What is it? It's the word of wisdom, word of knowledge, word of prophecy, tongues and interpretation. I believe those are miracles of supernatural communication.
So half of the gifts, nearly half, four of them, are gifts of miraculous demonstration, signs, wonders, miracles, healing, those kinds of things.
And half are the other half five, not precisely half are gifts of divine communication.
Let's just talk about some of the gifts then. Let's talk first of all about the first group. Faith healing, miracles and discernment of spirits.
The gift of faith that is talking about here is not the general faith that everyone is given for salvation, the faith to believe God.
This is a gift of.
This is a gift of supernatural faith. What Oral Roberts used to call that moment where you know that you know that you know that you know, where it transcends any argumentation, any circumstance, any situation.
It is a gift of such faith that you're not revving yourself up to it. You're not pressing forward. You're not trying to exercise faith or confess faith. It is a gift.
It drops inside of you. It's done.
You just know it's done, it's finished.
It is a powerful and I believe, actually a very rare gift in the body of Christ, because if it resides in a person, then that person becomes a tremendous anchor to a community of faith.
When people are praying, praying, oh, what about this? What about this? What about this? And he says, it's all taken care of, it's all settled.
The Gift of faith is a rare and powerful gift, and it is. Remember, the gifts are to profit withal.
I would profit in my poor little shredded faith by someone that I know who has the gift of faith and demonstrates that gift of faith repeatedly and successfully in the body of Christ. Think what it would do for me when I'm struggling to get through a situation or a circumstance. And the person with the gift of faith says, it's done, it's all done.
Now, that's the gift of faith.
The second it says gifts of healing.
Gifts of healing.
So I'm not going to teach tonight on healing. Maybe next year I might actually teach on healing. But I think maybe one Wednesday next year we'll have a healing service. And I just invite you to bring everybody you know that's ill or infirm.
It's always interesting to me when people say, I'm so sick I can't go to church. But I long for the impulse to say, man, I'm sick, I got to get to church.
But gifts of healing, it's plural.
So that doesn't mean gifts of healing, as in multiple people all heal the same way. It means that there may be manifestations and healing that operate through different people in different ways.
So I'll give you an example, and that is counseling.
There is a level of counseling that goes beyond what you could learn in a counseling course.
So these gifts flow together.
The gifts of the spirit come together. And look, if you reach up to a cluster of grapes and squeeze them like that, tell me the drop that comes off your elbow, which grape did it come from?
I believe that's the way the gifts of the spirit operate.
So the gift. The gift of one of the gifts of healing, for example, counseling may actually connect to and be part of and be used together with the gift of word, of knowledge.
So I was in Augusta, Georgia, at a certain church many years ago, some years ago, and the pastor, before the morning service, I was preaching at night, and then in the mornings, pastor said, look, there's a lady in my church that suffers horribly from migraine headaches. And she's asked if we would pray for her before the morning service. I said, great, bring her in the office.
So I talked to her for a few minutes, and she said, look, I don't. I want to make sure you understand. I'm talking about migraine headaches are not just where your head hurts real bad. She said, they.
They destroy me.
She said, I can't move. I can't think.
It may last a day. It may last a Week. She said, I can't hold down a job. It's ruining my family.
She said, I'm talking about something that is debilitating.
And it's. For years. She said, I've been to every kind of thing. I've had MRIs. I've had brain scans. And she said, nobody can tell me anything.
And I said, now, ma', am, I never have claimed to have any great gift of healing. We're going to pray for you and anoint you with oil, so let's just bow our heads.
And I reached my hands out toward her. And when I did, I had a remarkable experience.
I saw in my mind. I'm not easy with words like vision. So I saw in my mind's eye a picture that was so clear. It's as clear as I can see you.
I saw a little girl so clearly that I could even describe the dress that she wore.
A little girl wearing a navy blue dress with a white lace collar. She had her little hands crossed across her chest like that. And she was standing, staring at a door and crying.
But it wasn't sad crying. It was like angry crying. She's crying like this.
I want to show you what that feels like for just a moment, if you will. When I say three, I want you to just close your eyes and think of a horse real fast. Are you ready? 1, 2, 3. Close your eyes. Now just think of a horse. Think a picture of a horse. Now open your eyes.
Okay, that little flash picture of a horse.
Imagine if that were clarified where you could tell the color of the horse's mane, the color of its eyes, its size, its shape. That's what I saw. But in my mind, the walls didn't go away.
It was so sudden and unbidden.
I felt I ought to share it with the lady. So I said, now, ma', am, open your eyes.
We are going to anoint you with oil and pray for you.
But I said, I just need to tell you what I've experienced. It was in me, so it maybe doesn't have any meaning to you, but if I tell you what it is, if you haven't, if you know what it is, just tell me.
So I described it to her.
She said, oh, I know exactly what that is. She said, that's my 10th birthday.
She said, I am the youngest of five children.
Four older brothers.
And the next youngest to me was 10 years older than I am. So he was 10 when I was born.
Four boys.
And my mother thought she was finished. And she has this accidental girl.
She said, my mother didn't want me. My mother never loved me. And she made it clear from the moment I was born.
She said, on my 10th birthday I got two gifts.
She said, I got a navy blue dress with a white doily collar that the next door neighbor made.
And she said, I put it on and wore it because I loved it. It was beautiful. But I was hurt because a neighbor lady gave it to me and not my mother.
She said, the other gift I got, I got a birthday card from an out of town aunt with a ten dollar bill in it. One dollar for every year. When I opened it holding the ten dollars bill, I said, look what my aunt sent me. My mother reached across the breakfast table and said, what does a little girl need with $10? And she snatched it out of my hand and gave it to my 20 year old brother.
And I leaped up from the table and ran onto the back steps and slammed the door. And before our eyes, she clenched her fists across her chest and closed her eyes and her voice changed to the voice of a little girl.
And she screamed, I hate you.
She opened her eyes and she said, you know, come to think of it, I've been pretty much sick since that day.
Now, we could have spent 15 years in psychotherapy and not have gotten to that moment.
So is that the, Is that a gift of healing?
Is that a word of knowledge?
Is that discernment of spirits?
Yes, it sure is.
So I'm bringing that just to a conclusion by just opening the subject with you next week. What I want to talk about is the gifts of the Spirit in the everyday life of the believer.
We have too often in the Pentecostal world relegated the gifts of the Spirit only to demonstration in Sunday morning service.
What does it mean to a plumber on the job?
What does it mean when somebody just says, pray with me the next two Wednesday nights? I want to see you armed.
I want to see you armed by the gifts of the Spirit in such a unique and powerful way that the gifts of the Spirit are given to profit with all.
I want everybody that comes in contact with your life to find profit to their lives and their souls. Because you as a gifted person are a gift into their life.
Let's pray together. God, I thank you for this precious church.
And Lord, I pray that you will, between now and next Wednesday, work on us, open us, crack us open. God.
Every resistance, everything that would be, that would be him defensive to the gifts of your spirit. Prepare us, O Lord, that we may hear from you.
Having heard that we may be in this world armed and profitable.
In Jesus, mighty name, amen.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: You've been listening to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Be sure to speak. Subscribe, rate and review today's podcast. You can follow Dr. Rutland on Twitter @Dr. MarkRutland or visit his website, Dr. MarkRutland.com join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
