Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] 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] Lord, we thank you. We laud and magnify your holy name. You are the Lord our God, above human history. You are above every calamity, you're above every disaster, you're above every blessing, you're above every hardship. You're above all. And you are all in all, in the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God. Amen. Amen and amen. Well, praise him one more time. Magnify the Lord.
[00:00:53] Praise God. And you can be seated. Thank you. Praise God.
[00:00:58] Well, my beautiful wife Allison goes every Wednesday night and every Sunday morning to hear our son preach.
[00:01:07] This is the level of loyalty that I inspire.
[00:01:13] So tonight, our son is in Africa.
[00:01:18] And when the cat's away, the mice will play. Here's the most beautiful warm one in the world right there. Stand up, baby.
[00:01:32] She came in tonight and one person said, you really are real.
[00:01:39] We're continuing this series called Dimension, which was your pastor's brainchild or brain cloud, one or the other to invite me to do this series. We call it Dimension. I've come to really love this church and love the spirit here.
[00:01:56] And I appreciate the grizzles and their leadership and their sweet spirit in the ministry that I have sensed here and it's ministered to me. And I'm grateful for this church. I know you'd be blessed to be here. I want to make a quick statement, if I can, about something, and then we'll get into this teaching tonight as we continue to talk about the gifts of the Spirit.
[00:02:19] I want to just say a quick word about this whole issue. This Chinese virus that's everywhere.
[00:02:28] Look, I never want to be frivolous about anything.
[00:02:35] It's what it is.
[00:02:38] But I also believe that the children of God ought to be impervious to panic. And I just want to say that.
[00:02:52] I'm not making any. I don't make crazy statements, you know, I'll never get this. None of my people will ever get. I don't. I don't like that kind of thing. But what I like less than that is people freaking out.
[00:03:06] You know, look, you should be cautious. I'm urging you, be awake, pay attention. You know, I think you ought to wash your hands frequently. I Kind of.
[00:03:18] Personally, I kind of thought that was a good idea before.
[00:03:24] I've kind of always believed in washing my hands. My mother taught me that.
[00:03:31] But I think it's good. I think you should, if you can find any hand sanitizer, but if you can find some, you should use it.
[00:03:41] I'm just not going to let.
[00:03:43] This freaked me out.
[00:03:46] I'm not making any extravagant statement or anything. I'm just saying I just don't think we ought to panic over things.
[00:03:55] Look, be cautious, pay attention, wash your hands.
[00:04:01] But I really urge against panic. Freaking out. I don't know, you know, I don't know the ins and outs of all this. I don't know where it's going to go.
[00:04:11] Jesus is lord over everything, and he's lord over some kind of Chinese flu. I'm just not freaking out over that.
[00:04:24] 1 Corinthians, chapter 12. We kind of went through the first part talking about.
[00:04:30] Paul is making the distinction between the way that pagans worship, trying to rev themselves into a fever pitch, trying to be swept away, caught up to their. To their gods, trying to push themselves into the supernatural realm, receive something from the gods, from the supernatural, and then when that comes down, come back down and deliver. Paul says that's not the way the gifts of the Spirit work. We don't access the supernatural through excess.
[00:05:03] The Holy Spirit accesses the natural through divine power.
[00:05:08] And then he lists some of the gifts of the Spirit, framing it in this way.
[00:05:18] Whatever gifts of the Spirit operate through us and in us.
[00:05:22] They are all given and distributed by the same Holy Spirit.
[00:05:27] Now, this is important to us in our theology, but remember how important it was to pagans.
[00:05:33] Remember, these are pagans who have come into the Christian community.
[00:05:38] So he's trying to contrast what they believed. He's saying there's not a spirit of this and a spirit of that and a spirit of this. That kind of spiritism is at the essence of paganism. The spirit of the river, the spirit of the trees, the spirit of the sky. He says there's one Holy Spirit, there's just one Holy Spirit. And he distributes the gifts to severally, meaning individually to us as he will.
[00:06:06] And then we began, I just began at the very beginning to talk about the gifts of the Spirit as they are here. We talked about other lists, the list that says that the church gives gifted people gifted persons are a gift of the Spirit. There are other supernatural abilities not listed here. For example, I used the example last week, the interpretation of dreams that Joseph and Daniel and I believe in the interpretation of dreams. And it is a gift that just isn't listed among these.
[00:06:41] It could fall under the category of a word of knowledge or a combination of the word of knowledge and the discernment of spirits, but it isn't listed specifically.
[00:06:52] Now, we're going to get in tonight a little more of the detail of these particular gifts. So if you'll begin reading verse 8, 1 Corinthians 12 and 8. For to one is given by the spirit, the word of wisdom. To another, the word of knowledge by the same spirit to another, faith by the same spirit to another, the gifts of healing by the same spirit to another, the working of miracles to another, prophecy to another discerning of spirits to another diverse or different kinds. See plural kinds of tongues.
[00:07:30] To another the interpretation of tongues. But all these worketh that one and the self same spirit dividing to every person man severally as he will.
[00:07:45] I want you to imagine for a moment that you are a ministry Internet with Jesus of Nazareth and you go with him to the well of Sychar. And there you encounter the woman at the well.
[00:08:02] And Jesus says to her, give me something to drink.
[00:08:06] You're listening to this, you're interning, you're standing beside Jesus.
[00:08:10] Give me something to drink.
[00:08:12] She answers because she is wounded. Racially, the samaritans were hated by the Jews. They were racially discriminated against.
[00:08:23] It would be like imagine in 1929, a white man pulls up to an African American convenience store in south Alabama and says to the person sitting on the porch, can I please have a drink?
[00:08:39] And so that person at that convenience store might say, well, here's a fine thing.
[00:08:45] You won't let me eat in your restaurant, you won't let me go to your schools. But now all of a sudden, you're thirsty. Now you need me.
[00:08:52] Now you need me. That's basically what she says to Jesus. She says, well, so you won't have anything to do with us and you want a drink. Jesus says to her, if you knew who it was that spoke to you, now you would ask me for a drink.
[00:09:08] She's not giving in easily.
[00:09:10] She says, yeah, show me your bucket.
[00:09:14] He says, I will give you water to drink, that you would never ever have to come here again.
[00:09:21] Now she's beginning to nibble on the bait.
[00:09:24] She says, give me this.
[00:09:28] Now watch what Jesus says.
[00:09:30] Go, woman, and call thy husband and come here.
[00:09:34] Go and call thy husband.
[00:09:36] As far as I can tell from my own personal research, somebody else I'm sure before this teaching is over can correct me.
[00:09:45] But as far as I can tell, it's the only place where Jesus relates to anybody through another person, through a side relationship. Usually he is saying, leave your mother and father. Leave your family. Talk to me, listen to me. He says to her, go call the husband.
[00:10:04] Now, suppose we had been there, that intern, and we turned to Jesus and say, now why'd you say that?
[00:10:12] Why'd you say that?
[00:10:14] Where are you headed with that?
[00:10:16] You know what I think he would have said?
[00:10:19] I don't know.
[00:10:23] Let's see how she answers and we'll go from there.
[00:10:27] Now, my point to you is this.
[00:10:29] Jesus lived in ministry all the time with two onboard unidirectional antenna pointing in opposite directions.
[00:10:39] One pointed heavenward, constantly receiving input from God the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. The other pointing human word, constantly receiving human interaction. And he lived and ministered in that constant tension of dual messages.
[00:10:56] If anyone cuts off the supernatural direction, you live in bondage to the human.
[00:11:03] If you cut off the human message, you live without the opportunity of ministry.
[00:11:09] So Jesus says, go and call thy husband.
[00:11:13] And she said, I have no husband. And every light on his dashboard began to blink.
[00:11:20] He said, right you are.
[00:11:24] When you say you have no husband, you're telling the truth there because you've had five husbands and you're shacking up with some guy now you're not married to.
[00:11:32] Now we're that intern.
[00:11:35] And we say, lord, what are you ministering in now?
[00:11:39] Is that word of knowledge? Is that word of prophecy? Is that discernment of spirits?
[00:11:46] I said this last week, the gifts of the spirit seem to function in cluster.
[00:11:53] And we Americans, we're a generation, we're a nation of scientists.
[00:11:59] We want to put everything on a slide. We don't want to flow in the gifts. We want to analyze the life out of them. We want to put them all on the slide and put them under a microscope.
[00:12:10] But if you reach up and grab a cluster of grapes and squeeze the drop that comes off of your elbow, tell me which grape that came from.
[00:12:20] That's how I think the gifts of the spirit function in the life of the believer the most authentically.
[00:12:27] We enter into human circumstance, situations, reality around us.
[00:12:33] We just enter in as a human into the human input that we're receiving.
[00:12:40] But the power of the supernatural is operating in that.
[00:12:44] And instead of worrying about which gift is ours, why don't we enter into the arena of human need, understanding that the supernatural power of God is operating through us, and he knows what is needed at Any precise moment.
[00:13:04] So what does it mean?
[00:13:07] It means that we, particularly in the Spirit filled world, I will be honest with you, in the Pentecostal and charismatic world, we want to plunk down our gift like a credit card.
[00:13:21] Somebody's sick here. Oh, let me pay tonight.
[00:13:24] There's my MasterCard of Healing.
[00:13:27] And it takes about it a kind of arrogant possessiveness.
[00:13:33] So when people say, do you have this gift?
[00:13:38] In a sense, the very phrase is a misnomer.
[00:13:45] If you are filled with the Holy Spirit and the gifts are the gifts of the Spirit, actually, all of the gifts of the Spirit could access you at any given moment as God wills. So somebody says to you, do you have such and such a gift? You say, well, it never has manifested in me, but the Holy Spirit's in me. I am in the Spirit.
[00:14:08] At any moment that could happen.
[00:14:11] At any moment that could happen any of the gifts. Because the gifts are the gifts of the Spirit.
[00:14:17] And if you are filled with the Spirit, but they don't.
[00:14:22] They don't erupt volcanically at random, without purpose.
[00:14:28] The gifts of the Spirit are for ministry.
[00:14:32] Jesus manifested in the gifts of the Spirit toward people, toward situations of grief or fear or loneliness or brokenness or sinfulness.
[00:14:47] And he always kind of seemed to move in with this grace, this gentleness.
[00:14:57] I want to suggest this to you.
[00:15:00] Offer the gifts to others.
[00:15:03] Don't beat them over the head with the gifts.
[00:15:06] Go in tentatively, gently, humbly, offering what you sense God is saying to you and through you.
[00:15:15] So I arrived some years ago to Australia, and the pastor at the church where I was in Gold coast, He said, well, Dr. Olin, you got your hands full tonight.
[00:15:27] And I said, why? He said, well, two weeks ago we had another American evangelist here.
[00:15:33] And in the middle of the worship service, he called a young man out in my congregation, pointed to him, said him, stand up. And he said, the Lord has revealed to me that you have a spirit of homosexuality.
[00:15:44] And he said, it sent a shockwave through our church. And the boy denied it, said, I do not have that. And instead of letting it go, he said, and now you're proving you have a lying spirit.
[00:15:59] He said, Dr. Olam, we had to escort that man to his car.
[00:16:03] And he said, you're coming into that situation.
[00:16:07] Listen, arrogance and pride and narcissistic egotism are the exact opposite of the gifts of the Spirit. The opposite of the gifts of the Spirit. Jesus didn't just walk up to this woman out of random and say, whoa, thou has five husbands.
[00:16:27] He entered into a moment of human Encounter gently. Go call your husband.
[00:16:33] And he let the gifts of the spirit flow in the moment.
[00:16:38] What does it.
[00:16:40] What does it sound like to hear the voice of God? To hear a discernment of spirits? What does it feel like of all of the gifts, if I have any of them, I don't know that I have any of them or flow in any of them. But the one that seems to work through my life the least and the poorest is discernment of spirits.
[00:17:02] I don't know why that is. I have the discernment of a doorknob.
[00:17:06] People come to my office and apply for a job. They say, jesus is Lord. I say, great. Your heart.
[00:17:11] Later on, Allison says, the sixes. That didn't mean anything. Nothing.
[00:17:17] The third eye, the eye in the middle of his forehead, not a red flag.
[00:17:23] But in Allison, in Allison, that level of discernment is at a supernatural level.
[00:17:32] We had just received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the two of us. I was pastoring a little tiny Methodist church when I was very young, right at the end of the Civil War, and it was.
[00:17:45] It's rude to laugh at me.
[00:17:48] And a lady called and said she wanted counseling and she was in trouble and needed counseling. And we were at home at the parsonage in those days, the little Methodist parsonage right next door to the church.
[00:18:00] So I said, yes, my wife's here. We're nearly time for supper, but I can spend a half an hour with you if you'll come to the house right now. So she came. She came in the side door, through the kitchen. Allison was there, introduced her to Allison. Hello.
[00:18:16] Reputable looking lady, older than I was. I was in my 20s. She looked like she was in her 40s, but nice looking lady, nothing about her. And then the door came in here and then went through. And then there was a swinging door that went into our living room. And I said, come in here. We'll just be in the living room. There'll be nothing between us and my wife except this swinging door right here. Fine. And just as she went in, Allison said, mark.
[00:18:43] So I went back into the kitchen. She said, mark, I urge you, don't meet with that lady alone.
[00:18:48] She said, I have to cook supper. The baby's hungry. But she said, call one of the elders and get him to meet with you. And I said, oh.
[00:18:57] I said, there's nothing between us but a swinging door. What in the world could go wrong?
[00:19:03] So I went in and sat down with the lady and I said, now, how can I help you? And she Opened her mouth, and out of her mouth came such a river of profanity that you have never heard anything like it. Absolute vulgarity. Just not all sexual. Just some was. But it was just obscenity, just poured out of her.
[00:19:26] I said, excuse me.
[00:19:30] I said, my wife is extremely helpful in these kinds of situations. I'll be right back. I went through. Out through the swinging door, and my wife was wiping her hands on a cup towel. She said, I'm coming.
[00:19:47] We went in through the swinging door, and the lady was going out the front. She went out the front, got in her car, drove off, and never saw her again.
[00:19:54] So I said to Allison, what.
[00:19:57] What was that? How did you know that?
[00:20:00] How did you. What did that feel like? I said, she wasn't dressed in some sensuous way. She looked like a very nice lady.
[00:20:09] What. What was it she said when she walked in the door?
[00:20:13] I knew, I don't want this in my house.
[00:20:17] Now, I don't know how to describe that to you fully, and I'm not sure Allison can, but.
[00:20:23] But I would say this. Don't ignore those kinds of things.
[00:20:27] Don't blow that off.
[00:20:29] Don't call that a hunch.
[00:20:32] Why can't we just say, I sense the Lord in this moment and say it gently? You don't have to get all crazy.
[00:20:40] The gifts of the spirit are not to make you crazy. They're to make you useful.
[00:20:47] There is no charismatic gift of craziness that's not an anointing.
[00:20:57] So listen, pay attention. But I can't teach you how it all feels. You have to learn to sort through it, and you'll have a sensation. And you have to learn through experience sometimes how the voice of God comes to you.
[00:21:14] Word of Knowledge is something that God has shown me. Sometimes. The problem is you don't always know when you're right.
[00:21:25] So you have to approach it tenderly, gently.
[00:21:29] So you're in the airport. There's a man sitting across the gateway there from you. And something inside of you says, that man is in serious trouble and needs help.
[00:21:43] Now, look, you don't stand up in the airport and start screaming, you're in trouble. God has revealed to me you're in trouble.
[00:21:51] That's how you wind up in jail.
[00:21:55] What you can do is go over and sit down beside that man and say, hey, friend, I don't want to.
[00:22:02] I don't want to just mess with your mind or anything. I was sitting over there, and I just felt like somehow the Lord said, why don't you go over and offer to pray with this guy.
[00:22:14] Is there anything I can pray with you about? I've had people who'd say they don't believe in God, who believe in prayer.
[00:22:22] I've had people who say that there is no God. And when I offer to pray for them, they'll let me go. Figure that, who are we praying to?
[00:22:33] But they're perfectly happy for me to pray. So you offer.
[00:22:37] You see if they nibble. If they say, get away from me, say, fine, no problem. Walk away. They are not rejecting the gift of the spirit. They're not rejecting you. They are rejecting the opportunity of God to minister to them. So you just say, great. Didn't mean to offend you.
[00:22:53] The thing is, you won't always know if you're right or wrong.
[00:22:57] So I had driven to a revival.
[00:23:01] In the old days, we had revivals. You preach all night, every night, and do a Bible study the next day. So Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday the everyday. So I would drive over and do the Bible study at this guy's church.
[00:23:14] So we were doing the morning Bible study at this church, a Methodist church. And just as I started to do the teaching, there was a lady there. And I said, ma', am, before we begin the teaching, I just felt like the Lord spoke into my heart that I should pray with you about your daughter. Would you like me to do that? She looked real funny, and she said, I don't have a daughter.
[00:23:35] Okay?
[00:23:36] That's the moment you let it go.
[00:23:41] I didn't.
[00:23:44] I said, try. You try to cover it with religiosity, and it's a mistake. It's a mistake. And I said, well, you know, maybe. Maybe it's some spiritual daughter or something, you know, but it was. It was stupid.
[00:23:56] And so I prayed with her. I did the teaching, and then I drove back to the house and I said. Told Allison about what happened. And I said, oh. I said, it was just so humiliating. And she said, now, Mark, you don't know the situation. Leave it with the Lord. When I went back for the night service, I got there early. The pastor was in the parking lot, and he said, Dr. Mark, you got to come over to the house right now. He said, guess who's in my house? And I said, who? He said, that lady that you called out this morning in the Bible study. She's in my house. I said, oh, no.
[00:24:26] I said, does she have a lawyer with her?
[00:24:29] He said, please come right now. I went in, and that lady said I had to come back. She said, I never been to this church before. When I was driving past, I saw the sign that said, revival evening service, morning Bible studies. And I came in to see if God could heal me.
[00:24:47] When you ask, let me pray with you about your daughter. And I said, I don't have a daughter. She said, I wasn't lying.
[00:24:53] I don't have a daughter.
[00:24:55] Because 10 years ago today, the reason I came here, I need healing. Ten years ago today, my teenage daughter, who was morbidly obese and unattractive and lonely, took her father's shotgun and blew her brains out.
[00:25:13] And she said, when you said, let me pray with you about your daughter, it so blew my mind that I just said, I don't have a daughter.
[00:25:24] Now, my dear friend, I need to tell you, you don't always know what's happening, but if you get all arrogant and presumptuous about it and self absorbed, then it'll go south fast.
[00:25:39] Offer the gift. Offer the gift. Don't hit people over the head with it.
[00:25:47] What is word of prophecy? What is a prophecy?
[00:25:52] I believe that much of the time when the pastor is preaching, it has about it a prophetic edge that there is. And we think of prophetic, you know, as Jeremiah throwing lightning bolts at everybody. But I'm not talking about that, particularly as the fact that it has that impact, that moment where you realize, pool, that hit me, that was truth.
[00:26:20] But it can be other things. It doesn't have to be telling the future.
[00:26:26] It means speaking the truth of God in a particular context.
[00:26:31] And therefore it doesn't always have to be from the pulpit. It can just be in a setting, a situation.
[00:26:39] I had a guy in one of my churches, he was limited intellectually, deeply limited intellectually, but I loved him and he would go with me different things. So I had a couple of friends of mine from the seminary, and we were going to hear this certain speaker. We'd heard about him and we were going to hear. And I took this guy with me and we went to hear this guy. It was the most confused, rambling, non biblical, absurd lecture you've ever heard in your life.
[00:27:09] You know, I was a seminary student. My seminary friends with me, we got in the car, we're talking about how that was challenging and why, you know, that was really stretched my mind.
[00:27:21] My friend spoke up and he said, that man is lost.
[00:27:28] And I said, you know, if I've ever heard a word of prophecy in my whole life, that was it. And I just started laughing and I said, boys, that man's lost.
[00:27:40] So what I'm trying to say to you is, it's that moment where God just speaks into the situation. Doesn't have to be extravagant.
[00:27:50] The word of wisdom is the same way. Wisdom is the application of knowledge.
[00:27:56] But the word of wisdom transcends any particular body of knowledge that you have.
[00:28:01] And it often is very human, very down to earth.
[00:28:06] You remember, this is a mature crowd. You remember Andy Griffith Show. I love that show. But there was always this moment where that goofy Barney Fife, remember that he'd be. He and Andy were trying to figure some kind of a thing out, you remember? And all of a sudden, Andy would say, barney, that's a great idea.
[00:28:27] And Barney would say it was.
[00:28:29] What did I say?
[00:28:31] I have found that word of wisdom often functions.
[00:28:37] Sounds a lot like that.
[00:28:39] That you're at a board meeting or trying to figure a certain thing out, or you're dealing with it, or in a counseling session. And then all of a sudden, somebody not, you know, you don't have to make it extravagant, but he says something and everybody else says, whoa, that is what we needed to hear. And that person, a lot of times can't think what he said, what.
[00:29:03] And that kind of lends to the authenticity of it.
[00:29:09] Now what happens? This is the tragedy.
[00:29:13] What happens is that we turn it into showmanship.
[00:29:19] We don't want to just move in the gifts of the spirit, in the lives that are in need around us.
[00:29:27] We want to make it about us. So you have this look. God gives you a word of prophecy to say in a Sunday morning worship service.
[00:29:36] Can I just say this?
[00:29:38] You don't have to change your voice.
[00:29:42] You could give it, like, in your own voice and all you see, don't add anything to it.
[00:29:48] You don't have to tidy it up. You don't have to make it sound more spiritual. Your voice doesn't have to quiver.
[00:29:57] You don't have to shake.
[00:29:59] You don't need to put any whipped cream on it. It's good enough.
[00:30:04] So you could say it like this.
[00:30:08] Excuse me, everybody.
[00:30:10] I'm neither a prophet nor the child of a prophet, but this morning it seemed to me that the Lord was saying, I should say this.
[00:30:20] And then you just say it. And then you sit down.
[00:30:24] If you're trying to make a show of it, it may be that there may be an actual authentic word that God wants said there. And nobody can hear it because you and your flesh are in the way.
[00:30:36] So we have to be gentle with the gifts, gentle with each other, move in graciously and gently and humbly with the gifts. Don't try to Lord, it Over people or make it showy.
[00:30:55] Now we come to the gifts of tongues.
[00:31:03] Let's just spend some time talking about diverse. Different kinds, plural, different kinds of tongues.
[00:31:13] I don't know why this one has come to be the one. We all want to choose up teams and play Red rover, over.
[00:31:21] This is. Why did this become the one that we're all going to get tribal marks and fight over different kinds of tongues. Let me give you some ways in which this. I think it might just as well be translated.
[00:31:37] Supernatural communication.
[00:31:40] So there is the impartation of tongues that you might receive at the baptism of the Holy Spirit. You speak in tongues at the time that you're baptized in the Holy Spirit.
[00:31:53] Even that. I'm not laying that on people. I know that it's important to some people and significant. There are places in the Bible where people receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit and they speak in tongues. There are other places where it doesn't say they didn't and it doesn't say they did.
[00:32:09] It is what's called a secondary doctrine, a derived doctrine. So say, for example, the virgin birth.
[00:32:20] That's a primary doctrine. You don't have to try to figure it out.
[00:32:25] It's pretty clearly stated. But the evidence of tongues is. That's a secondary doctrine. That's a derived doctrine. It's not primary because there's no place in the Bible that says it.
[00:32:36] It's kind of figured out from that. But that is a way that people speak in tongues when they receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. The first person I ever heard speak in tongues was me. I preached against it for seven years, but I'd never heard it, didn't believe it existed. When I started speaking in tongues, I thought I was having a nervous breakdown.
[00:32:57] I said, this is horrible. I can't even speak English.
[00:33:01] And then it dawned on me. This is tongues, the very thing I had preached against.
[00:33:06] So the first person I heard speak in tongues was me. That was the gift of tongues as an initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
[00:33:15] Let me just say one other thing about evidence. And it is this.
[00:33:19] For whom and to whom is it evidence?
[00:33:23] It is evidence to you.
[00:33:27] You don't have to show me evidence that you received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
[00:33:32] The gift of tongues to you is evidence. It says God saying, okay, I want you to believe this. So here you receive this. The evidence is for you. We've turned it into a Pentecostal green card. And you don't have to show me the evidence that You're a citizen of Pentecostal nation.
[00:33:49] It's not evidence for me. The evidence is for him who speaks in tongues.
[00:33:54] Now, there's another kind, and that is tongues with interpretation in a public setting of worship.
[00:34:02] And Paul is very clear about this. He says, that's supposed to be done decently. That's supposed to be done in order.
[00:34:11] A word in tongues with the interpretation.
[00:34:14] And that should only be two or three in any given service. And you should wait. If you don't have the interpretation, if nobody's there that can interpret, then don't do it. He says, you're not out of control.
[00:34:26] I was preaching at a Christian university one time in a revival service, what they call convocation or something. And the middle of my sermon, a boy in the balcony stood up and started speaking in tongues.
[00:34:37] I thought somebody on the platform would help.
[00:34:42] Nobody said anything. I had a microphone. So I said, sit down, son.
[00:34:47] You're out of order. He said, I have a word from the Lord. I said, no, you don't.
[00:34:53] He said, well, how do you know? I said, because I do. Why would he interrupt me to give you one?
[00:35:01] So he sat down. The next morning, when I came back for the morning service, the president of the university said, I don't know what you thought you were going to lecture on this morning, but I'll tell you what you are going to speak on. He said, you have turned this campus upside down over that thing last night. So he said, you're going to deal with it this morning.
[00:35:19] But I kind of wanted to say, you know, hey, I feel like you were an authority. You should have told him to sit down and be quiet.
[00:35:27] But it's supposed to be decently and in order. It's not supposed to this. We don't have to get all crazy about this now.
[00:35:38] Then there's another kind still, and that's praying in tongues.
[00:35:43] Paul speaks of that as being important in his own devotional life. He said, I pray with my mind. I pray in the Spirit.
[00:35:50] So praying in the Spirit, praying in tongues, that's in your own prayer closet. Praying in tongues, or Roberts used to suggest to people, and I think it's a very good suggestion, why don't you pray in tongues for a while and then switch to your native language? If it's English or Spanish or whatever it is, pray in tongues. Pray in your own language. Pray in tongues. Pray in your own language. He said, that way you may actually begin to sense where the Spirit is leading you to pray, that you may actually be able to follow the Spirit as he directs you.
[00:36:21] Then there is another kind of the gift of tongues. And that's the actual impartation of a language, of a specific earthly language that can take two forms.
[00:36:34] Actually technically three forms. One is what apparently happened in the upper room where people are speaking in tongues and people on the outside hear their language. Okay, how here we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born. A second way it can be given is the temporary gift of tongues. Where a gift of a language where you may not even know you're speaking a specific language, that you may temporarily speak that language and somebody else, it's for somebody else in the room, but you don't receive it, you to speak it.
[00:37:13] Then there is the third way, and it is the less common, and that is the impartation of a gift of a specific language. Where somebody receives a foreign language, they receive it, they speak in it, they understand it, it becomes a gift to them.
[00:37:31] And this is a real thing. I know someone who was given the gift of Spanish, given it in a worship service.
[00:37:37] They weren't praying for it. There was no interpreter. He just spoke Spanish. He can still speak Spanish. He can read Spanish. He can understand Spanish.
[00:37:46] Now somebody said to me, his Spanish is not perfect. If God gave him Spanish, why wouldn't his Spanish be perfect? Because I'll give you an example. Have you ever hear anybody give a word of prophecy in Sunday morning church and they have bad grammar?
[00:38:01] You're tempted to say God doesn't understand the English language.
[00:38:04] No, but the giver is perfect, the gift is perfect. The receivers are all broken.
[00:38:12] So God gives a limited intellect, a human being, the gift of a foreign language. Does it seem that it might be that the limitations of the receiver might make it less than perfect? The gift is perfect. The language is perfect. The receiver is not perfect.
[00:38:31] Then there is the interpretation of tongues.
[00:38:35] And this is one that I staggered with in the early days of my experience in Pentecost, because I understood interpretation of tongues to mean translation.
[00:38:49] So when I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I've talked about this probably too much. I was a Methodist preacher. I had no experience in it. I never heard anybody speak in tongues.
[00:38:57] I prayed in tongues. When I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I spoke in tongues. Then as an evidence to me, I needed that to convince my over educated brain that something had actually happened. But I had never heard it in public.
[00:39:11] Soon after that, I got invited to preach at a Congregational holiness church in South Georgia. I had never been to a Pentecostal church in my Life.
[00:39:23] I got invited to preach. As I drove down there, it came in my mind as clear as, you can hear my voice now. Tonight, someone is going to give a word. He's going to give a declaration in tongues, going to speak in tongues. And I want you to give the interpretation.
[00:39:39] And I said, no, I would like to hear it once. Could I just hear it once?
[00:39:48] And we argued. God and I argued all the way down there. And I was in such a sweat by the time I preached it. Nothing happened. The whole service I preached, I couldn't concentrate on my sermon, worrying about this thing happening. I got all finished. The pastor thanked me, and I was thinking, oh, I'm out. I've dodged it.
[00:40:11] And the pastor said, let's stand for the closing prayer. And. And little fat man stepped right out in the center aisle and raised his hand up. And I said, oh, God, stop him. Stop him.
[00:40:24] And he raised his hand up, and he began to speak in tongues. The only other person besides me I'd ever heard.
[00:40:31] I never heard it in public. And he spoke. It sounded to me like he spoke for five hours, it probably wasn't 20 seconds. But he just went on. And I'm thinking, I.
[00:40:42] Listening. I'm not getting a word of this, because I thought it was supposed to be, you know, buongiorno, good morning. You know, I thought. I thought I was supposed to get it. Do you understand?
[00:40:54] Because I was thinking, translation, nothing. He got completely finished. And I said, lord, I. You just didn't give it to me. I'm sorry, I can't do what you didn't hand me.
[00:41:08] So somebody else can interpret that little congregational holiness preacher. God bless his heart. He said, we believe wherever there's a message in tongues, there's interpretation. He said, we'll just wait.
[00:41:23] We waited.
[00:41:25] We waited. I realized we're going to be there all night because of one disobedient Methodist in a hole in his church. Church.
[00:41:35] And I said, lord, I'm trying to do this. Help me.
[00:41:40] And it just came into my mind.
[00:41:43] Lord God almighty, Lord of heaven and earth, we worship and adore you. That's all I heard.
[00:41:51] So I said, okay, I've never seen this before, and I'm probably doing this wrong.
[00:41:59] But when he was speaking in tongues, it came into me.
[00:42:03] O Lord God Almighty, Lord of heaven and earth, we bless your holy name.
[00:42:10] When I said that, the next came and the next and the next.
[00:42:15] It was very quiet.
[00:42:17] Pastor stood up and he said, thank you, Brother Rutland. So let's have our closing prayer. We left.
[00:42:23] We drove along in the car was quiet. And I said, pastor, I. I did that wrong tonight, didn't I? I've never seen it before. He said, no, it's not. That was wrong.
[00:42:33] He said, I'd never seen it like that before. I said, what was it? He said, when that man was speaking in tongues, you gave the interpretation, but it wasn't to us.
[00:42:44] He said, my whole life in Pentecost, anytime anybody gave the interpretation of tongues, it was a message to us.
[00:42:52] That was all to God.
[00:42:55] And I said, you know, Pastor, the problem here is I never grew up in a Pentecostal church. I didn't know that.
[00:43:02] I didn't have anything to go on except scripture.
[00:43:05] I said, in the Bible it says, he who speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh unto God.
[00:43:16] So I said, if he was speaking to God, it seemed to me like the interpretation would be to God.
[00:43:26] That was my first encounter with it nearly.
[00:43:29] Nearly 45 years ago.
[00:43:32] Here's what I've come to believe. You can take this for whatever it's worth.
[00:43:36] I think sometimes people speak in tongues in an open worship service, and the power of God energizes someone else in the room, and they jump the queue and they give a word of prophecy.
[00:43:48] A word of prophecy is to the people of God.
[00:43:52] When a man prays in tongues, he prays to God. And I think many times the interpretation gets skipped.
[00:44:01] What happens is you have someone who speaks in tongues and a word of prophecy because somebody gets excited and they give the word of prophecy. But it may or may not, may or may not be the interpretation of that, because the Bible says when a man speaks in an unknown tongue, he speaks unto God.
[00:44:20] So just think about it.
[00:44:21] But however, all of be all that as it may, what I'm saying to you tonight is that the gifts of the spirit are not weird. They're not wonky.
[00:44:32] They don't have to make you act crazy or sound goofy. You don't have to tidy it up.
[00:44:38] They're to be like every other thing in the Christian experience, done with humility and with grace and in the light of our own humanity.
[00:44:48] If it goes wrong, let me just suggest to you why it went wrong.
[00:44:54] You, not God.
[00:44:57] But that doesn't invalidate your place in the universe.
[00:45:01] That just means that you're as human as the rest of us.
[00:45:06] Now, next week, what I want to talk about is how do these gifts work in your office?
[00:45:14] What about in a meeting in your family? How did the gifts of the spirit function outside church?
[00:45:23] What happens? Why are they useful to A believer, a carpenter who goes to work and he's with a bunch of other carpenters. What could the gifts of the Spirit do in that?
[00:45:35] The power of the Holy Spirit, the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit can certainly God can do whatever he wants to do. God is God.
[00:45:43] God is God.
[00:45:45] But it has been my experience personally and my studied observation scripturally that God witnesses, manifests himself supernaturally, purposefully in the body of Christ.
[00:46:04] I am not, I am not attracted to. And in fact, I distance myself from random phenomenology.
[00:46:17] You know, a statue in some Catholic church that bleeds, bleeds blood out of its eyes.
[00:46:26] I just, it just, I just stay back from that kind of thing, that kind of phenomenon. What is, what's the randomness of that? What's that?
[00:46:36] What I believe is what God wants to do is to manifest himself in reality in the body of Christ and through us to each other in gentleness and grace and humility.
[00:46:49] I don't want to chase around after somebody that sees the.
[00:46:56] I went to a church in Florida and they wanted me to go in this one room where they thought the face of Jesus was in one of the light bulbs.
[00:47:05] And they said, would you come and just see? We'll turn the light on. You can see the face of Jesus in the light bulb. I said, no.
[00:47:11] They said, don't you want to see it? I said, no, no, I don't. You know, I'm trying to get Jesus in me, not in the light bulbs.
[00:47:22] I'm struggling with this.
[00:47:24] How would that help me?
[00:47:29] How would it help, like, anybody?
[00:47:33] And I just want to say that sometimes our interest in the things of the spirit, God is a supernatural God. And look, if God's trying to water the garden, I don't want to be the guy with my foot on the hose.
[00:47:48] But I'm just saying I don't want to chase around seeking weird stuff.
[00:47:53] I just want to. I just want to seek Jesus.
[00:47:58] I want to do it in the power of the Holy Spirit. And I want the power of the Holy Spirit to witness and manifest himself through me in the kind of giftedness that might heal a lonely used up woman by a well who've been through five disastrous marriages and is now living in adultery.
[00:48:21] That's the gifts that I want.
[00:48:24] Let me pray.
[00:48:26] Heavenly Father, I thank you for these precious people. I thank you that they have come in their numbers, Lord, in the face of all of this virus and stuff. And they're here in the night to seek you and to seek a word from you, make it real. In their spirits, O Lord, return to them over and over and over again the sacrifice and their risk of their being here. Tonight.
[00:48:53] I pray health, I pray blessing, and I pray protection.
[00:48:59] In the beautiful name Jesus, the strong son of God.
[00:49:05] Amen. Amen and amen. God bless you and good night, everybody.
[00:49:16] You've been listening to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Be sure to 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.
