Gifts of Controversy: Cessationism vs. Continuationism

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Cynthia Ardish.

And together we're discussing Kerasmania, the history and impact of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements on Christianity. Cynthia, it's good to have you back and this particular subject that we're on today. I have wanted to do this for so long with so many, so many different people, but I've been actually waiting for the right person, somebody who could do it in a balanced and kind way, because as you know about this subject when we get into it, people are just angry, if you're on, they're so polarized, if you're on one side or the other, they get

angry at you. And my personality can't do this, right? I'm not a person who gets angry at things that people can be persuaded one way or another. I have a set of beliefs and often I keep it to myself, but on this particular subject, I came out of a movement where the vast majority were accepting of what we're going to talk about, and I was raised this way, I was raised this way for 37 years.

And after I left, I'm not a person who changes their mind on a whim. I have to research, I have to study it, and even after I feel like I've come to a conclusion, I have to sit on it a while because I have to make sure that I didn't miss something.

And so there are many subjects that I just, I'm in the process of re-evaluating. I'll say it like that. And so I've wanted to get somebody on here to talk about the gifts, because as you know, that's the backbone of what I came from, right?

But there's so many people that are polarized, and I wanted to do it in such a way where I could be open and honest with whoever it is that I'm doing this with and say, I came from a movement where gifts were the thing.

If you did not accept the gifts, then you were cast out. Man, you had accepted a demon from hell. And I'm just going to openly say for the sake of this podcast, I'm just going to ask you to persuade me in whatever is Europe.

and we briefly talked about your opinion. And I'm just going to ask some questions, but I'm also going to share some of my feelings as I have evaluated this over the course of, I left January 1st, 2012, was when I left the call.

So I have evaluated this, and I'm still forming what is my opinion, and that may come, I'm in no hurry, it may be years from now. But let's talk about the gifts, and I'm going to ask you some questions.

I just want to say I'm glad to be here, especially for this conversation. It's uncanny. What you just said, you described a lot of my journey as well. As you know, as musicians, real musicians, you know, those people that really do music as a lifestyle, even if it's a hobby, it's part of our life, it's all about seeking skills and seeking, you know, learning, that's what I love about it.

It's an active learning lifestyle. And so as a Christian, I like to think of my faith as faith-seeking understanding, as an ongoing, you know, it's part of who I am. And so in my life as a musician, my faith is the same way.

I'm always seeking better understanding, and especially if I make mistakes or if I miss something, you know, I want to learn how to correct that, and go on the right path. So it's wisdom-seeking.

And I'm just grateful to have a partner here to chat about this, because I think we really have similar experiences we can share. Exactly. And we had a brief conversation. I don't want to rehash the whole conversation that we had before this.

We'll get into it again. But you brought up a point that I want to stress early on, because it is significant. Whenever people talk about, when the battle begins between the cessationists and those who are not, immediately, if you're of the mindset where the spiritual gifts are still in place, you always focus on a select few of those gifts.

You never mention the majority of them, right? Right. And there are so many more than the ones that they argue about. And that was one of the things that really hit me like a brick wall.

After I left and I began just, I took a step back and I started evaluating all of it. And I started thinking about gifts like wisdom and mercy. They never mentioned those two. Right, yeah.

But the people, when I would watch the debates and I would watch the people get heated, they would get angry at each other. They're actually displaying the opposite of the gifts when they do this.

Right, ironic. Yeah. Yeah. It's very inconsistent with what the text, what the Holy Scriptures explain. And one of the starting points that helped me years ago, because I'm a curious... person. I would always ask, I knew what the scripture said, and then I would watch these debates or be in a room where people were discussing it. And I would ask myself, first of all, no one has brought up the question, what are the gifts for? You know, two questions actually. What are they?

Let's list them out. You like a laundry list. And then what are they for? Because I, because I was always reading the scriptures, I noticed a couple of important things, starting points, I think.

Number one, in Corinthians, the gifts are for the Corinthian church, an organized church. They're not like a public announcement. Any Christian believer can just, you know, believe whatever and get these gifts. No, it's in the context of a defined church, according to the scriptures. And then the other thing, they are distributed, it says, according to the holy spirit sees fit. So this harkens back to the design of the church, which of course brings us to the other question, what are they for? Well, we need the gift of wisdom because we need wise decisions in the congregation, in the context of the congregation, in the care for the poor and the sick,

and those in need, the gifts are for the nourishment of the church in daily life. And those things get mixed, they get missed, I think, when people start first off, they're angry. That's not okay because we're not supposed to be gripping over who has what, because it makes some Christians feel like they don't have all of Christ. And there's so much sin going on in that argument, I think, when they debate. Yeah, absolutely. And there's also, so wisdom is one of the gifts, right? People should critically think, but we've been trained by numerous scoundrels that

critical thinking is devilish. And you've got an evil spirit, if you think, but you have to critically think in order to have the gift of wisdom. So those who have the gift, and I'm not saying that I do, but those who do have a gift of wisdom, they critically think. And so they would be chastised by these same people in many ways. Well, don't they call us these pejoratives? They call us religion. What is it? Religious? The spirit of religiosity? Because discernment is connected to wisdom, critical thinking, right? Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. So just knowing how,

see, over years as a Christian, I've learned what these gifts mean. And knowledge, knowledge is not helpful if it's just knowledge. You have to know how to use the knowledge. Don't we know that in our in our techno culture where we have all this knowledge but how much wisdom do we have not so much it seems right yeah and there's two big problems one of which well I'll go to the other and first one of the problems these movements not only do they avoid certain gifts but they also tell you incorrectly what the actual gifts are so in in the

laterane movement discernment was being able to walk up to a person and and suddenly quote unquote discern what was their address and their name as they were in a prayer line which is a parlor trick I mean it is nothing more than a parlor trick right and actual discernment as you said as being able to discern between good and evil the spirit it's literally it's under it's having the wisdom to understand and perceive what is happening that is the gift of discernment and it's broader than that obviously but at its core element it's just understanding and being able to discern is this right or is this wrong is this good as this evil and that's a gift but it's not one

talked about the other the other real problem which you alluded to but I'm going to expand on it just a bit because our last episode I don't know if you've seen it but it's highly I did highly successful we're getting a lot of good feedback I yeah it's really good so the ones who are critical of what we said we're talking about specifically one part of it we're talking about how you can go verse by verse and change the context right right you probably saw some of those some of those comments I'm going to expand on that a bit because it ties directly into what you just said whenever these guys do

this and they're telling you I'm in the context of scripture and they're packing their own context in it what what they do for example the letters to the Corinthian letter so the right into the Corinthian church well these guys go verse by verse by verse and what they try to do is take it out of the context of being written to that church right they forget who the letters to exactly and I had can I just interject this because this is funny but it's true okay when we Christians today are reading the letter to the

Corinthians or the Romans or whoever we're reading someone else's mail that's exactly what I was just about to say I had a I had a dinner with I had a lunch with a minister shortly a few years after I'd left to call it and I sat down and and I had that as a problem I understood that Paul was writing a letter to a place and I was trying to explain to him I have trouble fitting into a lot of churches that I've tried out because it's like they're taking this letter that has no application whatsoever

to a single word they said in the sermon. And they're trying to bastardize it to make it fit. And he said, he looked at me thoughtfully, he said, yeah, John, why I tried to when I preached the sermons, I try to say, well, we're about to read somebody else's mail, but it's good mail.

Yeah, exactly. And that's where we see the categories, I think, I remember in theology classes. So we're reading this epistle. And it is to the Corinthian church and part of the understanding is who wrote it, why did they write it, who are they writing to, who's the audience, right?

Which, by the way, are the same techniques we use to read any literature, right? So we start there and then very carefully later, the skill comes in when we apply it to our situation today.

So there's a difference between knowing what the scripture says and the application to our two Christians today. And one thing I have to say, I've had some friends over the years who are charismatic and I've been to some charismatic churches.

And when I started really digging deeper in the scripture, I noticed right away in the New Testament that all of those, you know, texts in the New Testament are written to churches. They're not written to what I call, or what people call, long-ranger Christians who are just out there doing the Christian thing and they're not attached to an organized church, a confessional Christian church that identifies as, you know, members of, right, of a church.

And I thought, well, anybody can walk in the door and just say anything. How is the church protected from that kind of, those false teachers? And that's what we have today. We have, every time we turn around, it's some new person showing up with a YouTube channel saying, I'm a prophet or I'm a whatever.

Well, we live in a country where we can do that right now. And now we have to really discern. And I tell all the new Christians, like if you're wondering how to discern who's true, who's false, you need to find out, are they attached to a true church as specified in scripture, not a church that they took out the business license for?

Because anybody can get a nonprofit and make up a religion, right? And that right there can get you, you know, a lot of information right away. Who is this person? What are they attached to?

Yeah. So yeah, we're reading someone else's mail. And can I also say, here's a news flash or a PSA, all of the two, two malt that we see in the Christian church globally today.

We are basically in, the epistle to the Corinthians. Everything that's addressed in Corinthians is so applicable to us, especially the part about the super apostles. Remember that where you've got Fred or Larry super apostles saying, I'm, you know, and Paul is going, look, and I love Paul because he just admits, I'm not impressive, you know?

We don't know how he spoke, but some people make a joke and they think, you know, he's probably like a Danny Vito kind of character where he's not very impressive. He's sort of a short, with a unibrow, Jewish rabbi, doesn't have a lot of branding power, you know?

Not a very eloquent speaker at all. And we, of course, are attracted to the loud, shiny slick celebrity pastor kind of presentation out there. Yeah. And from a historical standpoint. So I've got all of these complexities that I'm just, like I said at the beginning, I'm going to open up where I am with my research with you and just let you convince me, persuade me, right?

So I study parham. Parham is the father of the Pentecostal movement according to several sources. And if you study it, there's a strong division among some Pentecostals as to whether it was parham or sea more.

And you see why after you realized the scoundrel that parham was. But speaking in tongues, parham basically stole from Frank Sanford. Apparently, Frank Sanford's Shiloh commune had it before Chosvox Parham. However, parham starts a, he tries to replicate the cult compound at Shiloh and compound at Dauy's Zion City, Illinois.

Starts his own commune. And initially, it was writing in tongues. I don't know if you've seen this or not, but. I heard about it. It's like an automatic, a lot of this is a cultic.

Yeah. So the writing in tongues, just like the speaking in tongues, which is, now I'm going to get this wrong, but I think we call it Glossy Glossalelia. It's a phenomenon that we see in pagan religions.

I don't know if your audience knows about that. But the speaking in tongues exists in pagan religions as well. Yeah. And yeah. Exactly where I was heading with this. Only slightly different. So I'm an IT.

I work with several different cultures and I've worked with several people, Asian, Indian people who have a vast number of different religions. And everything that the Pentecostal charismatic world claims as a gift, a quote unquote gift that can only come from the Christian God, where you can see it in these other religions.

And I have seen people who, you know, they're in religions that have this stuff. But if you go back to params writing in tongues, I've actually got a copy of it on my website if you go to my chargebox bar and page.

It is chicken scratch and it looks like it looks like they chicken scratched around a tic-tac toe game and they said this is Chinese and so they sent missionaries into China and said we're going to have the ability to speak this language by the time we get there because now we can write it.

Well, I have Chinese friends too and I've had them look at it. This is not Chinese and the initial from its inception, it was claimed to be that this was going to bring forth the end of time revival.

Params group was going to do it. The speaking in tongues would give them the ability as messengers to go to other countries, spread the gospel in the native tongue of whatever country they went to and it failed miserably.

They had to come back because they couldn't do it. Nobody could understand them. After it failed, the whole religion erased that history and they tried to shift it to we're going to speak gibberish and we're going to have an interpreter and I'm using that where I realize that's an offensive word but realize and recognize I came from this background.

So when I say it, it's me evaluating some of the things that I believed and some of the things I'm still evaluating. I know from the other religions, from the other people that I have friends who I openly talk to people just like I am with you and they can do similar things in their religion and I would not say that the Christian God gave my Hindu friend the ability to interpret my, I don't know, Buddhist or whatever other friends language that they're doing the gloss that's not the Christian God.

Yeah, and you know, you're making me think of quite a few things like in my experience. So I think one of your posters that I read wasn't happy with what I said about Lonnie Frisbee because he said I had no proof and I just want to say this, I have experience.

I was in the room and saw things. I have a testimony maybe, that's my testimony. No, I don't have proof because I didn't have a cell phone back then to videotape and I certainly didn't understand that what occultic practices Lonnie was doing at the time were really what they were because we were at a Christian worship service.

So I would encourage your viewers to consider this. In my career as a harpist, an independent musician, I have played, and not kidding, I had to sit down and count, over 2,000 in the last 35 years, 2,000 individual contracts for religious groups of whatever I've played for Mormons, I've played for Wicca people. That's White Witchcraft people. I know that scares my Christian friends. I know because I was there and saw what they do and because I'm a curious person and I love the Lord because he had to be protecting me back in the day when I had no idea what I was doing. But what I

witnessed was, for example, Mormonism. I played for many years in the Mormon, not as an employee of the Mormon Church. I would be hired by a family to do their wedding or their ceremony of whatever. So it was a one-time thing.

And what I noticed was, I started studying a little bit about Mormonism because the claim was their additional books to the Bible were divinely given by this angel. I call them moron, but it's Moroni.

And the claim was there was this language, this mystical language that the angel gave, you know, Joseph Smith. And it looked like Egyptian. I mean, it was like hieroglyphic kind of stuff. And back in the day when I was first learning about apologetics, there were actually some apologists that were deciphering those documents. And they found out they were not angelic.

They were actually parchments that Joseph Smith either acquired or bought from a traveling salesman that were an old bit of what Egyptian death, an Egyptian death prayer, or something from that Egyptian religion. And there was a lot of panhandlers back in the day that sold curiosities from the back of a wagon, you know, in the new pioneer, you know, America. A lot of commercialism going on, right? So he just basically got this old piece of Egyptian writing and claimed that it was divine. And to the community he was built at the time, they didn't know anything else, so they believed it, right?

So we see a lot of the pagan religions. And I can say this also as a musician, you know, the modern day prayer songs I have a problem with because they're designed very similarly to pagan worship music. And I'm not even talking about lyrics, I'm talking about the ostinato patterns of chords in the rhythmic, strong rhythmic impressions that are basically like tribal drumming.

And the reason the Christian church doesn't have tribal drumming in their work or shouldn't have is because the tribal drumming is designed in pagan religions to summon the gods, the god of war or like in Hawaii, the god Pelle, this is why I freaked out when Rick Warren had a Hawaiian worship service. Using beautiful Hawaiian music that we all love if we go to a Hawaiian restaurant or we go to Hawaii, right? We we look at that culture, but that music and that expression is pagan, directed at the God of the volcano, Pele, the fire god. And what do American Christians do?

We make it part of our worship service over at Saddleback. And so we see this happening all the time in innocent ways. I mean, I don't think Rick Warren thought, ah, let's do pagan worship and put a Christian label on it. I don't think that's the way it happened.

I think it was an appeasement to include everyone to come to the church, you know, all inclusive. We're on the other hand, in the Mormon religion, they decided to deceive, you know, Joseph Smith used that parchment to back up his bogus claim that he received in angelic language. And so the stuff that we see with par him and all of that is very much in the playbook of Huckster religious fraudsters.

Yes. You know, right out of, I always think of those, I think of that movie, where, oh gosh, what's the name of it, the Wizard of Oz. And the old movie Wizard of Oz, remember the Huckster who is, who meets Dorothy and he's got his wagon.

And he's basically a snake oil salesman. He's an entertainer. And he's going from town to town. And that's what they did back in the new America, you know, the westward expansion, you know, going across the prairie and stuff.

So you had people like that. And boy, you know, the Wizard, you know, you look behind the curtain, it's the same guy who was selling the fraud, you know, the snake oil to the people, right?

And so that's where I think a lot of this comes from in America. We have these religious salesmen that realize they can get money from saying anything pretty much. So the last thing that'll bring up before we, we've actually not even got into it.

The last thing I'll bring up before we get into it is my thoughts on the time that we live in now versus the time when those letters were written. And apply that to the thought that God is not illogical.

That's one of the things that, one of the concepts that I had to accept when I left the movement, God's not an idiot. But when you're in the movement, you have to dumb God down and make him a complete imbecile, right?

So in the time in which those letters were written, the vast majority of people could not read. More people could not write, but interestingly, I've learned there are people who could write, but not read.

And so that's why there's some weirdness in the translations. It's a weird history, if you study it. But most of the people could not... right. Worse than that, there weren't a lot of translators. So if the gospel were to spread quickly and God had the power to do the speaking in tongues, then he sends out missionaries and then they can speak in new tongues and it makes logical sense, right? There's a need, God provides the need.

In today's world, we don't need this. I mean, especially today, you've got a Google Translator right there on your phone. Back during params time, you could get translators. It was not, it was not as uncommon to get a translator when param was alive as it was back then. So logically speaking, God was crippled if you take that belief set according to the thought trail that I was heading down when I started researching this. And so then the thought hit me and this is where I kind of diverted and that's where I'm going to start asking you the questions. What should,

what do you believe? I got to the point where I realized that the gifts as they exist in the Bible were for a specific purpose in those letters and those letters were written to a specific people. However, in today's world, we read those letters as examples of what we should do and what God can do and what God will do. So when you apply it like this, there is the door opens for a need in which God could fulfill through one of these gifts, one of these spiritual gifts that's listed, including the prophecy, the tongue, et cetera. In today's world, there could be a situation where

there is a need. However, I can assure you that the nonsense that I came out of, many of them, many of the examples that I had, there was no need and God would have to be a complete imbecile.

And more than that, God would have to have been powerless to have needed those people to do the things in which they claim that they did. So I began to separate, okay, here's the fiction and I'm just going to put that over on this side. Here are the facts. This is what I know about the letters.

This is what I know about the gifts. This is what I understand about the God. And then I started diving into today's world and I started to think, where does that leave us? And that's where I'm going to open the conversation with you. Well, this is a big topic. So let's get at it.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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So I just like to say to the audience and yourself, there's no way that this video is going to cover all the things efficiently. But what I hope to do in my sharing is to give guide posts so people can...

The best resource any Christian can do from this conversation is to go to the scriptures and read it for themselves. And to also read correctly. And so what I mean by that, first Corinthians, you want to read first Corinthians all the way through.

You want to ignore the chapter in verse divisions. Just ignore them because they weren't there at the beginning. And in the early church, like you said, John, most people couldn't read or write. And we certainly didn't have Bibles distributed.

Nobody could afford books. Their parchedments were so expensive for a scribe to copy. We didn't have a Christian bookstore. So what we had in the early church was the leader of that church, the pastor, would proclaim like the letter to Corinthians.

He would either already have memorized it and or would read a parchment from it. Now I happen to know because you can figure this out and this is sort of a techie thing. But in the textual criticism science, we know we have over...

I think it's 57,000 copies of the Bible. And so we have such a wealth of copies. That's how we know it's reliable. And that's another topic. Somebody would say, well, copies aren't reliable.

We'll deal with that later. But I'm saying what we stand on when we open our Bible that we bought from online or whatever. We know we can rely on the Holy Scriptures because they have been examined over the years by textual critics and scholars and all of that.

That's how we know one thing from another thing. But read Corinthians all the way through like it's a letter that it is. So don't start in the middle. Don't start where the gifts are.

You need to know that by the time we get to chapter 12, we've had 11 chapters that the writer of Corinthians, in this case Paul, you know, he wrote important things there. So that's important to catch that because when we're doing application, we cannot, we should not dismiss the text that came before.

the text that we want to get into and starting there is important, you know, with what is written and then learn what it means by what it says. It's like any book. If I were to go get a book out of the library and I want to read what it says, I don't just pick out a verse and say, I'm going to think everything that I can outside of this book and pack it into that sentence. That's not how you'd read a book.

And if you did, you would never know what the book was that you even read was about. So I get all that. So in these movements, one of the things that, you know, from the Pentecostal movement's history, there was a point in time in which they specifically emphasized the tongues out of the gifts.

And I think it would probably be good because I guarantee you a lot of our listeners have no idea what the gifts are. Let's just talk through some of the gifts because there was a point in time in which the Pentecostal movement said, this one single gift, if you have it, you have the Holy Spirit.

And if you don't, you don't have the Holy Spirit. And that was one of the things I was like, you know, I don't know what the count is. There's like 15 different gifts. Why the one? Why did they pick the one?

And then when I realized that parham was the scoundrel and he was doing these weird things, I began to understand that that was his gimmick. So he chose the one and that was the gimmick, right?

Right. And that's the right word. gimmick, in fact, I have in my notes here, remember this term because it means something in church history. The term is called enthusiasm. So in church history, way before parham, in fact, I guess you could even go to Old Testament.

See the church has been around since the Garden of Eden. And it's never been broken. You know, so this claim that we have to restore the church, that's bogus because it's never been broken.

Even though we've been down to the nubs, I think we were down to one or two people, a little baby hiding under a shield during David's time. But enthusiasts in Christian history are those folks for whatever reason are anti-intellectual.

And that sounds cruel, doesn't it? No, they just don't want to get involved with thinking critically about anything, okay? And that's just a human thing that happens. They want to feel, they're going to lead with their feelings.

So this gimmick that we've seen in all of church history has always included the exaggeration of the gift of tongues, because think about it. Somebody could say gibberish or they could even use their own language if they're, let's say they're Italian and they're in England or whatever.

You know, they could use an unknown language to assert a claim of some sort. And we see that in history. And then the other excitations or enthusiasts are... These activities are all separated from scripture, and that's why during the Protestant Reformation, we had the Protestant means to protest, and we Christian believers who disagreed with Rome, the papacy, the papacy was always about feelings.

And they would say, we are the magisterium, we're the only ones that can interpret the scripture. So they made the church be the biggest priority in Christendom, not the word of God, because their claim was only the intelligentsia and the papacy can interpret, because you little shepherds and farmers, you're not educated, you don't know.

We are the special envoys of God. And so they're corruption historically, and I can say this, I know people are gonna freak out, hey, do a little history, so you know I'm not just making this up.

You have the corruption of the Roman church that basically turned into Christian nationalism back in the day, that's why I'm concerned about today. It's like, we did that already, it didn't work out. But all that to say, we now have special representatives of God claiming, do this, do that, whatever.

How could any common person know? What could they consult? If they even had a thought about, is that okay? Should we be doing that? No, they would suffer under the tyranny of the church that would say things like this.

If you had a son or daughter that committed suicide, that son or daughter was not allowed to be buried in the cemetery, which was always connected to the church. And that meant their soul was damned for eternity.

What a heartbreaking thing. And this is one of the things Martin Luther didn't like because the church was proclaiming your son or daughter if they committed suicide, they were damned because of the act of suicide.

And of course, we don't see that in scripture. And so we now see the historical Roman church imposing all these additives, unscriptural additives that basically bottomed out in the community because people couldn't even buy bread or they were being bled to death by these hucksters that went around selling salvation, we call the indulgences, where Tetzl would come into town and say, if you want Uncle Fred to get out of purgatory, give the Roman church some money and we'll get him out.

But we can't totally get him out. And it was always this give to get scheme, you see. So that scheme has been in the church since his existence. That's just the corruption of sinful man.

And it's very sad. But the word enthusiasm means Christians who... who, for whatever reason, are embracing all these excitations, whether they are responding to an end of the world, scare tactic, because that's what they did back in Rome.

They didn't have electricity, but they could paint these big banners of flames, and they would come into town and do this passion play and scare people and say, oh, you're gonna burn in the flames for all eternity if you don't buy this indulgence to save your soul, kind of thing, right?

So we see the same thing today, all through church history, and I just want everyone to notice those patterns, and compare them with Holy Scripture, the Protestant Reformation was important because luckily, someone got their hands on a written Bible and read it, and noticed the Bible had different content than what was being pushed, you know, advertised back in the church.

Absolutely. You know, whenever you separate that type of atmosphere with what was being created in the early 1900s in America, again, they focused on tongues, and ignored the rest of them. And if you compare that to what was being, you know, what they were escaping from the Protestant Reformation, gifts like service, for example.

Right, gifts of service. Gifts of service, that's a gift, and you never hear one of these Pentecostal Charismatics say, I would like to come mo, mo your lawn because I have to give you service.

Right. You feel bad, can I cook you supper? You know, the gift of giving, how many times have we been in need, and some rich person who's in the Pentecostal Charismatic movement, how many of those people have you ever seen that had the gift of giving to you?

Yeah. You don't find it, right? I love the gift of mercy. I did a study years ago on mercy, because mercy is kind of an antique word. We don't really use it in daily life.

And we're Americans. We're not under a sovereign king. So dang it, we're a American. We're gonna vote for our leader, right? And I got news for Christian Americans, you know what, the God of the Bible is a king.

He is not a president. You don't get to vote for him. He is who he is. You know, he is sovereign. And so the gift of mercy, think about mercy. Mercy is granting compassion towards someone who does not deserve it.

Wow, think about that. And that's daily life. That's in daily church life. So the whole conversation about the gifts in Corinthians is about the nourishment and the daily pedestrian life of the church. Pedestrian means not very shiny and exciting, not very loud.

You know, we are washing our clothes. We are. are feeding our children, we are helping the poor, we are enduring a neighbor that might be annoying, we're enduring a corrupt government that might be interfering with our safety and well-being.

All of those pedestrian daily things that are human life in society, right? And so the gift of mercy has always been very important to me, because in Southern California, I live in Los Angeles County, we have a very brutal culture here, very brutal, very rude.

I have to apologize to my friends who visit from other places, go look, traffic, the traffic's terrible. And everybody in Caleson Southern California, they act like they know everything and they don't, and they never talk to their neighbors.

I don't know if you've heard this, but it is true, all the rumors are true. And you go to the grocery store, or you go to Starbucks to order a coffee, and you don't really get the server to look at you.

You're just a number, you're going to buy your things and you're out of there. And my first visit to Ireland, back in the day when I was studying the Irish harp, it was scary, because I went to the market to get milk or bread.

And the lady who was checking me out, she goes, oh, how are you doing? And she meant it. And it was like, oh, she was so friendly, and so humane, so neighborly. And that gave me some thoughts, yeah.

And I think that's the point that I'm driving at with this podcast is I'm letting you lead it, but I'm trying to drive at where I, I'm not going to say where I ended up, where I am now.

So take Los Angeles, take the atmosphere that you're talking about. And if God were to come down and bless the whole city with the gift of service, the gift of giving and the gift of mercy and the gift of wisdom, think of how that would change California.

Versus, versus, so the charismatic movement exploded on the West Coast. Pentecostalism exploded on the West Coast. And they focused on one single gift, just one. They had other ones, you know, they were minor gifts, but the tongues, that was by and large, that was the biggest thing.

Then when it got into Kira's, Kira's Mania, there was, they added a few more. I, you know, I understand that, that history. But what I'm trying to say is, what if instead of just focusing on one or two of the gifts, what if they did them all and started imparting these gifts and everybody in California suddenly kind?

And we have quite the opposite. I've been to California, I know exactly what you're talking about. You know, you know that, yeah. John, we would call that, that idea. You just put out, what is my teacher call it?

An over-realized eschatology. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because, again, in the scriptures, and this is why this conversation is important. The whole conversation and argument about gifts and eschatology is not a little thing, okay?

Because eschatology, a person's idea of this life and the ultimate ending of this life and the transition into the life to come, that ideology matters and it will be a lens on their understanding of the whole Bible.

So take Chuck Smith, for example, okay? He had a dispensational grid, you might say, in his head from his previous involvement with the four square and all of that. So when he comes and creates Calvary Chapel, which is a lot more homogenized, I use that word homogenized.

Because it's not a flaming charismatic crazy place. It's actually a very attractive, friendly, and I have to say, back in the day, Calvary Chapel in its bookstore was a very attractive community feature in the fifth, Southern California is the fifth largest economy on earth.

So we have all of this business, in fact the full gospel business men's headquarters was down the street from Calvary Chapel, as I applied for a job there back in the day. So we had all of this pressure to grow, grow, grow, you know, commerce, grow, you know, all of that and you cannot separate what happened here, secularly, like the oil rigs we found oil here and we had a lot of oil companies come here and communities built up because of that discovery.

And so in the culture, that helped cooperate and shape with what Calvary Chapel did. And Chuck Smith brought his own personal ideas about eschatology. And we know that because he wrote that silly book, you know, I was surprised when that book came out because he seemed to me like a very sensible, like I said before, some sort of history teacher kind of character, down to earth, not crazy, not exaggerating, right?

But you can't, none of us can escape who we are as people and how we think. And so I've always thought the charismatic folks, especially the ones I've run into here because I went to a church of the Nazarene for a couple of years before I knew anything.

They didn't come out and say, don't think critically or don't read your Bible. You just never heard the Bible read very much. And you heard the speaker or the preacher give a couple of Bible verses and then go bobble a shamba, hamuna hamuna, you know, all of the excitations.

And that was supposed to be the sign that God was in the room and doing something. And if it's just that, it's impressive. Especially new Christians, they're just going to go with whatever is given them, depending.

And we always have to get back to Solar Scriptura because one of the arguments we can put on the table in this discussion is, why does the Christian faith have a 1,300-page book?

Why is it even there? And I'm 1,300 pages giver take, right? I always think of, like, Lord of the Rings, the book that Tolkien wrote was 1,300 pages, right? And all of those pages have important things on them.

So I began to think very practically, why do we have this book? Why am I lugging this book around? Back in the day, we didn't have the slimline Bibles. But that means part of, well, we are human creatures made after the image of God.

God, like you said, is not an idiot. He is an artist. He is an intellectual. The more science finds out how creation is constructed like in nature, we now know that the cell is not a blob of gelatin.

It is like a factory of machinery that's engineered by this master engineer. The design is so intricate. And the more we test these sciences, the scientists that are honest will say, this is designed.

This is incredibly creative, and nuanced, and specific, and elegant. That's how health sciences know and natural sciences. So we have a book for a reason, because language is not just nothing. It means things.

And we have to take that back, because we're in an anti-intellectual culture right now. I have to laugh. Did you know one of my students, John, went off to college, and she wrote me one day just really disturbed because she said her college professor of English, came in to class one day, and started to say things like the author, oh gosh, who's the guy?

The wrote Tom Sawyer at Mark Twain. Right, Mark Twain, famous author, we love him, right? That professor came in to a college classroom and had the audacity to say, you know, Mark Twain didn't know what he was talking about.

He really didn't mean this when he wrote this in this book. He meant this other thing. And my student, Katie, was like, what? What are you talking about? We call this deconstructionism. We found out later this is a thing in some of the colleges.

Where in the postmodern era, which was 20 years ago, you know give or take we had college professors who were paid To come in to an English class and say you know this author whoever it is mark Twain or heart or You know the ancient writers like the Trojan War or whatever take any of the classical literature they could just say Oh, that author didn't mean that and here's why and this is what I think

And the student is like Do I get my grade if I disagree with that? You know, so that's where we are as a people and we really need to take back literacy and Starts as a Christian people. We need to get back to what the scripture says and Read it and so an answer to your question. I'm reading spiritual gifts chapter 12 first Corinthians. I'm just gonna go down and it says um Basically the Lord gives us these gifts because the other religions have mute idols, you know carved woodstone and Since humans become like what they worship well, we worship the living God and the spirit of God

I have to say this because these Charismatics they always talk about the spirit like it's the force in Star Wars And it's not it's the Trinity. It's God the Holy Trinity so The spirit of God has given us these gifts so his church can prevail throughout history and discernment is one of the gifts and So these guys that are isn't that ironic here. They are yelling at us. Oh, you guys, you know, you've got spread ledges because you're just no That's one of the gifts. Have you read you know, just go back to Corinthians. It's in there

so Yeah, it's a lot of self-refuting claims that they make if you read the text and so I just encourage everyone to read One of the problems that I have is that So you've probably seen it in the comments any time that I point out a scoundrel who is clearly a scoundrel Who is doing one of these quote unquote gifts? I get labeled a cessationist even though I've never ever said Anything of the sort. I've never said it and and like I said at the beginning of this podcast I'm on a journey and I'm in no hurry to in this journey. I'm I'm going to do it very carefully and cautiously

But the problem that I have is with that word cessationist Because it is labeling if you study what it means. It's literally the dividing issue Mainly over the tongues, but also the healing and and the ones that they emphasize and that word totally ignores the rest of them like we've been talking about and so Like the John Wembre issue like the Chuck Smith issue What's an example? I can if I'm selling you a car that I have driven it down the street and somebody sides wiped the entire passenger side and demolished the passenger side and I invite you to come by my car and I hand you a Pringles can and I say look through this can at the good side of my car and you're going to say well that's a good car well I'm looking at all of these guys from all sides not just the good side and watch the feedback and the the feedback I'm getting is you're not pointing out the good side job.

So therefore you must be a cessationist. I take issue with the whole word because no I still believe that there is gifts of service there is gifts of giving all of the things that I'm going to say this and I'll probably get hate mail all of the things that the Pentecostal and charismatic movements have taken away from the church all of those things were there for a reason and I can wholeheartedly I will support a person who it comes into my town who is in fact this is happen who is Hindu who is feeding the poor and homeless people in the town I'm going to help him hey let's band together let's give them some money and that's one of the gifts of the spirit and here's a person who is Hindi who's doing it right but these churches have totally ripped it away and then what they want to do is throw up a red flag and say cessationist you're a bad guy and that is the opposite.

Yeah can I be the bad guy here because I don't have you know I'm not your channel owner but I'm also a little field soldier for the Lord out here and I can say this with very great confidence because we see it and it's happening here in my experience with the extremist I guess we nowadays we could call it the extremist right church which is Christian nationalism slash charismatic whatever release what it's morphed into I have always known them to be very angry hostile accusatory presumptive just my experience and it shocked me at first you know back in the day when I was playing in the Laguna arts community which is mostly gay and Laguna Beach is a famous art mecca and all the artists come from around the world to you know and I would play the harp there and everything I was really shocked one day when you know

a lady who said she was a Christian she came over to talk to me because I play the harp and they think I'm an angel and that's pretty funny because they just bring the subject up and she just started you know she was admiring my instrument and stuff then she started talking about heaven and then it went from bad to worse she started then she started saying how she hated the Jews and hated these other people groups and hate and she was spitting angry and I was just sitting there like I don't even know how we got there in the conversation right and things like that would do

stirrup me because I'd think, wow, what is going on? I mean, how can somebody profess his Christ even have that spirit, which is so vicious? Yeah. And I wasn't even arguing with her. I was just here listening to her. And now, as a Christian, I know in the scripture, we're told how to discern the spirits. And so for me, I would question, how could someone like that be like that? And the scripture tells me, when you discern the spirit, you call the spirit for whatever it is. Because she claims she was a Christian. And I don't know her heart. That

was the claim. But her actions and her attitude was opposite to that. And for me, now, it wasn't a friend of mine. So I didn't have to see her again. But that experience haunted me because I thought, huh, how can that be? And in this is the world we live in, this is the real world, okay? In Southern California, we had these what I call Christian ghettos, like the whole Calvary, the whole Calvary Chapel community grew into everything's, you know, K wave and the radio station. And it's all Christian. And it began what I thought was funny. I

did an event once where they said, we have these Christian artists and we and these Christian musicians. And I thought, wait a minute, there is no such thing as Christian musicians in the Bible. There are musicians who are Christians.

But we don't have Christian music because the claim is if we write the words, oh, it's just going to be acceptable as and I have a problem with that as an artist and a composer. It's like, wait a minute. We do not have these products in the Bible where we have these communities of Christian believers or whoever. I mean, it doesn't matter if it's the omnis or the Calvary Chapelites or whoever it is. We don't have this cultural or cultic kind of society that the Bible promotes. We do have, and we have to be careful here, we do

have a cult cultural type of society that is described as the true church in Scripture. But, but here's the big but. The church, the true Christian church is in the world, but not of it. And being in the world really means living here.

So when I have gone and played for like the Wicca people, I didn't get, I didn't go looking for that job. They called me. It was a fair job. I went and played and got my feet. That's my vocation, you know, to work as a musician.

I'm not afraid as long as it's not illegal or dangerous. I, you know, I, take any call that I get. But it's fascinating to see how humans gravitate towards cults. Because that's what culture is, human-made societies.

And to claim, like Parham and the rest of these guys claim, this is great offense that they do to the Holy Spirit. They blaspheme the Holy Spirit by claiming all of their works and their teachings are of the Holy Spirit.

Wow. Anybody reading the Bible is not going to do that. Or reading it correctly, because you don't do that. But here we are with this culture. And so I tell my friends who are Christians and musicians, and I had one dear friend that struggled.

She said, I don't know if the Lord is leading me to play my music for the world or for the church. And I said, look, do you like what you do? Yes, she played the piano.

I said, are you good at it? Yes. Then you're free to do what you want with it as long as it's not illegal. Because the scripture gives Christians the freedom in their vocation to make a good shoe for a fair price, so to speak, to play good music for a fair price.

We're free to do that. And that's my policy. It's like, look, I'm sort of adventure dog over here. I get to learn what other people are doing out there by doing my work, and sometimes it's difficult.

Yeah. But this enthusiasm category, something the new Charismatics, I hope, will study because it's part of church history. And I don't resent, that's not the right word. I think it's very unfortunate that I'm projected on.

Sometimes not as much as you, John. But people will say, if I don't agree with the excitations of the enthusiasm in the gifts, then they say, we don't believe in God's gifts. Excuse me, no.

I'm a confessional Christian. That means I believe everything in the Bible, the way the Bible says. And I read the whole thing, so I know. You know, I think you hit the nail on the head that I was hoping that you would drive towards.

We didn't have any sort of outline on this show. So I was hoping that you would go there so I could follow up and have this wonderful closing with exactly this. And you actually took me right to that spot.

So if you look at the gifts, you've got this list of gifts that Paul gives. And it's in a letter that's written to a church that isn't today, but we can use that today.

However, what the church, what these scoundrels in the church have robbed us of, is so much more than even just the gifts that they've eliminated. It's the fact that so Paul randomly list off what he considered to be the great gifts that were given to the church.

right? But what in the case of the person that you're talking with who's a musician, what if God blessed somebody else through her music and that person was like, wow, this is great, I feel blessed and God gives a blessing to them. Is that not a gift? And if Paul were writing a letter to America today and were to send it to the church, whatever church he went to, wonderful gift of music that this person has, you know what I'm saying? What the church has done, and I'm not saying that that's a spiritual gift, don't get me wrong, but what the church has done is they've taken away

the ability for God to use even further more than just this list that's given because they've created a rulebook by going through line by line, taking a single verse and trying to pack their agenda into it. And the fact that they have taken, the movements have taken most of these gifts away and they want you to focus on tongues, faith healing and what they call discernment, it's not even close to discernment. Those are the three that they focus on, they totally ignore the rest of them.

And so where I landed was that I'm not shutting it off, I'm not going to, I'm not by no means, I'm going to engage the cessationist or continuous argument because I'm offended by that word.

It is offensive. That word just takes the whole, the whole thing out of it, it takes away it distracts from the gifts. So where I ended up with is if somebody is asking me and they want to know, are you cessationist or you continuous, here's what I tell them. You've got the same book that I do. Go read the book. I usually tell them, I am a Christian. And what that means is nowadays, I have to qualify that because there's so many, you know, confusing claims out there. But getting back to Corinthians, what I love is, and this is emotional. Paul was a genius. He was

an incredible author. And when he wrote the letter to the Corinthians, he starts out with a gospel saying, the Lord has saved you and the Corinthians were pagans, right? They had no knowledge of the Ten Commandments, right? They're just living like Corinthians, right? And Paul's loving appeal to them was, the Lord has saved you by his blood. So why don't you act like it?

Because this is the gift to you. And then he gets to the gifts in chapter 12. And then, you know, let's all that, but don't stop because by the time we get to 13, he says this, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clinging symbol.

And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith. So is to remove mountains, but I have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burnt, but I have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not arrogant, it is not rude, it does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful.

Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, and hopes all things, and endure all things. And then I will skip to the end of this chapter.

He says, So now, faith, hope, and love abide. These three, but the greatest of these is love. And that is what the charismatic and enthusiast miss. I miss Paul's point, and that is what is missed when you go through verse by verse, because you have got to read the letter how Paul is speaking as a human.

He is not an AI, a tomatron here. He is trying to reach their hearts and souls. And by the way, love is not a sentimental, sappy thing, like Valentine's Day cards or whatever. Love is about laying your life down for another person, like Jesus did.

That's what loving our neighbor is supposed to be like. So it's heavy. It really is heavy. And I think we do well when we start thinking about these things, because they get us at least on track with the true Christian faith.

And I don't think there's a single thing that I can say to top what you just said. So I'm going to leave it there. Read the book, pay close attention to chapter 11 when he talks about the super apostles.

Thank you. Oh, I know. You'll fully understand. We should do a whole episode on super apostles. We do. We need to go back and because Paul's craft work and his arguments are just masterful.

Okay. So you're right. When you read it in order, the way he enters into these deeper ideas is like a master logician. He knows where he's going with this. And yeah, we have to go back to 11 because we are in the time of the super apostle guys, right?

Absolutely. We've got to do the super apostles and we'll do that next. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branham.org.

From more about the dark side of the new apostolic reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.