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As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace (1 Peter 4:10, ESV).
As to the Holy Spirit, in the church of my youth we were Cessationists, believing in the Spirit but thinking the Spirit was only needed to fill in the blank for the third name of the Trinity — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
After mentioning the Spirit as a member of the Trinity, the preachers and teachers of my denomination put Him on the shelf of the first century and left Him there. The problem for me was that they also taught the Bible was true, and the Bible (not the preachers and teachers of my youth) had verses like…
To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7).
Pursue love and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 14:1a).
HHHHMMMHHM … the manifestations (gifts) of the Spirit, according to my previous denom (shortened version of denomination), are a blessing for the first century, but the rest of the 19 centuries of church history must muddle through the best we can.
And logically following Cessationist teaching, when Paul writes in Galatians 5:25, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit,” that verse should be re-interpreted in the English Standard Version to, “Sorry, only the first century can live by the Spirit.” Then when Jesus said in John 16:13, “When the Spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all truth.” He should have said, “The Spirit will only come to you till the end of the first century and then you can rely on human preachers to teach you everything.”
All of which is nonsense.
Some might be thinking, “But Pastor Grant, aren’t the Cessationists talking about the miracle gifts of the Spirit, that we can have the teaching gift but not the gift of healing today?” And I would respond, “Scripture doesn’t make that distinction, and do we really want to teach, preach, travel to third world countries in the name of Jesus without the fullness of God’s Spirit?”
In the mid-1970s, after my Cessationist schooling in Bible college and seminary, I determined this theology to be wrong and became a Continualist, believing that the total repertory of gifts, power, and miracles mentioned in the New Testament continues throughout the history of the church.
During the last several months on Friday, I’ve written 10 blog posts on “Ten Reasons That I Believe the New Testament is Reliable.” And because I believe the Bible to be reliable, in the next few months I’m going to write “Ten Things Scripture Teaches About the Spirit Today.”
I will discuss and define spiritual gifts, explain why Spirit-following believers too often grieve the Spirit with excesses, and I’ll give practical guidance about living in the Spirit. We can learn from the first-century, lessons of power much needed in the last days of the church.