Interview With Jason part 2

Nakita Kolov, the Russian nightmare.

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Stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. Alright, If Not For God with Mike Zwick. I've got Justin Newt back, and we've got our friends in the showroom as well, I guess you could call it. We've got our friend John Perry, he's the assistant basketball coach of a local college. We've got Jamal, a former police officer.

He's big into supporting the police. We've got Wadajo, and we've got our friend Joe Sperley, who's a baseball coach. I love Wadajo because young people are getting on fire for Christ, and I love to see that as well.

Justin, today, Justin Neup, and it's K-N-O-O-P, for the two of you out there who have not heard of Justin, Justin has his YouTube channel, Blessing Boys, and he also has his YouTube channel, Unshakeable Kingdom. And today we're going to be talking about, have the gifts of the Spirit ceased? Did they stop in the first century? And so, there's two beliefs out there. There's cessationism, and then there's continuationism. And one of the proponents, one of the largest proponents of cessationism would be John MacArthur. They had a strange fire conference, and I think, Justin, you said your first Bible was a John MacArthur Bible, is that right? It sure was.

It sure was. So many of our friends out there are cessationists, they're good people, they love the Lord. You actually got saved in a church, Justin, that probably was a church that believed in cessationism, is that right?

Yeah, I mean, they never really voiced it, but I never saw them in operation, so my guess would be they were practical cessationists. So this is what we would call an in-house discussion, where these are all people who love Jesus, and so we're just going to give our side and our version of what we believe. You may agree with us, you may not, but, you know, it's something that I think you should definitely think about. So as we open up today, I'm going to be looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 13, starting in verse 8, it says, Love never fails, but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away with, and if there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, and reason like a child. When I became a man, I did away with the childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

Now I know in part, but then I will be known, just as I have been fully known. And here's verse 13, but now faith, hope, love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love. And so, is that a good kind of passage for cessationists, Justin? I think if you pick out of the middle, and I want to say quickly, you know, we want to say on here, we don't want to straw man cessationists, and so I think a lot of people's mentality is that the cessationist believes that the work of the Holy Spirit has ceased. So that God doesn't do miracles, he doesn't answer prayers, he doesn't, you know, doesn't, uh, whatever. So there's a varying degree of cessationists and what they believe and stuff like that, but I want to go ahead and say that I understand that they don't believe that the work of the Holy Spirit has ceased, or that God doesn't heal or do miracles and stuff like that.

I think their main argument, from what I understand, is that specifically things like the sign gifts or the miraculous gifts were something that either ended with the canon being fulfilled, so the Bible actually being written and completed, or that they gradually faded out throughout history. So I want to say that, and remind me of your question again, I kind of lost my train. Well, you and I had listened to a little bit of a video before, and you had watched a video, it was a debate, between Dr. Michael Brown and it was Doug Wilson, a guy who's post-millennial, believes in post-millennialism. What did you take from that debate? Oh, I thought it was an excellent debate, and I would actually refer many of your listeners to go check that out.

It's actually done by Unbelievables, the name of the YouTube channel, by a man named Justin Brierley. Excellent, excellent debate. Both sides bring up many points, and I think in the end you'll see what is more scriptural.

So I think it was good. So I learned just such a lot from that, because I always want to hear the other side of the argument, just so I know, because I'm after truth, and whatever's going to lead me to truth and what the scriptures say, that's what I want to go after. But here, I think him and many other continuationists, even cessationists, will mention that this, in 1 Corinthians 13, kind of used to be a prominent argument for cessationism, but it's kind of lost its edge. Because if you continue to read on, you see that when Paul is talking about the perfect that is coming, you see that he is actually most likely referring to the perfection of seeing Jesus face-to-face. One interesting thing that we kind of breezed through when we read it was it didn't just say gifts of the Spirit will cease, it says knowledge will cease.

So I don't know if you read that, but we're in trouble, because that means that we can't learn anymore. And so you have to really take a look at what the rest of this text says when Paul says in verse 12, For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. So I'm not sure how you can kind of twist or contort that into meaning that whenever the Bible is complete, we'll see face to face.

Because I don't think the rest of the scripture really confirms that. Well then, and it's interesting because right after that, the very next chapter talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And the gifts of the Spirit, he's not just talking about the 12 apostles, is that right?

Right. Yeah, I mean, I don't see that. I think many people make the argument that the gifts of the Spirit were maybe things that exemplify an apostle or a first century apostle or something like that, but we see the gifts of the Spirit not only being used by other people in the New Testament, other than the 12 apostles identified by Jesus, but we also see prophets, you know, in the New Testament, throughout the New Testament. We also see, not only that, but in the scripture we're reading in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, we see a general instruction on how to operate in the gifts of the Spirit in a meeting, one thing that was actually never retracted by Paul. So we see things like Paul telling us to earnestly desire or pursue the gifts of the Spirit, not only that, you know, especially giving, no, especially teaching, no, especially prophecy.

And so he actually puts an emphasis on there. Elsewhere in scriptures we see, like in 1 Thessalonians, do not despise prophetic utterances, and elsewhere in scripture we see, do not forbid people from speaking in tongues. Later in the book of Acts, chapter 19, we see some disciples of John the Baptist, who Paul runs into, and asked them what they responded to, and they were like, well, we didn't even know there was a Holy Spirit.

So he lays hands on them, prays for them, baptizes them into Jesus Christ, and what happens with those guys? They begin to speak in tongues and prophesy. And so it's something that we see continuing throughout the history of the church, throughout the book of Acts, and something that we are never told or warned about in all of scripture, that it's something that is only temporary. Yeah, the very next verse, starting in 1 Corinthians 14, verse 1, pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God. For no one understands, but in his Spirit he speaks mysteries. But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation. One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but one who prophesies edifies the church. Now I wish that you all spoke in tongues, but even more that you would prophesy. And greater is one who prophesies than one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets so that the church may receive edifying. So it's funny, we did an interview back at Northside Baptist back in, I think it was December, the Christmas decorations are up, and I posted something on TikTok because I thought that you had prophesied this current revival that had happened in Asbury, and the one that's spreading all over as well, but what had happened to take us back, you had been spending some time in prayer.

Is that right? And the Lord had shared with you something? Yeah, we were praying, my wife and I, we spent some time in prayer, dedicating time to prayer for revival, obviously. We want the hearts of people to be awakened. And we have been experiencing some things for the past couple years, some things that would probably be out of the ordinary or even seem like revival to the average person, to see, you know, demons being cast out of people, people's bodies being physically healed, to see people coming to know Jesus, salvation, people being baptized in pools and bathtubs and rivers and all of that stuff, right? Those are elements of revival, but in prayer, I felt like the Lord said, like, you haven't seen anything yet, right?

This is just a little blip, a little taste of what I'm going to begin to do. And it wasn't soon after that that we started to see, you know, things like this happen where not only, and this is what I feel like I communicated when I spoke to you, was in the past we've seen revivals that started in a place and they stayed in a place, so you would have to actually go to that place to experience God's presence or whatever He was doing in that particular time. But I feel like what He's doing in our day is He's actually going to spread it throughout, so you're going to start to see these pockets kind of pop up everywhere. And then like we talked about in our last episode, He's looking for how people will respond to those revivals, personal revivals in your own life, in your family, you know, could happen in your church or wherever. What are we going to do with that? Well, ultimately, I think He doesn't want us to keep it into one place, but just like in, you know, the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2, He wanted to spread that out, you know, Jerusalem, Samaria, Judea, to the ends of the earth.

Absolutely. You know, there was an incident that happened with me. I was praying at Just Like Jesus Ministries.

And I believe it was right before you and I did that last show that I'm talking about where I thought you prophesied. But Christy, a lady named Christy, she said that she saw Jesus place a gift inside of my chest. And I didn't know what it was, but I noticed after that, I started praying for people and immediately they were healed. There was a guy that we saw at Dario this morning who said that he had a pain in his chest, and I prayed for him and I asked him where the pain is, and he said it was about a three. And then I was done praying. I said, where's the pain?

He looks around and goes, it's gone. Well, of course. I mean, you know, of course Jesus uses us to pray for people and to heal the sick, but it actually talks about a gift of healing. So I've wondered myself, is that a gift of healing that Jesus gave me?

It seems to be. I mean, you know, I can't seem to argue with that. But, you know, it's interesting as I've prayed for people to be healed, you know, and I'll put a video out there. I want people to see, hey, that people are getting healed.

Jesus is real. That, you know, I did something so simple that seems to be helping people. And you're doing something so simple that seems to be helping people with deliverance. But not everybody's excited about it. Right. Yeah.

I mean, it's going to it's going to rub certain people the wrong way. And I think that's mainly because of discomfort. Going back to what you said before, you know, have I received the gift of healing or something like that? Well, there's a debate on whether the gifts of the Spirit are residential gifts. If you get a gift and then basically you just function that gift all the time or if, you know, they're just distributed as needed.

I tend to think this is this is just my logical mind thinking. The gifts are the gifts of the Spirit. The Spirit lives in us if we're a believer. Right. So gifts are in the Spirit and the Spirit's in us. Where are the gifts in us?

They're all in us. Right. And so if the Lord distributes them as needed, that means whenever you're praying healing over someone, you may pray healing over someone one time. And it may be just, you know, faith and just normal and God heals the person, whatever. You may pray in another instance. It's a more difficult situation.

And you may even feel like you don't have that much faith. And then all of a sudden the Lord just comes and supernaturally heals. Like now you see this gift and function. It's the same thing with teaching. Every time I teach, I wouldn't say the gift of teaching isn't in operation.

But you can hear a shift sometimes when someone is just teaching out of their own knowledge. And when the gift of teaching is flowing and the Spirit is flowing through that and there's revelation coming and all these different things. So in my understanding, the gifts of the Spirit function like that. And that's why Paul could say earnestly desire the gifts. He doesn't say just earnestly desire your one gift, that the Lord earnestly desire all of the gifts.

Interesting. Because you need you're going to need different gifts at different times. If you come up to somebody and they have a physical pain in their body and they need healing, how good is the gift of generosity going to work in that situation? Or the gift of leadership or the gift of helps?

They need this specific gift at this time. And you can be rest assured that you have access to that gift because you have access to the Holy Spirit. Yeah, and I went to a meeting this past Sunday with Nanette Noel. And you've known her for a while now too, right? And what she was teaching on and what she was talking about, she says, Mike, she says there was a time and she said that I prayed for it. It was her son in law at the time who was completely sick, was felt like he wasn't going to get better. And she says, well, do you mind if I pray for you? And he said, well, it doesn't matter.

It's not going to do any good. He said, but go ahead. And she prayed for him. And she and he just kind of sat there and she said, well, how are you feeling? He's like, well, I'm healed. So in that case, he did not have the belief system that he was going to be healed, but he was healed anyways. I think you said that the first time that, you know, when you really started to pray for people, you were in the hospital. And what happened when the first time you saw healing? Yes, it was about seven. I was counting because the person, Nanette, she had challenged me to pray for 100 people regardless of what happened. So it was the 17th person that I went in. I prayed for and I always asked patients permission to pray for them after we did their x-rays and everything that they needed.

She had had neck pain for two years. I prayed for her and I did something different this time. This is something I didn't used to do. And that was after I prayed, I asked them to check their pain. It's something that we don't normally think about. Normally we pray for someone. How's it going to build our faith if we pray for someone and then we let them go and say they did get miraculously healed? But we never know, right?

So ask the person how they're feeling. And when she turned, she turned her neck and all her pain was instantly gone, that she's had everything on hand for two years. But you said you were just about as surprised as she was, right? I was probably more surprised for some reason.

I don't know. Because I'm like, you know, I just didn't have an expectation for it. So I think there's different, you know, times that God's grace comes in and he comes up and over our unbelief, right? And he just does something miraculous. I would call that a gift. I've experienced different situations in my life where I would say that was, from my understanding, that was a gift of the Spirit operating through me.

Because literally I didn't even really feel like I had faith for that, right? But the Holy Spirit begins to work through you, speak through you. Everybody's had moments where you've been speaking to someone or witnessing to someone. And then you get done and both of you are shocked that came out of your mouth, you know?

Like, what was that? So in 1 Corinthians 14, 26, throughout the entire New Testament, there's nothing really where it says, hey, when you do church, do it this way. A, B, C, D, E, right? We get glimpses throughout the book of Acts and through the New Testament on how they functioned, things they dealt with, problems they dealt with. 1 Corinthians 14, 26 is the only scripture that says, when you gather, do this, right? Do you know what he says in there? What's that? He says, when you gather, make sure each one of you has a teaching, right? A tongue, an interpretation. He's talking about the gifts of the Spirit.

But guess what else he says? What's that? A revelation.

Oh. Right? A revelation from the Lord. And so one of the arguments of the cessationists is, hey, if prophecy is still legitimate for today, then we should be writing down those prophecies because it's in line with scripture.

Right? And I think that's a poor argument, because nowhere in the Bible does it say just because there are still prophetic gifts in the church that we should continue to treat them in line with something like scripture. Now, what it does say is that we should test them according to the scripture, right? Test those revelations and stuff according to the scripture. But that doesn't mean that we either have to treat them like they are the Bible or treat them like they don't exist.

Yeah, that's a good point. And in Hebrews chapter 11, it says, and without faith it is impossible to please him. For he who comes to God must believe that he is, and he is a rewarder of those who seek him. And so we were talking about where, you know, you prayed for somebody, you were surprised that she was healed. I do believe that some of that is God's grace. The easiest way that I can explain, you know, when I'm seeing results with the healing ministry is that, yes, there are going to be instances where somebody may not believe and they get healed. There may be instances where I may be even surprised that they're healed.

I prayed for a lady who was blind in one eye and I prayed for her and she was healed and I was excited and stuff like that. But the easiest way for me to explain it is this. I sell life insurance. If there's a thousand smokers and there's a thousand non-smokers, there may be a few of those smokers who are going to outlive the non-smokers. But a thousand non-smokers are going to outlive a thousand smokers.

A thousand non-smokers are going to outlive a thousand smokers every single time because they're doing the right things. Well, Jesus very clearly in scripture taught us to have faith that when we pray, in the book of James it says, believe that we have it. You know, the prayer of faith of a righteous man will avail much. And so what I see when I'm praying for people, I was praying for a lady with a sciatic nerve problem. She 100% believed that she was going to be healed and immediately she was healed. There are some other people who doubt or may not have as much faith that they're going to be healed and I may have to pray for them two or three or more times.

So as a general rule, and I know there's an exception to every rule, but as a general rule we do have to have faith. And I love what you were telling me this morning. You said that there was a pastor from a church, a Reformed church, who said, well, I'm not seeing anything. But then he talked to somebody else. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah. And so I actually wanted to reference this because I think for a lot of people out there, a lot of listeners that are truly searching, there's a guy by the name of Sam Storms, you know, a Reformed guy. He's written books on the gifts of the Spirit.

He was once a cessationist. He was actually unconvinced of that by a man named Jack Deere because he challenged him with a question when he came to talking about it. Basically, he was coming in town to visit someone who was sick and Jack had said to him, he said, well, did you pray for them to be healed? And he said, well, no, I didn't. He's like, well, you know, why didn't you do that? And he's like, well, you know, I don't really think God does stuff like that today.

And you know what his response was? He said, oh, where's that in the Bible? And he said, that caught me so off guard that I realized the reason I was a cessationist, and this doesn't go for everybody, but the reason I was a cessationist, he says, was that he didn't want to be lumped in with the loony charismatics that he saw, the televangelists and all these people that he saw that he disagreed with. He thought if he started to believe in the gifts of the Spirit, that he was going to be lumped in with them. And so it was more out of fear that he was resistant to this than that he was convinced by the Scriptures. And so he began to study that out, and sure enough, he realized that, hey, this is pretty explicit in Scripture.

You can't get away from this, and ended up writing a few books on the topic, which I highly recommend. Yeah, and one of the arguments that I heard the cessationists make is he says, you know, the thing is with these healers or faith healers or whatever it is, he said that their results are temporary at best and unverifiable. Man, I just, I think, I can't think of anything that would be further from the truth than that, because there are over 500 million charismatics in the world, and we've seen a lot of stuff. You've seen some stuff yourself, right? Oh, yeah.

I mean, I've seen miracles from someone's headache going away instantaneously to the blind and the deaf being healed, and so over in Africa and some villages and things like that. And so I can't, I don't know what to do. I don't build my theology based on those experiences, but those experiences will sure challenge your theology. And that's what you have to do.

You have to go, what do I do with this? And then the problem is, is when you go in the Scriptures, you see it too. And it begins to, like I said before, close the gap of what you see in the Book of Acts and what you see in the reality of your church. And so I tell people a lot, you know, charismatics will get kind of scolded for using their experience to build upon, you know, to build theology out of. But I say, you know, a lot of times the other side is just as guilty of building a theology out of lack of experience.

And I heard this, I shared this with you earlier. You know, the guy that he was talking about was, he said, you know, I've never seen any of this stuff. And he's like, well, let me ask you, he's like, is the church you go to cessationist?

He said, yeah. He said, will they pray for the sick? Well, no.

Have you ever been to a church that operates in the gifts of the Spirit or believes in them? Well, no. Well, what do you expect to see? That's right. That's right. If you're not praying for these people to be healed, then how could they ever be healed, right? And so my friend Jason and I, we went into a church recently. And when we went in there, you know, I started preaching and then Jason got up there and I said, who needs prayer for healing? Everybody, almost everybody raised their hand.

I guarantee it. A lady went to the front and Jason started praying for her. He didn't just start praying for her, man. He started casting out spirits and she was healed immediately. There was another lady sitting in the pews. We went back to her. Her knees were killing her. She had pain all over her body.

She was healed immediately. And this is pretty exciting. And one of the things that I talked about before, I think with you earlier, was that Jesus even, it almost became like a test to see like, okay, is this true? Because what he said, he said, if you don't believe me for the words that I tell you, and I understand that to us in a sense. I mean, if somebody comes around saying, hey, I'm the son of God, I'm the Messiah, they're going to be like, okay, well, show us. How do we know?

He said, but believe me for the works that I do. And we had talked about this on Stu's show this morning where that, you know, we're not pointing to the healing. We're not pointing to the deliverance or anything like that.

But when people get delivered, when people immediately, they're blind and they get their sight, it's actually pointing to Jesus. Is that right? That's right.

Yeah. I mean, even Paul talks about that. He's like, you know, woe to us if we have to preach ourselves, right? What is the treasure that we carry in these earthen vessels? It's the revelation of God through the face of Jesus Christ, right? So that's the revelation that we carry with it within us. And so every sign, every wonder, every miracle has a sole purpose of pointing to God in the face of Jesus Christ and the person of Jesus Christ. So ultimately, our ministry is reconciliation. We preach repentance so that people, you know, by grace through faith would turn to Jesus and be reconciled to him.

And those are what those things point to. And so, yeah, I mean, you're going to get people that are going to argue you're emphasizing this or emphasizing that. And I just say take it up with Jesus because, listen, if Jesus needed it in his ministry, if the early disciples needed it in their ministry, it's actually kind of prideful for me to say, no, I can do it without all that.

I have enough eloquent speech. Not that people are saying that, you know, that it's by their own power. But for me to say that I could do it for less than Jesus did it with, I think is a problem. I think we should be willing to accept and utilize every gift that he offers.

And I guarantee you, if you begin to pray for the sick for long enough, you're going to start to see miracles. Yeah, I mean, it's in the Bible. And I think that's one of the main arguments that continuationists make. And that's what Dr. Brown said to Doug Wilson, the moderator. He said, well, what do you want Doug Wilson to believe? And Dr. Brown says, I want him to believe the Bible. That's right!

It's true. I mean, if you're listening to this on the radio, today's March 18th and yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. Well, St. Patrick, when he went out and did ministry, what he would do is he would go directly to the chief of a tribe. And one of the chiefs of the tribe, his daughter, I think, was dying.

And St. Patrick made a deal with him. He said, I tell you what, I'm going to pray to Jesus that he'll heal your daughter. And if Jesus heals your daughter, she's about to die, will you follow Jesus? And the chief of the tribe said, not only will I follow Jesus, but the rest of my tribe will follow Jesus as well. It was something that was pointing back to Jesus.

In the final 30 seconds, what do you want to share? Yeah, I would just say, listen, look at the Scriptures, take off our glasses of the traditions that have been passed down by the people before us, that have caused us to look through that lens when we read the Scriptures, and really take a good close look through things like the book of Acts, through 1 and 2 Corinthians, through Romans, other places where they speak about the gifts of the Spirit, and think to yourself, can I really come out on the end with a good, solid scriptural argument that these things are no longer for today? You come to that conclusion, then ask the Lord what he wants to do next.

I told you this earlier with Stu. You know, my prayer was, Lord, I see a big gap between me and the lives of the early disciples. And if you, if the Holy Spirit that lived in them still lives in us, Lord, I pray that you would begin closing that gap. And sure enough, he began closing that gap for his glory, for his kingdom, for the gospel to go out, and for people's lives to be transformed so they can be reconciled to the Father through Jesus. That's it. Amen. Justin Neup, thanks for coming on again. And follow Blessing Boys and Unshakable Kingdom on YouTube.

You can check them out on Instagram, Facebook, and I think you even have a Twitter account. Is that right? I do. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Justin. You're welcome. All right. For my YouTube channel, if not for God with Mike Zwick, just like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell so you'll be alerted when we have our next video. This is the Truth Network.