In the book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul talks about groups of people who receive the gifts of preaching or teaching God's Word.
The apostles were a unique and unrepeatable group, personally chosen and authorized by Jesus. We don't have apostles today. What about prophets or evangelists? We'll explore those two groups today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg takes us back to Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 and 12. Secondly, prophets.
Prophets. Once again, they are contained in the twentieth verse of chapter 2 on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Also, they're mentioned in verse 5 of chapter 3, where Paul talks about the insight into the mystery that God would unite in one new man, the two of old. And he says this hasn't been something that previous generations have known, but it has now been revealed, verse 5, to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. As soon as you had the Word of God inscripturated, as soon as you had the closed canon of Scripture, there was no place for and no need for somebody coming and saying, I can tell you what the Word of God is. Because God has now provided us, finally, in the New Testament, the words that were spoken by his prophets and apostles. And, my friends, this is vitally important.
It's not uncommon—and I use this terminology all the time—but purposefully. People say to me, You know, I like Jesus. I like to read the Gospels. I love the Sermon on the Mount. But I'm not so keen on Paul.
I don't really like Peter. As if somehow or another you can read the New Testament and decide, you know, who your top three are and then reject all the rest. No, the authority is the same authority. It is the apostolic authority provided by God in inspiring and enabling his servants to speak from him, for him, and then for that to be written down and preserved so that we then may be able to understand what that means. Staud, wonderfully as always, says, As the foundation on which the church is built, the prophets have no successors, any more than the apostles have. For the foundation was laid and finished centuries ago, and we cannot tamper with it in any way today.
We cannot tamper with it in any way today. And yet, if you've moved to and around church circles at all, you know that it is frequently tampered with. And people say, Well, I have a word for you from God. Or somebody might tell you something and say, you know, Thus says the Lord. There are people who… They seem to enjoy this notion of being able to, you know, tell you what's going on. I don't know where they get it from.
They get it from their tummy, I think. Unless you have it from the Bible, then just don't talk about it. You don't know. Don't go to your friends and say, Thus says the Lord. You go to your friends and say, Have you read the Bible? Go to the Bible and say, What does God say about this? What does God's Word have to say about marriage?
What does God's Word say about singleness? What does it say about business? What does it say about sexuality?
What does it say? He has given us his Word in order that this might be the case. And what more can he say than to you he has said? You understand, loved ones, how absolutely crucial it is—the primacy and the place of the Scriptures in the life of God's people. That is why the undermining work of the Evil One from the Garden of Eden on has always been to say, Did God really say this? Can you really trust this? Do you think that's what God really means?
Go to any area, and classically at the moment, in the realm of family and of marriage and of the issues of sexuality and so on. How can we know? Because we have the Bible. Well, you know, when I was young—younger, so much younger than today—I went to all kinds of churches.
I was ready for anything that was on offer. And I remember being in a church in England that was a very charismatic church, and they had a peculiar focus on the gifts—not so much the gift of helps, but more spectacular things. And it was quite common for people to give utterances in tongues, and then somebody would interpret the tongue.
And I remember one evening when I decided, I must move on from this. Because we were in the church, there was a lot of singing, it was okay, then there was a bit of a hullabaloo, and then somebody gave an utterance in a tongue, and then the pastor or somebody said, Now, do we have anybody to interpret what has been said here? And it was either a fellow or a girl, I can't remember. She said, Yes, I got it. And she said, Okay. And she said, The word of God to the church is, and I quote, Whoop it up!
Okay? So I said to myself, Why would God go to all that bother to make this guy do what he just did and then allow this lady to say what she just said? And what does whoop it up actually mean in this context? And I can remember, I didn't do it in a proud or defiant way, the way sometimes happens here on a Sunday, where you could see people, I'm about ten minutes into it, they go… Out the door. I didn't do it that way, but I did take my Bible, and the first time it was confused enough again, I just slipped out of the bag. I said, No, no, this is not good for me.
This is not good for me. No, the word of God is light in my darkness. The word of God is the lamp to my feet.
It's the light to my path. You see, it is together that we submit to it, rather than subjectivism. There's all kinds of ways, good ways, in which you can get deviant from this. You can't come to me and tell me what God is doing unless you come to me with the Scriptures open to say this is what God is doing, because this is what God has done, and this is the truth that God provides. You see, loved ones, this is what makes a church ultimately secure, free from the tyranny of the predilections of the preacher. That is why I say to you, examine the Scriptures. You are sensible people. See what the Bible says.
Don't take my word for it. We must be men and women of the Book. You say, Well, then the prophetic thing is over.
Yes and no. No, in this sense—that throughout history, subsequent to the apostolic period, we can see that there have been those who have exercised, if you like, a prophetic ministry, in this sense—that they've had a peculiar ability to combine accurate exposition with pertinent, pressing application. So, I just was in… I did the wedding in a church in Edinburgh last Sunday, and Whitefield preached there in 1741 and 1748. And I sat there, and I thought, What it would have been like to hear Whitefield preach?
Whitefield! For surely here is an individual who exercised a prophetic ministry in his day. He wasn't adding to the Bible. He was teaching the Bible. But he taught it in such a way that people said, You know what?
I get that. In the twentieth century, probably in British terms, nobody more so than Martyn Lloyd Jones. I remember listening to him preach in Yorkshire years ago, but in the course of preaching from Psalm 8, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and so on, he breaks off from his thinking. He says, You know, in America, in the last few days, many of the newspapers have used a split front page. A split front page. He says, I saw newspaper X, and on the front page they had the moon landing and the Kennedy Chappaquiddick event on the one page.
And he says, and there, in his own inimitable Welsh voice, he says, And there you have it, my dear friends. You have a man on the moon, and you have hell on the earth. That's prophetic. The way the Word of God addresses these things. But in the strict sense in which Paul is using it, there are no apostles today.
There are no prophets today. What of the evangelists? Well, actually, this is an interesting one too, because there are only three places where this noun is used in the whole New Testament. It is used here, and it is used concerning Philip in Acts chapter 21, and it is used when Paul urges Timothy to keep his head, endure hardship, and do the work of an evangelist. So Timothy was not an evangelist. He was to do the work of an evangelist. And Philip apparently was an evangelist.
So what are we to make of this? Well, every Christian is called to bear witness to Christ, right? Not every Christian is a missionary in the strict sense of the word, right, and being set apart for a specific geographical context or area of ministry. So this evangelist is something different from that.
And if you think about Philip and you think about Timothy, both of them essentially worked within the framework of the apostolic band. So the apostles and the prophets and the evangelists taking and disseminating these things. Now, as I was studying this week, I realized that one of our speakers that's coming to Basics caught me off guard when he says quite clearly that the evangelists, along with the apostles and prophets, had callings that, quote, belong to the inaugural life of the New Testament church, and that in the very nature of the case, we do not expect these ministries to reappear in the church today.
Well, then I sat for a minute, and I said, Wait a minute. Then I realized what he was saying. He was saying that in this unique dimension, in the founding and grounding of the church, there were those who were set apart to this task. He's not saying that the gift of evangelism no longer exists, because clearly it does. And the need for evangelism is an ongoing need. And we recognize too, and we're grateful to God for those whom he has raised up and continues to raise up who are particularly gifted in explaining the gospel, and not only in explaining the gospel but in putting the net in and drawing it in. Some of us are, like, you know, sharing the gospel, but we're like fishermen. You know, the person says, you know, Did you catch anything? No, but I influenced a few, you know. You'll never sell life insurance unless you can actually get the signature on the bottom of the page, on the premium.
You can talk about it for the rest of your life. And that's why some of you have never made it in that business, because you just say, Well, would you like to sign up? The person says, Nah, I don't think so. And then somebody else, he's got people signing up all over the place. He's got the gift. And there are people in our church who have a peculiar gift of talking to other people about Jesus. All of us talk to people about Jesus, but some of us aren't as gifted as others.
We still do it, but we stumble and bumble, and then there are those who are just manifestly good at it, because God gifts. That gift is not the same as that to which he's referring here, in terms of the evangelists, but it is foundational. Well, let me just take us to pastors and teachers. In fact, let me stop before we get to pastors and teachers.
And let me crystallize this for us in our minds as a segue to moving on. What we're essentially recognizing this morning, I think, is the fact that when God… Remember Jesus in John 17? He prays, Father, sanctify them in your truth.
Your word, thy word, is truth. So he's praying. He says, I don't pray just for these but for those who will believe as a result of the ministry and so on. So before Jesus goes to the cross, he's praying that the truth of God's Word will be the portion of God's people and that they will become all that God intends for them to be as a result of the ministry of his Word.
So it ought not to be a surprise to us that when he is resurrected and ascends to heaven, and as they ascended Christ, he pours out gifts to men, these gifts that he pours out are Word gifts—apostle, evangelist, prophet, pastor, teacher—because of the absolutely vital place of the Word of God. The reason that we do basics is not because we think we are onto some peculiar deal. We are not! We are trying to find out what this means. We are trying to find out what it will mean to become, as we will see later in the verses, fully mature as a congregation—what it will mean to quit being childish and forming our views from the latest DV or the latest book that somebody came out with. I can tell where you are in your lives when you come to me with this stuff.
I mean, don't stop coming, but I just want you to know that I know that when you come to me and say, Oh, I think this is it. I think we finally got it. We ain't got it.
We got it right here. And if it's not setting that forward, it's setting it aside. There is a crying need in our nation for the teaching, preaching, proclaiming, and living out of the Word of God. How do I know? Because I live in the nation. Because I pay attention. Because I'm on the receiving end of all kinds of initiatives.
And a letter such as this with which I finish. Here is an illustration of what we're saying about the need to see young men set out into pulpits around our nation. Not young men that are looking for the perfect pulpit, the perfect place, the ideal spot. Because there is no ideal spot, except the spot he puts you in. If you think, when I was in Scotland, that I had conceived of Cleveland as the ideal spot, then you don't know me. All right? But God has made Cleveland to me, for me, the ideal spot. There is no other spot. This is it. I recognize that.
Not in looking forward. And I get young guys coming to me all the time. They need a certain number in the church, certain place in the church, certain location in the church, certain this, certain that, certain that, and they say, Go home and never come back. But if you're prepared to say, I'll go serve in rural America, I will go up a side street for the cause of the gospel, then you and I can have a conversation.
Because here's the cry of a guy's heart. He's twenty-four years old. He lives in a small town in eastern Kentucky.
He's got a wife, and he's got a nine-month-old son. And essentially what he says is this. Listening to Truth for Life has created in me a hunger to try and find out what it means to know God. I don't consider myself a religious person. And I write into you in the hope that you'd be able to give me some advice or maybe guidance into what I might do. I'm having a very hard internal struggle, because I want to have faith, and I want God to be a part of my life.
That's fantastic in itself, isn't it? Because what do we know from the Bible? We know that there is none that seeks God. No, not one. So when you get a twenty-four-year-old fellow saying, I want to know God, I want to have faith, then we know that God is at work in this fellow's life.
Mm. I was born into a family that was Jehovah's Witness. My dad was devout, my mother went along with it. Third grade, my parents got divorced. I went with my mom. She left a religion, and she took me to a Baptist church.
Which was okay, he says, because I thought it was amusing how worked up the preacher's got. As I got older, I understood a lot more, and I decided, basically, forget it. My father got cancer. I moved back in with him, and he started working on me with the JWs again. And by the time I was fourteen, he said I was done with it. My dad's cancer went into recession, so I moved back with my mom. That was the last time my father ever spoke to me. So he's now twenty-four. His father hasn't spoken to him in ten years.
All right? Young, confused, I tried every church. I went to the Church of Christ, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of God. What fourteen-year-old boy goes from church to church? Where is this boy? I want to meet a fourteen-year-old boy that's been going from, you know, the Episcopal Church up on the corner there in Chagrin, and then to the United Methodists, down opposite the dry cleaners, and then over here. I want to meet him! Do you know many fourteen-year-old boys that are just going from church to church, trying to know God?
It's fantastic! But he doesn't meet God. He says, the problem I have is the church seems to be more about association than worship, and the people who are supposed to be the voice of God are some of the worst among the group. The Baptists can't speak clearly enough to get a proper message across.
And the ones who can't speak properly are bashing all the other denominations. Then he says, my mother died when I was seventeen. I bounced around from house to house. Eighteen, I got an apartment.
I was a senior in high school, living in an apartment, playing football, working at McDonald's to afford it so that I could live in my apartment by myself. I had no time whatsoever for the church. So in order to get away from everything, I decided to join the army. And in basic training, I got interested in the Catholic Church.
Quotes, I figured they'd been around for such a long time, they gotta be doing something right. But I didn't like how they prayed to so many different people and practically worshiped the pope. I haven't been to a church since, and perfectly honest, I don't even know what to do with it all.
Here we go. So now here I am, married and with a son, that I want to raise in the ways of God but with no means to do it other than to teach him myself, which I am not qualified to do. When I hear Truth for Life, the message is easy to understand and relate to.
If there is any advice you could give me on how I could go about trying to be a good Christian, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter, and I hope I haven't bothered you with my request. He bothered me.
He stirred me. I'm about ready to go to Kentucky and start a church plan in Kentucky. I mean, why not? We don't have to just start them, you know, within thirty miles of Parkside here. There is no limit to the opportunity to be granted to those who, with a firm conviction about the truth of God's Word, a genuine love for people, and a preparedness to be thought nothing for the rest of your life—there's no limit to what may be done. And as Truth for Life, along with other ministries, sort of breaks ground into these areas, one of the challenges that is given to us is, where are we gonna take and back it up?
On the ground, as it were, with the personnel to answer this. I asked the folks at Truth for Life to track this fellow down in his phone number, and I saw this morning when I came back that we have it. But you might pray for him, the young man from Kentucky with a nine-month-old son who has been wandering around for a while, and he wants to know God. Father, what an amazing thing it is that in this book that people dis-doubt, disown, devalue, discard—that in this book we have the abiding, the living and abiding Word of God. The grass withers, the flower falls, but the Word of our Lord will stand forever. Lord, increase within us not a desire to worship the Bible, but to worship the Lord Jesus Christ as we meet him in the pages of Scripture. Help us with these things, Lord. We need to come to terms with this as individuals and as a church. And we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. We are living in days when it's easy to feel anxious about the future of Christianity in our world. Is the church being sidelined? Is it possible the church could even cease to exist?
What will things look like as Western culture moves further away from Biblical Christianity? Well, I want to recommend to you today a book that we have found immensely comforting. It's titled Future Proof—How to Live for Jesus in a Culture that Keeps Changing. This is a brand new book that assures us that the worst of the worst can't stop the inevitable triumph of Jesus and his church. That's actually what the title Future Proof means. Our future is not at risk because God is in control. Our King is on the throne. Request your copy of the book Future Proof when you donate to Truth for Life today on the mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate or if you'd prefer you can call us at 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapine.
Thanks for listening. There are people who think that a pastor's job must be easy. It's only one day a week, right? But there's a lot of work and responsibility beyond what we see Sunday to Sunday. Tomorrow we'll take a closer look. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.
