This thing that we do sometimes
in the confines of our culture, that we just do it. We don't
know why. Much like singing songs before
a sermon, after a sermon, saying a prayer as we gather together. Sometimes they can just become
part of what we do. It's like Kelvin and I were talking
about when he grew up in the Methodist church, they sang doxology
every week, Lord's Table every week, you know. It's just what
you do, it's what you do, it's what you do. And there's nothing
wrong with doing something every week, but do we do things just
because it's time to do them? You know, when we think about
using the Lord's name in vain, we often think of the vulgarities
or the profanities or just the explicatives that go along with
the name of God or the word God or Jesus, but a lot of times
we use the Lord's name in vain when we sing songs to Him without
heart. We speak of Him without truth.
There's nothing different, really, according to that command. And
the point of all that is that we ought to be very careful that
what we do and what we say and how we worship and everything
that we do as the local church is very carefully considered,
very cautiously engaged. Oh yes, now a song, I'm singing
a song. But is the truth of the lyrics actually true to you? Does it engage your life in such
a way that, wow, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. When we consider those words
as Isaiah thought of them, as Isaiah cried those things out,
holy is the Lord. He became undone. For as we reflect on the nature
and the character and the person of God and all of His attributes,
we immediately, by the sovereignty of God's grace, are countered
by our own presence. We stand in the presence of glory
and then we see ourselves. Holy, holy, holy, wicked. Majestic. When I'm talking about doctrine,
and it'll go well with today's text, but when I talk about doctrine,
and a lot of times people argue with me when they say, well,
you know, we don't need to really engage the church so much in
teaching things. Theology and doctrine is not
necessarily important. We need to give something that
people can live with and take home with. Well, if the teaching
of God isn't that, then we are not the people of God. And then another argument in
that same vein is, well, so, you know, this pastor teaches
a lot of truth and I know he feels this way about this. I
know he doesn't believe in the Trinity. I know he doesn't believe
in the fact of total depravity, that all men are sinful, no one
seeks after God, our throats are an open grave, our tongue
are the tongues of asps. But, you know, we can get some
good out of it. I said, that's like going to a five-star restaurant
and spending $300 on a nice meal. And right before they take your
plate out, which looks extravagant, they flick the roach off the
edge of it. Now, you may not know it's there.
But if you did, you would not eat that food, nor would you
pay for that. It never touched the food. It just sat at the
side. It was like, look at this meal. I'm like, get off of there. It's
not yours. We would not tolerate that. But
yet we'll tolerate just that same type of contamination in
our lives when it comes to worship and to truth and to Scripture
and the like. And so beloved, I want us to
be discerning. I want us to be discriminating. I want you to
understand that the teaching of God's Word is not so that
we can just say we've done our church thing. It's not so that
we can just say that we've gathered together and been to the building. For decades, this very property
was a gas pump. This very awning, the bell is
right there. When people would ding, ding,
ding, and Mr. Rogers would walk out and, leaded or regular or
unleaded, isn't that it? 22 cents a gallon. And the man in the truck was
like, oh, you're a hallway robber! Digging out of his little rubber
coin purse he squeezed on the side and, you know, fill it up,
here's 75 cents. I mean, you know, whatever. That's what this property was
intended for. And as we sit upon it in these
chairs, in this room together, there's an intimacy and a bond
that is supernatural. And we gather each and every
time we gather, not for the sake of saying we're at church, but
the church has come to the gas pump. And if we all go outside
and go to the Ebenezer Mexican Market, then the church has gone
there. The church has gotten into their cars, and the church
has spread abroad and gone about its way. But never is there ever
an opportunity for us to say, that's where I go, well, that
actually might work. That is my church, as we point
to a property. That's the most backward thing
that we've ever allowed to invade our minds and culture. And the things that we do when
we get together, oh, this is what our church does. Are they
biblical? Not are they wicked. I mean,
we're not getting together, toting our Bibles, then we get in here,
turn our crosses upside down and doing some satanic something.
But are we carrying our Bibles in vain? How many Christians
this day, sitting in pulpits, or sitting before pulpits, are
carrying their Bibles in vain every day? How many of us here
have our Bibles this day in vain? Have them, not have them. Read
them, not read them. They're just an object of our
faith, like the casserole ditch in the Southern Baptist Church. We're going to have fellowship.
Let's cook something. Nothing wrong with eating. Nothing
wrong with cooking. Nothing wrong with doing either of those things
together. But let's be real. Man does not live on bread alone
or casserole alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth
of God. And friends, oftentimes when I'm working physically on
a project, I don't eat that day because I could care less about
hunger because I want to see the project done. Those projects
are infinitely not as valuable as my time with Christ. So if I'll skip food for that,
I'll skip food for this because this is true food. I remember
one of my mentors years ago said when he got saved, he was saved
in his dormitory, laying in the bed of his Dorm looking at the
ceiling by flashlight reading the Bible And read the whole
New Testament Not the whole New Testament the whole gospel of
Matthew That night and he got on the floor and he cried and
he prayed that God would forgive him He began to name sins and
name sins one by one years and years and years of sin this 21
22 years of age playing football at a university with Jim Kelly
and those guys and And the first time I ever heard
him speak in a church, he said the next morning, he got up and
he woke up the entire football team who had partied their hearts
out the night before. And he told them, if they're gonna play
on his football team, they're gonna go to church with him.
So they found the closest church they could find and they sat
on the front row. He said he was so amazed, it
was open. They walked in and out, there's never gonna be a
place to sit, we're gonna have to sit out in the back. He said, it was
right in the front row, I could see the preacher's face. I couldn't believe it. The Lord
had just granted us favor, the front row. And so here we are,
all these big beefy guys who did not want to be there. They
all sat on that front row and he said, I sat in the edge of
my seat and going, I just read this last night. The preacher's
talking about what I just read. I couldn't imagine. And he says
toward the end of the sermon, he saw one of the most wicked
things he's ever seen. As he looked back to see if this
is how I feel on my first day in church, what are these people
doing behind me? They're probably break dancing.
And he turns around and he sees this. This is one of the most
evil things he'd ever seen in his life. And that's the heart
of American Christianity, y'all. I've done my due, shut your pothole,
let's go. The roast is burning. There's no time. You ever found
somebody in the parking lot of a place that you visited that
you hadn't seen in a couple of days? Or somebody that you see
often and you just got to jawing? You ever done that? And you get
to jawing, and then next thing you know, that jawing turns to
like a, I don't know, a reunion. Somebody else comes by, hey,
well, I didn't know y'all knew each other. Small world. Yeah,
there's only 20,000 people living around here. Probably no more
than one or two. And all of a sudden you realize,
I've been standing here for an hour. But if I called you up
tomorrow and said, guys, I'd like to meet you outside of Food
Fresh and just stand on the sidewalk. Would you stand on the sidewalk
with me for 45 minutes? What are we going to do? Just
stand there and talk about whatever comes up. You'd be like, you
have lost your mind. But we do it all the time. We
do it all the time. We go into a restaurant. We sit
down, we order our food, next thing you know, we see somebody
or something else. We sit and talk, we sit and jaw, we talk
about the things we love. We make a defense for the things
we believe in. We get engaged in conversations that are none
of our business. You hear the word Clinton or the word Trump
show up, you're like, wow, what do they say? America is going
down the toilet. Let me see if I can be the plunger.
Let me tell you how it should be. You know, we get in the jaw
and the next thing we know, we're just, hours have gone by. We're standing on the sidewalk
or we're in Hollywood, California on tourism. There's nothing to
see there. You see the grommet and then
you leave. That's it. Very understated when you get
there. But all of a sudden you see somebody
that you've seen act as someone else in a movie. I love that
character. You don't know that person from
anybody. They just went into the sandwich
shop. Let's go get a sandwich. Follow them around. I see it all the
time. Oh my gosh, I shook the president's
hand. I've heard people say, I'm never
going to wash this hand. Well, you better, because I've seen how
he does this. Friends, what's the point? We're
going to give time to what we love. And if we can jaw together about
nothing eternal and lose track of time, why is it that we have
such a track of time? when it comes to hearing God's
Word? Why is it that we track, in such rigid blocks, our worship
together? Why is it that we schedule so
often, so harshly, with such boundaries, the intimacy around
the hearing and the preaching and the learning and the living
out the Word of God? I don't know how to answer that
question. But I believe that Paul has answered that question
in last week's message, is that it's a quenching, it's a putting
out of the fire of the Spirit of God. Look at 1 Thessalonians chapter
5. Verse 19 through 22, we'll read these, we'll reiterate,
we'll couple the latter part of verse 21, and then we're going
to go all the way back and show you the context and completeness
of this. Do not quench the Spirit. Do
not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but
test everything. Some texts say, prove everything. Same word. Hold fast to what
is good. Abstain from every form of evil. So last week when we looked at
quenching, putting out the fire of the Holy Spirit, we learned
that there are some things that the Spirit of God does in the
local church that we, when we resist, are in some sense like
putting out the fire of God. But we cannot put out the fire
of God. Remember? Though it's a command
not to, it's a warning more than anything. We cannot douse water
on the burning of God. God burns and that which He sets
afire never goes out. Because if we could put out the
fire of God, the Holy Spirit, then we actually could say we
could walk away from salvation. We could do all sorts of things. But now he says, do not despise
prophecies. Let me tell you why this text
is such a dangerous text out of context. Let's hear it just
like it is. Do not quench the fire of the
Holy Spirit and do not despise prophecies. See how that sounds? For those of you who know the
historical theology of The abuses that we see in Corinth when it
came to the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, a lot of times
people would take this out of context without the wholeness
of the chapter and the phrases and the sentences, the syntax
that makes it work, and the context which makes it understandable,
and they'll just use it as a proof text to say, see, prophesying
is what we ought to be doing. And if we're not allowing prophesying,
then we're quenching the fire of the Spirit. That's true. But defining of the terms is
very essential in any conversation. If I say to you, Cheeto, do you
know what I'm talking about? You're thinking, that's a very
enunciated way to say that. Cheeto. And you might be thinking
about a little crunchy snack whose mascot is a leopard. Or
is that a Dorito? No, that's a Cheeto. Cheeto,
Cheeto, Cheeto. But I'm not talking about Cheeto
that you eat. I'm talking about the toe that you have when you're
full of chi. You know what I'm saying? So even in the stupid stuff,
the defining of the terms is necessary. On a theological sense,
we've talked numerous times over the last few years about the
love of God, how we define God and His love. How we define love
in our culture and our community, how we define love in the subsects
of our own societies. Love for you and love for me
and love for them over yonder may be different. Maybe in my
experience, maybe what I've been taught, but ultimately God defines
all things and God defines love in this, that because He is love,
His love is shown and proven and thus expressed only in the
giving of the Son Jesus Christ. So that when we say to the world
at large, God loves you, what we're saying is, God loves you
only in this way and only in this way. That He gave the Son
for you, that those who reject the Son no longer have any love.
God has no love for those who reject the Son, because that
is their love. That is His love. You see what
I'm saying? But we want to make God feel the way we feel, act
the way we feel, respond the way we respond. The same is true with the word
prophecy. Now we see prophecies in the
Old Testament. Let me define this for us for
a moment. Prophecies in the Old Testament have been noted for
someone to come in as a what? Who does prophecies? A prophet. The prophet prophesies. The prophecies
are what he says. So the Old Testament prophet
The office of prophet was just that, someone like Malachi, someone
like Jeremiah, someone like Noah, someone like Moses. The Lord
would speak to them. and then they would speak to
others. And that which they said that God told them to say was
what? The prophecy. They were prophesying,
saying, thus saith the Lord. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever,
ever, ever, ever do we ever see in the Old Testament anyone going,
huh, and getting a vision of some kind of power they've got,
and then they go, whoa, what's happening? Even in Daniel's day,
when the ruler of Egypt Babylon, when the ruler had dreams and
he wanted someone to tell him what they meant, Daniel did not
have the power to understand those things because he had this
supernatural psychosis of prophesying. The Lord gave Daniel the answer. So that when Daniel walked before
the king and said, this is what your dream means, why did the
king then order everyone to worship Daniel's God? Because Daniel
was not the person who interpreted the dreams, God was. So even the Old Testament prophets
had no power in themselves, but were revealed things by God. So in a nutshell sense, a prophet
and his prophecy are only a tool through which God speaks that
which He says. God is immutable, unchanging,
eternal. His Word is always true. So that
when we see God's Word, God never can contradict that which He
has said. For if He does, then God is changeable. So if God is changeable, then
God is not eternal. If God is changeable, then God's
promises 99.99%. That's not certainty. That's
not a certainty. I have a wisdom tooth that needs
to be extracted because the dentist says it's going to give me trouble.
But it sits in my, what do you call that, cranial nerve, runs
through your jawline. There's a small percentage of
possibility that you could lose the ability of your left side
of your tongue. So that I'd be picking it like this now. Now you might put up with it,
but the Lord be praised, His will be done. But I'm going to
take my chances just leaving it in there. Not going to deal with that.
But yet we want to make God almost perfect, almost right, almost
true when He is always true. So God's Word never changes.
So when the Old Testament prophets would come to town, guess what?
They were esteemed. It's a man of God. They were
feared. Why? Because they came in and
they read the Word of God, and they professed the Word of God,
and they would say, and God says, if you don't do this, then this
will happen. You either turn from your sin
or He's going to condemn you. Isn't that the same thing that
the Gospel starts with? And some prophets were heard
and heeded and adored and some prophets were hated and run out
of town. Jeremiah, poor guy. He was a
New Testament preacher before his day. A reformer before there
was in a very desolate land where nobody wanted to hear the word
of the Lord. Noah, another prophet who preached for a hundred years
with a physical image of salvation sitting before Him. They mocked
Him and laughed at Him. And then when the rain poured
down, they began to cry out. Opened the door. And it was too
late. Why would they not hear the Word
of the Lord through these prophets? Because so often, it's easier
for us to look at what seems natural in this world. Well,
this is the people that I associate with and they're okay. Well,
this person says he's a Christian and he's not really engaged and
on fire for the Lord, so I'm okay. These people are of good
company. They've got good wealth. They've
got good prestige. The culture, the community loves
them. I'm okay. I'd rather have the glory that
comes from man than the glory that comes from God. That's what
we say. Because the glory that came from man in the face of
Noah is that he was ridiculed, laughed at, and called crazy. Six to seven generations of children
grew up into adulthood and had their own children watching Noah
build that boat. Ever thought about that? Seven? Let's just call it an
even seven. Seven generations of children
grew up and had children, who grew up and had children, who
grew up and had... Seven times. So the first generation,
that's Noah. He says, we're all going to drown. Third generation, who's that
guy? What's he doing? Is that a theme park? Can we go? No, you can't go. Stay away from
him. Don't listen to him. He's insane.
He's been building that boat since your grandmother was a
child. Don't go near that guy. He's an idiot. I mean, think about it. A hundred
years He built and preached, and built and preached, and built
and preached, and built and preached. And by that end of His days,
or by the end of that time before judgment came, people just ignored
Him. Because what was normative among
the world was to ignore that. Because it was only a few people
who were following Him. And those were His children too
that had to sort of go. And their children, and the future
of their children, through whom we were born, all of us. And to see that, and to hear
the Word of the Lord and knowing that He is true, and to reject
that as a quenching of the Spirit of God, as a despising of prophecy. In the New Testament, prophets
came through the way of apostolic authority. and then apostolic authority
submitted to the written text. Listen to this. There is no such
thing as the office of the oracle of God who received revelation
apart from the Bible. As the apostles penned it and
secured it, then their mouths were silenced. And Paul never sat down and said,
I'm going to write me a holy writ. James didn't write his letter
and say, oh, I'm going to write some scripture here. Peter, those
two letters, he not once got together and thought, you know,
I need to write a little portion of a holy book for the Christian
faith. Let me put it down. No, these people wrote letters
pleading, showing, teaching, admonishing, exhorting, encouraging
the body of Christ to stay in that which they have been taught
through the apostles. And then they said, well hey,
we can't have Paul teach in all of our churches, but we've got
his letters, let's copy them and get them out to every Christian
we can. These are letters. Let's share the letters of the
apostles to us. The prophecies of God through
the apostles are written down in the New Testament. And God
supernaturally and divinely orchestrated every bit of this. That as the
Holy Spirit, who is the author of the Word of God, through the
persuasion, through the wisdom, through the writing of men, God
and His prophets are anyone who opens their mouth and says, thus
saith the Lord, do not quench the Spirit of God, do not despise
prophecies, but test everything, hold fast to what is good, and
abstain from every kind of evil. What just happened in that moment
through the ears of the language which God gave you to receive
is that God spoke in a prophetic way to you. And I'm just a couple of vocal
cords and a pale face to present it. And when I die, another voice
like yours can continue to perpetuate the prophecies of God. So that
when we see in the New Testament someone saying, do not despise
prophecies, in the context of this writing, it has nothing
to do with people telling the future. It has nothing to do
with someone coming and saying, I got a fresh revelation of God.
That's heresy, that's false teaching, that is obvious, and nobody's
arguing that. But what's happened here in Thessalonica,
as you'll see in 2 Thessalonians, is that there were some teachers
of the Word of God who began to impart some very disturbing
doctrine. The word doctrine meaning teaching.
And these teachers began to say that the second coming of the
Lord had come. And y'all missed it. I mean,
wouldn't that be a terrible day? We get together and we're standing
there and say, guys, I got a telegram last night from heaven. We've
got a Facebook messenger. Faithbook messenger. You know,
us pastors, we've got that little connection. He's friends with
us. You can just follow him, but he's friends with us. This
is ridiculous. And God sent me a message that
Jesus came back a couple of weekends ago, and we've missed it. That's what happened. And so
I would say that God said that Christ has already come back.
I lied. But I'm saying that it's teaching from the Word of God.
And Paul is saying to discern these things. And just because
someone led you astray by some teaching, don't make all teaching
suspect. You hear that? Don't run around, even... And I'm going to kill you on
this one. Even when you know a heretic opens his mouth, if
he preaches the truth, you better hear it, heed it. Sometimes just
for entertainment, then turns to melancholy, I like to turn
on the radio and hear some things. Nothing else to do. I'm not having
a root canal, so I might as well do something a little less challenging.
What does this guy have to say? Oh, I know who that is. I recognize
that voice. Oh, that was awful. Oh, it's like a bad boxing match,
you know. And then you're like tearing
up, because you know there's like 50,000 people listening
to it, and like 9 million listen to it on the radio, watch it
on TV, and then you're like, what in the world? And then,
all of a sudden, in some sense of clarity out of a, what, 18
and a half minute sermon, there's like 45 seconds of actual Scripture
quoted. You're like, I heard the Lord.
See? I heard the Lord! I heard Jesus
speak! There's hope for the world. Oh,
this is this guy. I'm back to him now. Don't despise prophecies when
the Word of God is taught to you, even if it comes through
your irritating neighbor who knows he's going to hell. When
he reminds you, you know, doesn't your Bible say? The answer is
not, yes, it says, but who are you to tell me? Listen, if he
quotes the Bible God's told you, I don't care if it comes from
a heathen or not. We don't despise prophecies, thus quenching the
spirit. If our five-year-old rebukes
us for our sin, we are slapping God when we do not hear it. Now,
if they're haughty and they use some other words and they snap
their fingers, then we can justly deal with it. And I'm gonna punish
you for your attitude, young lady, but you spoke truth. Go
to time out, six years. Do not quench the Spirit. Do
not despise prophecies. So this isn't prophecy as in
seeing the future, which is what this bad eschatology brought,
the Thessalonians. And it had put them on a skittish
road. So now every time they heard someone, they thought,
well, I'm just not listening to anything. Have you been there, church?
I've been there. I grew up knowing everything
about the Bible. I knew everything. You can just
ask me. Yeah, I know everything. I don't
want to hear somebody tell me about anything. Somebody would
say, oh, you know what I read today in Romans? I would say,
oh yeah, I know that. I read all that already. I mean,
that's... Isn't that the way we're raised? Jesus, die, raised from death. Walt Blau said the prayer. Hey!
What else is there to know? I don't care about all that deep
stuff. And so we know it all. I don't
want to hear somebody tell me anything about the Bible. They
read it over the weekend and now they're going to teach me
something. I mean, I'm a kid when I'm talking about this stuff.
I mean, this is how we act. This is how we feel. We don't
want to hear these things. But this prophecy, this prophesying
is specifically The articulation of God's Word to the New Testament
church, not only in its instruction, but in its application. The Lord
has not come, therefore be ready. Therefore live as a holy people.
Therefore be prepared to be presented on the day of judgment. Pray,
cast your cares and your burdens upon the Lord. Trust in Him. Know what He's done for you.
These are the teachings. This is prophesying. The office
of prophet is really no more. But the exercising of prophecy
stands in the hands of those who teach the Word of God. So
in the New Testament sense, the only people who are truly prophets
are those who teach the true Scripture. And if I teach you
something that's not in here, that prophecy is a lie. And if
you love me, you'll correct me. If you don't love me, you'll just let it go and then
talk about it behind my back. So what are we supposed to see
from this? Well, last week we learned that the Spirit is the
illuminator. The Spirit of God is the One, is the Person of
the Godhead who reveals truth. You hear me? Remember that. The
Spirit of God gives us the understanding of truth, the ears to hear and
believe truth. And so when we hear someone teach
God's Word, the Spirit of God, the reason you can grasp it,
the reason you can follow it, even in the babbling of your
pastor, is that God gives you the understanding of the Word. It clearly works with your worldview.
It clearly works because the Spirit of God who lives within
you gives you an extreme vision, an open-eyed visualization of
what is being said and taught. I see it. I understand it. And
sometimes these new ideas that we've not necessarily, they're
not new, they've been here forever, but these new things that we've
not ever contemplated before then bring friction to our lives
and the Spirit of God lets us work these things out and helps
us understand them and correct those errors. I mentioned it before, but I remember
thinking I knew everything. And then all of a sudden in a
season of my life, I realized I knew nothing. I knew nothing,
and everything that I thought that I knew about who God was,
was half truth. Everything about Christ, the small little thimble full
of things that I had in the sense of Christology, the study of
Jesus Christ, was so insignificant in the whole picture of who He
was. The eternality of the Son, The virgin birth, all these things,
they were just, oh yes, I have it, I understand, I got it. We
don't have it. So even when we've studied them for our entire lives,
we are in awe and we are in wonder, and we sit there and we go, wow!
What a mighty God stands before us. What a majestic Father looks
down upon us. What a loving and kind and merciful
King. to give Himself for us. And the
list could go on and on and on, but friends, the Spirit of God,
and only the Spirit of God has given us that understanding.
We cannot lean upon our own understanding as we see in the Old Testament.
We cannot lean upon our own wisdom, our own academics, our own study,
or anything. If I prepare to preach to you,
and I prepare in my flesh, it will be very obvious to you.
And I've had brothers in this church a few years ago during
a couple of weeks where it was just a very difficult time. And
they caught me at the door. And one of them was a little
stern. What kind of sin are you involved with? Y'all are laughing because you
know who he is, some of you. I'm like, whoa! Do you have time
to take a list? I mean, what are you talking
about? Your preaching was off, brother. So either you're living
in sin or something's wrong. I said, well, let's talk later,
not in front of everybody right here. But he had discernment. No, something was, I was preaching
on my flesh, fatigued. And my heart that day was, if
I don't get this focused, the church isn't gonna understand
it. Rather than God, if you don't show me these things and speak
through me, it's gonna be a disaster. I don't care how much you study.
The Spirit of God doesn't show us the truth. I don't care how
much you hear teaching. Little simple things like Jesse
and I was talking about yesterday. I do all sorts of things throughout
my day. Recently I've been doing some
sheet rocking and some different things in the new building. And
I have not once prayed, Lord, keep me safe. Lord, don't let
me hurt my back. I'm just like, I'm going to keep
my back straight, I'm going to do what's right, I'm going to do like this,
and I'm hurt. We take for granted just the simplest things that
we ought to have the faith in God to at least exclaim to His
ears. Lord, I am worn out, but I'll
do it through preaching, but why not everything? Do we pray? Do you pray for yourself? Lord, not only will you give
me the ability to do what needs to be done to be in the fellowship
of the saints tomorrow, but will you give me the heart to really
meditate on Your Word tonight and not watch TV? Will You give me the intimacy?
Will You give me the drive? Would Your Spirit rise up inside
of me, Father, and to help me be a student of Your Word because
I love You? We take for granted so many things.
And friends, we all take for granted that we'll just come
to church and be awed by the Word of God. But if God doesn't
show us these things through His Spirit, we are not going
to be awed at all. The Spirit is the illuminator
of truth. The Word of God alone teaches us the truth through
the Spirit this very day, through its learning and through its
teaching. So then, because of these things, a combination of
today and last week, quenching the Spirit includes not putting
the teaching and the preaching of God's Word in its proper place
and with its proper authority. Did you hear that? Quenching
the Spirit of God is to displace the authority and the purpose
and the power of the teaching and preaching of God's Word. Do we do that? Probably not if
you haven't asked that question. But probably so in areas that
we don't even think about sometimes. Probably not in the context of
our local assembly, not in the context of our daily lives. You
know, most of us, we're going to go to the Word of God numerous
times throughout the week. We're going to read it, we're
going to study it, we're going to meditate on it. We're going to find ourselves
up in the middle of the night, so we'll go to the Word of God.
I'm going to learn, I'm going to see. And in times of trials,
in times of suffering, you know. But there are times when we quench
the Spirit of God in this. not putting the Word of God in
its proper place and authority. Quenching the Spirit of God that
we learned last week is to resist the work of God in His church
as He sees fit. For example, like their mutual
benefit. The Lord works for the mutual
benefit of the church. Quenching the Spirit of God would
be, I'm not important, I'm not needed, nobody will miss me,
I have no role, I have no authority, we don't have positions in this
flock. We don't have positions of authority
in this church. Jesus is the head of the church
and He's taken a sinner like me and saved me and given me
a mouth that can speak without a PA. And so He's just going
to use it until it dries up. And He's equipped all of you
with the same type of ability. He's equipped each one of us
with a heart to pray and to love each other and to serve as needs
arise. And as we grow larger, we're
going to have to be very intentional on being very intimate. Because
it's easy to have about 15 or 20 people that you really love
and you can really depend on and you can really be intimate
with, but after that circle gets larger, larger, larger. You can't.
If I told you to call 100 people today, you'd never do it. I want
you to take this list of 100 people and call and ask each
of them how they're doing and pray with every one of them.
If and if you were going to do it, you'd get 3. And that'd take
you 4 to 5 hours to get those 3. So there's always a need for
God to place more people in the congregation to meet somebody
else's need and their own needs. To reject that, to not be submissive
to that, is like quenching the Spirit. And I'm going to use
that in a simile because we know it's not truly quenching the
Spirit, but it is resisting. The Spirit of God does the work
of God in His church as He sees fit for their mutual benefit,
for their mutual maturity as Paul teaches in Ephesians, that
we grow up into maturity and to Him who is the head. Friends,
we are here today to grow. And some of us are sitting here
going, well, I'm not really invested. Well, you know what? God's growing
you now. Maybe you're an object of ministry
and then one day you'll be the giver of ministry. But let me
correct that. If we had no objects of weakness
that needed ministry, there'd be no ministry. So even when
I'm unable to minister, if you minister to me, it's ministry
for me, and it's ministry to me, and it's my ministry as well.
Being the object is just as important as being the one who does and
who gives. Being the recipient is just as
essential as the one who is the gift giver. But as God brings us through
the fire, and we're strengthened just a little bit, we can give
to someone else. Much like the story that my grandmother,
Adam's pastor, told at her funeral, is that when she first got diagnosed
with cancer, and he sat by her bed, and he wept, he could not
even pray for her, he wept, he was so distraught that she was
bedridden with cancer, and she put her hand on his head and
prayed for him. So the whole point, he thought
he was a minister and he was a recipient of ministry and another
person's weakness. So don't ever think you're too broken, too
sick, too unworthy or whatever, that's not the word I'm looking
for, but unready, unprepared to minister to someone. The Spirit does the work of God
in His church as He sees fit for the holiness of the church.
Friends, we are gathered together this day for maturity, for mutual
benefit, and that we would strive to be more like Christ. The application
for the teaching of the Word of God is the point. God is holy. He commands us to
be holy. The Word of God says we can't
be holy. The Word of God says that He has created us to be
holy and secured our holiness through Jesus Christ to be received
by faith. Therefore, we're holy and standing, justified before
God without any guilt of any sin, for Christ took it all and
paid the full price for it. So therefore, we stand redeemed. But yet we look in the mirror
of our souls and we know, while this little flesh of mine continues
to rise up, continues to fight, continues to cause war, but the
war is not mine, the battle is already won, and I'm a victor. Paul says we're more than victors. Why? Because Christ has set the
record straight. And the Spirit of God that is
given to us enables us to what? To strive and live and put to
death the flesh. How? By the Spirit of God through
the Word of God. So if we despise prophecies,
we're despising the very thing that God is doing in the church. The very vehicle through which
He works to make us mature and holy and intimate. The very instrument
through which God works to bring knowledge. How am I going to
deal with this in my life? What am I supposed to do? How
am I going to know the will of God for my life? Through the
Holy Spirit of God, through the Word of God, by the grace of
God, that you may understand that even when the answer is,
I'm not telling you, we are at peace. And the only way you'll have
wisdom, Friends, one of the greatest sins of so-called quenching the
Spirit in the life of a Christian is when we fret, and we pray,
and we fret, and we think, and we contemplate, and we just wring
our hands. What am I going to do? What am
I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And
we do it every day in some sense of our mind. We do it every day. Our first response to any calamity,
to any decision, to any frustration, to any obstacle should be, praise
you God. I praise you, Father. For in
this moment, no matter what the outcome of this thing might be,
I know that you've put it here for my good and that this is
a gift from heaven. Cancer? Yes, cancer. Death of
a child? You better believe it. Job problems? Amen. Don't forget that the devil has
the authority to give riches. Don't forget that the devil has
authority to give power. Don't forget that the devil has
the authority to offer the world. He offered it to the God of heaven.
If you bow down to me, I'll give you the world. Why? Because the world is a nothing
chunk, piece of nothing in comparison to worship. You can have the
cosmos, the devil says. If it was mine to give, that's
part of the stupidity of Satan, he thinks it's his. He thought Rome and the Sanhedrin
worked for him when the devil is a puppet in the hand of God. So despising prophecies, this
is how the Spirit works, to quench the Spirit is to put water on
the work of God through His church and in His church. Despising
prophecies happens when people refuse the teaching of the Word.
Have we ever refused the teaching of the Word? Absolutely. I have refused the teaching of
the Word. Buy yourself a really nice Bible
that costs you 60 bucks. You will never throw it. Why would you throw a Bible?
You haven't read it all. If you've read all the Bible,
Especially during times where you really didn't want to hear
what was just said. If you're the type of guy that likes to
throw things in the trash. I'm the type of guy that likes to throw
things in the trash. That is my M.O. This bothers me, goes
in the trash. It breaks, goes in the trash.
I love to throw stuff in the trash. I don't know why. Do we
get that from dad? I don't know what it is. No,
he doesn't throw anything away. I don't throw anything away either,
but when it bothers me. And I remember, I've read A.W. Pink before. First
time I ever read A.W. Pink, I threw it in the trash. Sitting there by my, I mean,
I have a big old desk at the time. It was a stretch from here to
the front row. It's full of stuff and I've been reading and one
of my staff members brought it in. Oh, Pastor, read this. It'll
lift your soul. I read it and I lift my soul, lift my soul.
And the very last line, I'm like, that's garbage. Threw it right
in the trash. Dug it out the next day, but that was my answer. You get a Bible sometimes, you
know, those little dollar Bibles and you're reading through like,
just slinging across the room. That's how academics work. That's why textbooks cost so
much money because we're not going to throw them. But have you ever been where
you just didn't want to receive the teaching of the Word of God?
I don't want to hear that. I don't want to read that. Friends,
don't look at me so puzzled. Who is this guy? This is the
heart of humanity. And if it weren't for the Spirit
of God and the power of regeneration through the Gospel, we would
never, ever want to hear the Word of God. The reason that
I want the Word of God is because in the Word is where life is
found, and in the Word is where friendship with God is found,
and in the Word is where the power of God is found for Jesus
to be my brother. Forgiveness in my heart comes
through the Word of God. Love and affection and worship.
The answer to worry, the answer to famine, the answer to dissatisfaction,
the answer to marriage problems, the answer to rebellious children,
the answer to a hated life and persecution and death and suffering
is found in the Word of God. But the first thing our flesh
does is, what am I going to do about it? Don't despise. prophecies by
refusing the teaching of the Word of God. Despising prophecies
happens when we refuse the teaching of the Word of God. And despising
prophecy happens when we downplay the authority of the Word of
God. We don't put Sola Scriptura as
a banner of our being so that we can just sound cool and reformed.
Any Protestant church that does not understand or hold to the
doctrine of Scripture alone is no church. So what do you mean? I mean that there are many congregations
who are just infants. How do you know that? Because
I've been in ministry two decades and I've sat in thousands of
meetings in which very few, if any, people had a Bible. What
are we going to do about this problem? And they have Robert's
Rules of Orders. Order. They usually have multiple
copies. They have the Constitution and
Bylaws. They have a card from a lawyer's office. And the audacity to open in prayer
made me want to hurl. Is that bad to say? That means
vomit. Jesus says it in Revelation.
If you look warm, He'll vomit you out of His mouth. And it is comments like that
that people don't want to hear, because they downplay the authority
of the Word of God. You know why? Because we can
write a document that says we'll do it our way. We can write a
document that says the governing authority of the Word of God
doesn't have anything to do with our church when it comes to our
members and how we do discipline and how we call a pastor. We're
going to do it the way IBM does it. We're going to do it the way
this man wants it done because his granddaddy paid for the building. Burn it down! That's my answer. March of 2002, I stood in the pulpit at Norwich
Baptist Church, church of about 1600, and I took a trash can
and a lighter. Which shall I burn? The Bible
or the Constitution of Bylaws? It didn't go over well. I was stupid. I shouldn't have
done that. I was very arrogant. I felt so good after that. I'm like, yeah, I should have,
you know, and then I left a little while after that. It was sinful. The point wasn't
sinful. That was just making people angry
for the point of making people angry. You see what I mean? But
that's what we do. We refuse prophecy. We despise
it. When we don't understand that
when we put other things in place of Scripture, or in addition
to Scripture, we are downplaying the authority of Scripture, and
prophecy means that we are telling God to shut His mouth. When we
downplay what Scripture teaches us clearly because we don't like
it, we are saying, shut up God. You are blabbering on too much.
Now, we would never do that, but that's what we're doing.
Are we not? That's harsh. And that's within it. And we've
all done it. And we'll do it again in a few weeks. We'll have
some circumstance where we will downplay the authority of the
Lord. And what's crazy is the Spirit of God within us will
bring to remembrance the Word. I'm just walking around grumpy.
You know, when I'm grumpy, there's two passages of Scripture that
always come into my mind. What are they? Do all things
without grumbling and complaining. And 1 Thessalonians 5, rejoice
always. Thanksgiving and prayer at all
times and all circumstances. And I sit there and my spirit
goes, shut up, I don't want to hear it. I mean, you know. Ah,
you're right. You see what I mean? That's the burn of the flesh. But we who are in the Lord, it's
actually a blessing. because it takes it away from
us, it takes obedience away from us, it takes this sin away from
us, it takes the guilt away from us, and we go, wow, the Lord
was merciful. He gave me the Word that has
already been there, and here we are. But there are some times
when we don't forgive your enemies, love your enemies, love those
who persecute you, pray for those who hurt you, bless your enemies. Oh yeah, see. Does that ring out when the boss
man makes you just... and you go outside and you, I
don't know, throw a stink bomb in his truck or become vindictive?
Whatever it is you try to do? Try to catch him taking pencils
home without paying for them? He's the boss man. We despise prophecy when we want
some other wisdom. when we don't want to seek the
wisdom of God or the wisdom of God's people. Friends, this is
a big one. I get calls all the time. I have a new number. And
for those of you who have my number, it is private. Let me
just tell you that. Don't give it away. Don't put
it on Facebook, please. That's what happened to the last
one. Somebody, is this still your number? And I'm just like,
it's over. He took it down in like five minutes, but it was
over. And not only did people just start calling me out of
the blue, and then it ended up I'm getting mortgage calls and
calls from Turkey and all sorts of places. I had five, six fundraising
companies and banks trying to get the church to borrow money.
And I mean, it was just awful. It's just unbelievable. Please
don't put it out there. But people will call and say,
can I talk to you? I've got a problem. And you sit
them down, and I always like to preface when I do counsel,
friends, there's not a whole lot that I can say to you, but
I can show you what God has to say about this situation and
how we're supposed to apply it to the circumstances. Because
honestly, there's nothing that I have to say that's important
or even going to help. This is ridiculous. And they'll,
oh, that's good. Do you see this? Do you agree
with this? Okay, you agree. So what you know is what I've shown
you is God telling you this is how this is supposed to be. Absolutely.
And a day or two later, somebody else will call me. Hey, I just
got a call from so and so. And we're supposed to sit down. He's looking
for wisdom on this issue. I thought I'd call you and ask
you what you think I should tell him. Why don't you just tell
him to remember what I told him and send him back over here?
I mean, this is really what happens. Why? Because we don't want that
wisdom. We've got in our mind what we want somebody to tell
us and we go around and we try to find it. Well, I don't really
want to be told to be patient in this situation. I want somebody
to show me that it's okay for me to hate this guy or at least
cause him some pain. It's okay for me to be frustrated.
It's okay for me to not speak to my spouse. It's okay. I just
want somebody... What is that? Paul tells us in
Timothy, what? That's people gathering up teachers
to scratch their itching ears. That's despising prophecy. I
want the other wisdom. I want someone else who's gone
through this to help me with this. Listen, if it's not from
the Word of God, it's from the mouth of the devil. All the philosophy,
all the prophecy, all, any of it. Psychology, any of it. If it contradicts God's Word,
it is of the enemy. I don't care how good it works,
how well it works. Despising prophecies is when
not only do we refuse it, downplay the authority, want some other
wisdom, but we feel that the Word is insufficient, so we don't
heed it. Well, that was, you know, that's
really not this... I know this goes with the one I just said,
but sometimes we just feel like the Word's not sufficient. It's
not that we downplay the Word and go, that's not the Bible.
We say the Bible is ultimate, the Bible is authoritative, but
in this circumstance, The Bible's really silent. And I hear it
all the time in relation to homosexual, so-called homosexual marriage.
The Bible is not silent on that. Jesus Himself speaks to that
issue when He says, it is so from the beginning that man and
wife should be, what? Male and female. Because marriage
is a tiny, microscopic picture of the macrocosmic reality of
Jesus Christ and His church. So it doesn't matter how we feel,
think, or want to think about it. So we do not, what? We do not
give in to evil. Verse 22, we abstain from it.
We don't heed the Word. James says, he who sees the Word
and does not do it. What is it? He who knows to do
right and does not is sin. This is sin. Be not just hearers,
but also be doers of the Word. People like to pit Paul and James
together when it comes to faith. Faith without works is dead.
Why? Because the works are God's.
God produces the faith. God produces the holiness. God
produces the belief on Scripture. God produces the drive, the passion,
the zeal, the effort. Well, I just got to get my life
together. You are not seeing the picture of the sovereign
God, are you? When we continue to say, we've
got to get our lives together, it's unbelief. God puts our life together or
we're condemned. And friends, you may find that
frightening, but friend, there's no better picture than diving off the cliff of
self-sufficiency with our eyes closed and letting our Father
catch us. Or better yet, we think we're
diving and He's holding us the whole time. Something else to think about
of how despising prophecies can invade the church is when preachers
dilute the living from the learning. When we take the Bible and we
part it out to such a degree that we give you little life's
lessons and we never apply it to the intimacy of living as
a people of faith together for the glory of God, we fail. And
a lot of preachers despise prophecy because they believe that the
church needs something different. That learning the depths of the
knowledge of God is something that theologians do. But friend,
if you're not a theologian according to Jesus in John 17, you're not
a child of God. You don't have to know the very
definition of propitiation. You don't have to know all the
cool theological terms, the seminarian terms and the ologies and the
isms. But you've got to know God and you've got to know Jesus
Christ the Son. This is eternal life. That's
what Jesus says. So if that's eternal life, we
have to teach it continually. The Word of God is sufficient. So let's put this all in closing
in the context. What do we do from here? Let's review. God has bought
believers through Jesus Christ. God has called them into faith
with power. Thinking about chapter 1 of 1
Thessalonians. God has given the Word of God
and through the Spirit given ears to hear and believe. We
receive the Word and power into salvation with much affliction
and much joy. Our minds and hearts are made new. through the power
and through the Word of God. Our lives are given grace through
the Word of God. Our lives are molded through
exhortation and admonition through the Word of God. Our affections
and attitudes are divinely changed by the Scripture. Elders are
called and gifted by God to prophesy before the church this very word.
Elders prophesy through the preaching for the benefit of the church.
The church exalts the role of God in this gift for their good.
With all affection, with all honor, the church is equipped
to love each other and to lead others with all patience. Therefore,
we do not despise this teaching. We do not despise the Lord's
Word. We do not quench the Spirit in this way by the flesh, by
not submitting to the Word of God. That comes into the reality that
a lot of people are seeking preachers, not pastors. What's the difference? People
like to hear a message. but they don't want to be held
to the standard. When we step out of the standard,
we who are spiritual draw each other back. And when we don't
repent and come into the fold with newness, you know what happens? The church must expel those who
do not repent. I want you to hear what I'm saying
right now. And you might think, how does a little old church
in Claxton, of just a couple of dozen folks, have to deal
with something like that? Because we are a group of people
who are very subject to sin. And all of us are guilty of sin,
for John says, he who has no sin, says he has no sin, is a
liar. If we sin, we have an advocate with the Father. Friends, when
we sin, the Spirit of God, through the Word of God, no matter which
mouth it comes from, restores us, and we are then what? Forgiven and embraced. But if
cancer stays unchecked in the body, We die. If cancer stays unchecked in
the body of Christ, we die. So we exercise church discipline
because it is the command of God through the Word of God.
Sometimes churches don't ever preach correctly because they
know that if they take it here, they're going to have to take
it there. So when someone's shepherded,
that means they're accountable for that which they've been taught. And that's what the Bible teaches.
And friends, if we don't heed that, and if we don't hear the
brothers and sisters, we find ourselves subject to the Word
of God still through the expulsion by the church. You know what
it looks like to be expelled from the fellowship of the church? It's got nothing to do with this
room or this service. It's got everything to do with
each of our lives. When church discipline is exercised,
we have nothing else to do with that person in life until they
repent. Sometimes we despise prophecy
when we hear that. Be in prayer about that. For
we are not immune to it. But we are subject to it. Because
it goes on to say, but test everything. Prove everything. Prove it genuine. The word test there is like taking
gold and scratching it and putting certain types of acid on it to
see what caliber of gold, what authenticity of gold, of a precious
metal. That's what that word in the
Greek means. We're to prove it authentic. or to prove the teaching
of the Word of God authentic. What I've said to you today,
prove it authentic by getting in the Word and letting the Spirit
show you. Prove it authentic. Hold fast
to what is good and then abstain from every form of evil. And
that is where we'll be next week. as we learn that as we see and
hear, we test and we prove that which is good, and we hold fast
to the living God and His Word as it has shown us, because therein
lay the words of eternal life. And in the end, beloved, the
children of God devour the Word of God. Eat it up. They do not
slip away from His voice. They know the voice of their
Shepherd. We know that the Word protects us. We know that the
Word satisfies us. And we know that the Word prepares
us for an eternal weight of glory, even when this life falls apart. Let's pray. Father, we thank You, Lord, for
this opportunity again to come to worship together. Lord, this
Word is powerful, freeing, glorious. Lord, please cause
it to work into us effectually. Let us be ever mindful of our
lives, of our holiness, of Your grace, of our fellowship. Father, as we see different things,
not better, not new, but different things coming as a congregation,
Father, because the world in which we live is ever-changing,
we pray, Lord, that You would give us satisfaction through
it all, that You would keep us from idols, that You would restore
our joy every moment of our lives, that You would remind us every
day of Your Word that is in us because we eat it, that You would
show us that the written Word is the only way You point us
to Yourself, because Jesus is the Word, and He makes You known. And Lord, that even in the darkest
of our days we are not alone, but we are forgiven, We are with
You and You with us. And Lord, I pray that as this
message of truth and hope is continually purveyed through
this pulpit, Lord, that starting this very day, Lord, that You
would save those who are lost. That they would believe on Jesus
Christ. That they would understand their
place in You. And it is in His name we pray.
Amen.