#STRask - Can God Be Real and Personal to Me If the Sign Gifts of the Spirit Are Rare?

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Questions about disappointment that the sign gifts of the Spirit seem rare, non-existent, or fake, whether or not believers can squelch the Holy Spirit, and whether 2 Peter 1:21 points to the Holy Spirit “impressing” us during prophecy.   I came to faith because the gifts of the Spirit that seemed integral to church life in the Bible made God so real and personal, but now that I’ve found the gifts to be rare, non-existent, or fake, I have doubts I know anything about God. Can the squelching of the Holy Spirit be supported biblically, and can we, as believers, squelch the Holy Spirit? Does 2 Peter 1:21 point to the Holy Spirit “impressing” us during prophecy?

– music – Welcome to another episode of the Hashtag STRask podcast. I'm Amy Hall and I'm here with Greg Kockel. Amy. And we're here to answer your questions. and we're going to start today with one from Jess. Gifts of the Spirit seem real and integral to church life on Bible reading. Part of why I came to an act of faith is because these things made God so real and personal, but in practice, I've found the gifts extremely rare, nonexistent, or fake. This has made me have doubts I know anything about God.

This is, to me, a bit of an unusual question. There's an old saw that says, whatever you're one with, you will be one too. Whatever you're one with, you will be one too. So if you are one, W-O-N, to Christ through a religious experience, you are one, W-O-N, to Christ through a religious experience, you are one W-O-N, two religious experiences. This is what brought you into the kingdom, and so this is what you're looking for as a standard in your life with Christ. So in this particular case, Jess seems to be saying, I was one to Christ through beholding or being aware of or participating in these kind of traumatic expressions of the Spirit. And now what he's looking for is this to be the standard in the Christian life. And it's not. It doesn't happen that often. And a lot of times when it

appears to be happening, it seems like it's not legitimate. And so now he's wondering whether the initial experiences were legitimate too. Okay, I think people can see, you know, the problem here. You kind of started out on the wrong foot. If you are one, two, Christianity through these things, it's these things that are the focus, and then when that changes, or something about that changes when you become walking with the Lord, wow, that can really shake things up. As opposed to somebody who is one through the truth of the gospel, and then there's a sense that the truth of the gospel doesn't change even when our experiences change, the truth is still the truth, and that creates some stability.

So, that's my sense of the problem here. I do think that there are dramatic things the Holy Spirit does in the lives of Christians, even today. I have no reason to believe that certain supernatural manifestations were part of the first century and no longer happen today. I'm not a cessationist, but I am, you know, of the opinion that most of the time we see things like tongues and prophecies, which are kind of the more popular manifestations of spiritual gifts in certain church circles, I don't think they're legitimate. My first 25 years as a Christian was in a charismatic environment, and I heard lots of prophecies. I don't think I ever

heard a real one. But that doesn't mean there's no prophecy, and that doesn't mean the Spirit isn't real, and that doesn't mean the Spirit isn't real, and that doesn't mean that God isn't real, not to me, because none of those things had any relationship to my conversion. But if a person's conversion is somewhat predicated on those things, and then afterwards they find out, wow, it isn't the way I thought it would be in my daily Christian life, now they're going to question the foundation. And my point is, well, that's not the right foundation.

And I see a couple points here. First, the idea that you're looking at the Bible and the gifts of the Spirit seem real and integral, and then you find now that they're extremely rare. Well, we've talked before about how the Bible is telling us the main turning points of history where God brought a lot of miracles. For example, in the Old Testament, it's focused on the times when God had a prophet who was giving a lot of miracles for a particular reason, whether that was Moses or Elijah or whoever it was, but we've got all this time compressed into this book, and so we're seeing the parts where God was doing these miraculous things. That doesn't mean it was happening all the time. It was probably rare then, too. In fact, it even

says at one point that they were rare in those days. Yeah, that's Samuel. Right. And that didn't mean God didn't exist, it just means that's not what He was doing at that time. And so we see the same thing. In the New Testament, we see a lot of signs. We see a lot of signs that Jesus did. We see a lot of signs that the apostles did. That doesn't mean that that was going to continue in exactly the same percentage of happenings

that it would continue now because God's not starting something new now. And it could be that in other countries where he's starting something up that he could do more there, I don't know. But the idea is, it's not a surprise that we are seeing all of these things happening in the Bible because those were the things that needed to be reported. We're not in that situation today. So that's the first point. But the second thing here is this idea that it's the gifts of the Spirit that make God real and personal. And here's where I think you need to change the way you think about how you interact with God, because just even reading

His Word and seeing who He is and meditating on who He is and thinking about Him and praying and seeing answers to prayer and seeing how He's worked in your past life and looking back and seeing what He's done and feeling that sense of His presence and that comfort. All of those things are real and personal without having a Word of knowledge or a prophecy or a miraculous thing. In fact, to me, those are even more real and personal because they're consistent and they go throughout your life. They're constant and they don't go up and down. They're not one miraculous thing here and there. I just don't think we're likely to see tons of those. But that doesn't mean there's no way to interact with God and to see Him and to know that He's

here and not just intellectually, but a sense of the Spirit, a sense of His presence. All of those things can be there without the gifts. So I think you're putting too much importance on the gifts and you're putting too much on them that they weren't meant to do. They weren't meant to make God real and personal to us. And then finally, the last point here that just makes, it says here, this has made me have doubts I know anything about God. It might be you don't know much about God. It really might be. If you have been focusing on kind of miraculous signs in the present and you

haven't been looking at what God says about himself and what he revealed objectively for every Christian to have access to, then there probably are a lot of things you don't know about God. So you need to start with a better foundation, the foundation that He gave to us in His Word, and find out who He is there and what He does. And just do a lot of thinking about that. Now, to be fair, Jess does say that this came from a reading of the Bible, but you also need to understand what I just said, that that doesn't mean it continues on today. It can be true that God did a lot of miraculous things at certain points in history and that he doesn't do them today.

So on this issue of Knowing God Better, there are two titles that I'd recommend. One, the classic by J.I. Packer called Knowing God. It's been around for a long time and it's an evergreen book and has helped a lot of Christians. Then there's another one called Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozier. Not everybody likes Tozier. I liked him early in my Christian life and then, oh, he's a bit intense, maybe even severe, but he has very good teaching. In fact, my pastor quoted from him last, I think the last, Sunday before last, which is the last service that was out, and on the character of God, and how Tozier says, the most important thing about your Christian life is what you understand God to be like,

something to that effect. Your view of God is going to influence everything else, and he addresses that knowledge of the Holy. So this is an area we all need a foundation in, especially if we are drawn into Christianity because of some kind of subject, dramatic, subjective experience. Nothing wrong with that, but we just have to remind ourselves that that isn't the day-to-day. It's kind of thinking about marriage. You know, people meet each other and they fall in love and they're on this big thing and then they get married.

Well, it's just great. But the honeymoon ends. And then you get on with the day-to-day issues of living and it can get much more difficult. And then it can be good, and then it's hard, and then it's good, and then it's hard, and it's up and down. Well, there's a very similar element here with Christianity, where in fact, remember the Jesus movement, we would talk about the honeymoon. People become Christians, and it's like, wow! Crazy, cool, everything's wonderful.

God seems to be showing up everywhere. I had more dramatic experiences with God my first couple of years as a Christian than I've had in the last 50 years since then, in aggregate. But that's just the way relationship with God works. And God settles down from all the drama into sanctification and steady growth and living and productivity as an ambassador and as a disciple. And that's different than the honeymoon. And some people don't survive once the honeymoon is over, because for them it's all about the honeymoon. And some marriages don't survive either the same

way. So I think the parallel is apt. Okay, let's go to a question from Erin. I've heard people say, quote, such and such, example hierarchy in the church squelches the Holy Spirit. Can the squelching of the Holy Spirit be supported biblically? Can we as believers squelch the Holy Spirit? Well, there's a verse in 1 Thessalonians 5 that says that. It says, Do not, it's 519 through 22. I actually have it right here.

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances, but examine everything carefully. Hold fast to that which is good, abstain from every form of evil. Okay, so there's a reference to quenching the Holy Spirit. What one has to be careful of is isolating a phrase like that and then bandying it about willy-nilly to get other things accomplished on your behalf. So there's also a passage in the Old Testament where David talks about not touching God's anointed. Now what David meant is that I'm not going to kill Saul. He's God's anointed. God has anointed me too to follow Saul, but God's going to remove Saul in his own time.

I am not going to remove Saul by killing him, even though he's after me. Well people have picked up on that verse, don't touch God's anointed, and then they've leveraged it into an abusive principle where they say, don't criticize me. I'm God's anointed. I'm the leader of the church. If you criticize me, you're an—well, this is amuse of that text. And quenching the spirit is another example of that. It can be. So people might be pursuing something that's completely inappropriate and non-biblical.

And then when you speak to it, because the enterprise looks spiritual, too many on the outside, people say, you're quenching the Spirit. Don't quench the Spirit. Well, how do we know we're quenching the Spirit. Don't quench the Spirit. Well how do we know we're quenching the Spirit? The presumption there is that the Spirit's doing what they're talking about, but that's the very thing that's at issue. Is this behavior sound, biblical, appropriate? And when they say you're quenching the Spirit by asking the question, that's circular because they're presuming it is sound without demonstrating it's sound,

and then they're accusing you of hurting God because you're raising the question. Now, these questions have to be raised, especially for kind of strange, bizarre things from which there's not a sound biblical justification. So this is a phrase that can get abused. Yes, there is a quenching of the Spirit. In that context, it is— Just despising prophetic utterances. Despising prophetic utterance. Now, notice that when Paul says,

don't despise prophetic utterance, he's not talking about phony prophetic utterance. He's talking about, he specifies prophetic utterance. There are prophets who speak, and they offer something useful to the church. Don't despise that. However, just because somebody says, Thus saith the Lord, it's not enough. Examine everything carefully. That's the next verse. Okay?

So you don't want to just put the kibosh on any claim that God has got a message for the local church or the community or something, but you don't just buy into it because somebody says, Thus saith the Lord. And that's the excess that I see. Actually you have excesses on both sides of the church. You have on the ones, people who say there's no prophetic utterance of any kind that's legitimate. I don't think there's a biblical support for that prohibition. On the

other hand, it's like, all you have to do is say, thus saith the Lord, and everybody, you know, falls down in submission to it without examining it carefully. And like I said, in all of those years being involved in Charismatic circles and hearing so many things, thus saith the Lord's, I have no conviction that I ever heard the real thing, because I'm thinking about it and even in my own mind assessing it, and it just doesn't add up to anything that appears to be a legitimate prophetic word. So quenching the Spirit is just, as it's used in that passage, has to do with just, is despising any prophetic utterance. That's the application there.

No, it doesn't mean it can't be applied in other ways, but we have to be really careful that when we're using this phrase, we are able to justify or characterize whatever is being talked about as a bona fide, genuine work of the Spirit, and we're not just using it to silence assessment, which you might call criticism, but it's assessment. We had this, you know, 15 years ago, the so-called laughing, barking revival that swept the country

in many sectors, and many people thought this is a new movement of the Spirit. And I thought that was nonsense personally. But when I raised principled objections against this, people say you're quenching the Spirit. Well, wait a minute, you haven't demonstrated this is the Spirit, that I might be quenching it. And that's the discussion. So that's what we want to be careful of regarding the use of that phrase. And it certainly can't be that hierarchy in the church is quenches the spirit because

Paul created a hierarchy. Yeah, of course. Paul created a whole system. He's very clear that there's to be order in the church. And he says, you know, if you stand up and you say something in tongue, someone has to interpret, and then you have to sit down and someone else stands up. You're not supposed to do this all over the place willy-nilly. He's very clear that there's supposed to be order and that there is a hierarchy in the church. 1 Corinthians 14 is the passage you just referenced, right?

So if someone is saying that hierarchy quenches the spirit, well, that's definitely false, because Paul's not, he's not going to refute himself here. There can be examples of people in the hierarchy or adjustments to the hierarchy that does that. Okay. But hierarchy itself is not a quenching of the spirit. And order is not a quenching of the spirit. In fact, it's an appropriate way to manage things properly.

You know, as a public speaker, when I go to a church, I am under their authority. So I do what they say. But they are speakers who have gone out and said, hey, I got the Spirit, I'm moved by the Spirit, you do what I say in your church when I'm speaking, because I feel the Spirit's moving and so I need to talk longer and do this, that, and the other thing. But it's not the speaker's authority. It's the local church's authority. And they get to determine what the Holy Spirit is doing in that circumstance. And so that's another example of abuse that I think sometimes happens justified by this idea that the Spirit's in me and if you're putting, you authority figures

are putting any constraints on it, you're quenching the Spirit. Let's go on to a question from Summer. Does 2 Peter 1, 21 point to the Holy Spirit, quote, impressing us during prophecy? All right, let me look at that passage here. It's actually, I'm very familiar with the passage because it's one that relates to revelation, in particular prophetic revelation, but the principle applies broadly to all revelation because when you have a bona fide revelation, like a prophetic word or an apostle writing, whatever, the ultimate source of that revelation, notice I specified it's bona fide, the ultimate source is going to be God.

It's the Holy Spirit moving. So when we read in 2 Timothy chapter 3, Paul is talking about all the grafe, all the writings, the sacred writings, are God-breathed. It's Thel Nustos. It's kind of interesting the word he uses because it's like the out-breathing of God through the writers. So he's showing that their writings have the highest authority because God is the ultimate source.

Now Peter is talking about the same kind of thing here in 1 Peter, and he is talking about, first of all, we were eyewitnesses of Jesus' majesty. We weren't making this thing up. We beheld him. And so we are telling the truth. And then he shifts to prophetic word, and he says here in verse 19, after he says, We ourselves heard this utterance, he's talking about the transfiguration there, made from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain. Then he makes a shift, stays in the same category, but he makes a shift, a different application.

So we have the prophetic word made more sure to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place in the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts. So now that's the antecedent to the verse we're going to discuss. But basically he's saying, we know God spoke to us and through Jesus we experience Him and now we got the prophetic word that is in the same category, all right? It's God's word. And then he says, verse 20,

But know this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. No clarification there. He doesn't mean that we don't have to interpret what's said. Every communication has to be assessed by the listener to figure out what's being communicated. He means something else, and it's evident in the next verse, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. And so his point there is, Spirit spoke from God. And so his point there is, Scripture is not a matter of one's own interpretation. In other words, it's not just up to the individual to decide. It's the God has a meaning there. It's God's word, and the interpretation has to be based on God, because no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will. It's not a human will. And then our verse or our phrase, men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Now what strikes me here, and I understand the word picture, I'm not certain about this, but this is what I heard. The word picture is a word picture being painted there of wind blowing on sails and moving the ship. The wind moves the ship. Now the people who are directing the ship, they have a map and they're using rudders and whatever to accomplish that. So they have choices that they're making here. But it's the wind that's moving the ship. And I think it's a good parallel to scripture where you have both a human element and a

divine element. The technical term is called concursive operation, that God and man are working together, but God has a final say. The ship doesn't move without wind. Doesn't matter what you do with the guidance system know, the guidance system, it's sitting there. It's becalmed. But the wind moves it forward, all right? And that's the picture that Peter is describing here. I have no sense at all that when it refers to moving, men moved by the Holy Spirit, that this is kind of a subtle communication to the human beings

of the particular details of the text. All right? That would be more of a kind of a dictation view of inspiration. They're not dictating. They're writing their thing. Prophets, they're sometimes they say, thus saith the Lord, they give you that kind of clear statement, but there's other things that are going on too. Rather what Peter is expressing here is it's the power of the Spirit behind this. The Spirit is the author of this, and that's what gives the prophetic words their divine authority. Maybe another way of looking at it is that this isn't, they're not reading this

movement of the Spirit described here like they're reading a map so they know where to go, but rather this movement of the Spirit that's described is the force behind what they're doing, which is completely consistent with my understanding about how God works sovereignly in the midst of our decision-making. And notice also they're talking about prophecies of Scripture. So this sounds like the whole description he gives in 2 Timothy about the Scripture being God-breathed. Correct.

Now, I would add one thing here that this is a prophecy of Scripture. He's referring to Scripture here, but I think it has broader application because you have a principle that when God speaks, it is God's intention that matters, not human interpretation. It's not human invention. It's God speaking. And certainly, then the specific application is made to prophetic word or to scripture, all right? But it's also true of any other particular claim that people make about prophecy. If you make a claim that you've offered a prophecy, you are making a claim that these words are God's words, and therefore they cannot be mistaken because God can't be mistaken.

And this is why a test of a true prophet in the Old Testament, and I still think now, And this is why a test of a true prophet in the Old Testament, and I still think now, is perfect accuracy. There are a lot of people now that want to say, well, we're learning to prophesy, and we get it partially right and partially wrong. There's no room in the scripture for that approach. And if it's a prophecy, that means God is the author. It is not a function of human will. Human will is involved in delivery, but the source is God, and therefore the prophecies

are always going to be right. Well, thanks, Greg, and thanks, Jess and Erin and Summer. We appreciate hearing from you. Send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or just go to our website at str.org. And all you have to do is look for our podcast page and choose hashtag STRask and you'll see a link right there where you can submit your question. We'd love to hear from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Coco for Stand to Reason.