Ask Pastor Mike Live

Trisha: Hi. I was calling about leadership in a spirit-filled church. If the pastors are spirit-filled and they're praying for the Spirit to move within the church, and they want the gifts of the Holy Spirit to move, shouldn't it begin with the pastors?

Focal Point Ministries: Everything begins with the pastors in the sense that they're providing leadership for the assembly. Of course, if you think about the church and how it should function, it should function decently and in order. If it's going to be done decently and in order and it's going to honor the Spirit, I'm going to look to the book that the Spirit wrote called the Bible. I'm going to spend most of my time in the service either singing the principles that the Spirit has written in the book that he wrote called the Bible, or teaching and explaining what it means and talking about its implications.

You may be thinking more of the ostentatious expressions of what people call the works of the Holy Spirit. If that's the case, I'm going to say that there's a kind of spectacular expression of the Spirit that was used, according to Hebrews chapter two, verses one through four, to authenticate the Word of God as the Word of God when we didn't have a written Word of God. In that sense, I don't know that there's a lot of that, at least biblically, in terms of the purpose of why they were given, a need to replicate that.

Of course, God can do anything, but what God has purposed to do, all of it is according to the will of God, as it says also in 1 Corinthians 12 and 1 Corinthians 14. It's all according to the will of God. The will of God, I think right now, is clearly within the church that we are singing the truths of God's Word, the Spirit's book that he wrote, and to explain and apply the text of Scripture.

The principles that are within the text are to be carefully explained and lived out. The pastors should be putting services together, of course, with a lot of deference to what the Spirit would want to apply and say and emphasize in a service. I want to see that taking place within the church. The pastors are going to play a prominent role in that, but I think our definition of what God's Spirit's work looks like may be a little different just based on the way that you asked the question, Trisha. But the answer's going to be yes. If it's the first century and we're there in Corinth, we don't have a written Word of God and we've got prophets that are standing up and speaking, yes, all of that should be governed by the pastoral leadership of the church.

They're ultimately the ones that are given the administrative charge of the church. That's what 1 Timothy 4 says. They are supposed to rule or administer in the church and teach within the church. It's their primary responsibility to lead those services. Whatever happens in the service, the pastors have a responsibility to guide it, direct it, and to set the pace for it. Does that help at all, Trisha?

Trisha: I guess what I'm trying to ask is, the comments have been that we want to see the gifts of the Spirit—the speaking of tongues, prophecy, edification, and all the gifts of the Spirit—to operate among the body. I'm thinking, in my way of thinking anyway, is that if that's what you're wanting to see, then once you have taught on that and if you have certain gifts of the Spirit as the pastor, you should initiate those before the congregation.

Focal Point Ministries: According to 1 Corinthians chapter 12, if it's the kind of gift that is the ability to speak a language you didn't learn—which is what the word "tongues" means, it means language, a language that was not previously known—then I think the text of Scripture is very clear that not everyone's going to have that gift.

I believe there was a certain reason for the miraculous sign gifts. There are plenty of gifts that are not miraculously breaking natural law. Breaking natural law is me being able to speak French and never studying it. That would be a breaking in natural law, and someone who speaks French being able to understand what I'm saying and understand the mighty works of God being proclaimed through me in a language I never learned. That would certainly say something definitive about the fact that God was involved in this congregation.

But God's not in the business of doing a magic show in every church in every generation until he comes back. He was about establishing the veracity of revelation by showing signs and wonders that broke natural law that normal people can't do, but God was doing through the leaders of the church and even participants within the church so that people could know that what's being extolled from the platform is the truth.

A lot of people could say things about Christ, but some were speaking out of the spirit of Antichrist and some were speaking by the Spirit of God. How do I know the difference? Well, because God was enabling the Spirit to do miraculous signs among the early church. This is my understanding of how this functions within the church. Even the second-century church understood that that time of those miraculous gifts to bear witness to the revelation that was coming through those prophets was a first-century reality.

Once we had the Scripture codified and they had it in their hands, the work of breaking natural law was done. It's a lot like the plagues and the things that Moses and Joshua did in establishing the truth of God speaking through Israel and particularly through Moses the prophet. They were able to have then the written Decalogue, or the first five books of the Bible. Everyone could read it and know it was God's Word and fear it as they read it with trembling, as Isaiah 66 says, and they could then obey it.

That's my job as a pastor. It's not to get up and to show that God can do a miracle; my job is to teach the book that the Spirit wrote and that the Spirit, through miraculous signs when it was given, established as his Word. If we're seeking a sign to prove that it's true, the Bible says that's a perverse and wicked generation. What I want to do is to know we have the Word. It's been given by predictive prophecy. It's been given by miraculous signs. I can speak it in my generation unabashedly and unashamedly.

I don't have to get up and say, "Now let's everybody do a miracle," which I think is what some people want in their churches when in reality the Spirit is saying we don't need that. Therefore, I don't think the Spirit is doing it as often as people think he is doing it because if it were the kind that was happening in the New Testament, it'd be on the front page of the local paper.

My daughter, for instance, is paralyzed from the knees down. If we had someone in the church that was really saying something and my daughter was then skipping around the playground of the church the next day, I'm going to say, "Well, that's big news." My doctors at the Children's Hospital of Orange County are going to go, "Wow, that's amazing. This was a miracle," because her nerves were hopelessly severed in her spine, but now she can walk. They're all healed, and that's not supposed to happen according to all the doctors' textbooks.

If that's going on—instantaneous healings, for instance, or people that really can speak in Farsi without any study—that's going to get attention, the kind of attention that gets beyond people saying things when they look like they're whipped into some kind of euphoria and saying, "Well, that was God's work."

Every sign that God gives is a clear sign, a sign that is undeniably clear. It points to the truth, and the truth for us has already been written. It's a 66-book library that I am saying I teach from every Sunday, and I don't think I need to get up and to have a miracle show to prove that it's God's Word. That's my view. Not everybody shares that, and I have plenty of Christian friends that don't share that view. But since this is Ask Pastor Mike Live, that's where I would say your expectation should lie. What I want my pastor to do if I'm you is to preach the Word. The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. It's going to change your life and it's going to change my life, and I think that's the important thing that we ought to have as the expectation of our pastors.

Trisha: Most assuredly.

Focal Point Ministries: Yeah.