Are the Sign Gifts Still Alive Today?

It is my personal opinion that the signs gifts are present today, maybe not as much as in the early church but there are plenty of occurrences. I hold this position for three reasons. First I have experience the sign gifts abundantly. Secondly, there is no clear teaching in scripture that says that the sign gifts were only for the early church. And finally, the sign gifts of the Holy Spirit accompany the gospel as a clear sign to validate its message. Christ said that where his gospel is preached, signs would follow. When the Holy Spirit arrived on the day of Pentecost, he empowered the first church to do the extraordinary including speak in tongues. The modern church struggles to find answers about the mystery of speaking in tongues among the scarce accounts in the book of acts. As believers, we cannot limit God; we must worship God in spirit and truth. I agree that we must be temperate and balanced in our worship. Sterile, stoic worship was not representative of the worship that the Father expected from the chosen Israelites; why then would He expect it from His Church today?

I believe that there are plenty of sign gift manifestations in the church today. I just believe that miracles are easy to be explained away when you are not the subject or receiver of the miracle. There are many counterfeit miracles, and false teachings that stifle the legitimacy of some sign gifts. I also believe that God works his gifts and signs seasonally. There may be a cessation of gifts for now but there is not biblical evidence that insists that the canon was the line of demarcation for gifts. I think that because we have seen less spiritual gifts manifested in the church today that people need a reason to attribute the less frequent events to some biblical explanation. But there is none. Why limit God. God always has the power to use miracles at any time in the present or the future.

It is not determined what created that cessation of Spiritual gifts from the time of Acts until today, but I conclude that cessation alone is not reason to discount that speaking in tongues and any other work of the Holy Spirit. God is sovereign and he gave Spirit to be a helper to us to the church to spread the gospel. The facts are that the entire world is not yet evangelized, it has been two thousand years since the writings of the canon and God is still moving in the lives of His believers. God has not stopped speaking to us because His word is living, eternal, and is inside of every believer. Jesus said the woman at the well , "But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." John 4:23-24. Jesus prophesied in Mark 16: 16-17, "Go into the entire world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues;"

Charismatic churches today say that there is a genuine move of the Holy Spirit in their services and their lives that others characterize as mere emotionalism. Agree with Dr. Matthew Allen who makes the case that there should be balance in churches today. "We are responsible to offer 'something more' than either sterile rationalism or destructive emotionalism. We must offer a person, real relationship with Jesus Christ." Gordon Fee, an ordained Assemblies of God minister, believes that Pentecostals were incorrect in their theological exegesis of the scripture surrounding the baptism of the Holy Spirit and says that they needed biblical foundation for the experience that they were having. However, he maintains that they are correct in their quest to experience the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in the modern church (Fee 1985).

    Strauss argues that:

It is a mistake to assume that speaking in tongues is synonymous with the baptism of the Holy Spirit." …All the believers at Corinth received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, however all did not speak in tongue." The baptizing work of the Spirit is not an experience in the believer subsequent to salvation. Rather it is that act of the Holy Spirit which joins the believing sinner to the Body of Christ. More emphatically, there is no other means whereby one can become a member of the Church which is Christ's Body. All saved persons have been baptized by the Holy Spirit, but not all saved persons speak in tongues. The baptizing work of the Spirit places the believer in the Body positionally.

    What Fee says makes sense that the early church was used to seeing the Holy Spirit make His presence known. The writers of the New Testament were writing to the first century church not to later churches that are not used to a demonstrative Spirit.

Some scholars argue that the word of God is the final authority and fulfillment of revelation to the church. There is no need for God to speak directly to individuals through signs, dreams, miracles and such because His word is complete in the canon. Within this battle about the sufficiency of the Bible, scholars question whether accepting new revelations of the Holy Spirit implies that the bible is no longer the infallible sovereign word of God (Allen 1998).

The Gift of prophecy as well as all of the sign gifts, is alive and well today. Paul admonishes everyone in the body of Christ to prophesy. Speaking in tongues is a tricky subject but I do know that though I do not personally speak in tongues I have the gift of interpretation of tongues. I think that tongue speaking has become a cultural emotional type practice. And I caution people not to speak in tongues in that manner because that practice shines a negative light upon the true occurrences. However, I believe that if the tongues that are spoken in public are genuine, there will be an interpretation.

    Furthermore, we should judge that our worship is in truth and if the gift of tongues is displayed that it is to be done according to the guidelines that the Word mandates. God's inspiration in the book of Acts intended to show us that the presence of the Holy Spirit is unmistakable. You don't have to wonder whether the Spirit has arrived because when He falls he empowers the believer to be his witness. Speaking in tongues is not the evidence of the Holy Spirit, a born again life that bears the fruit of witness is the evidence of the Holy Spirit. However, only the Holy Spirit can give the power to speak in tongues that is new to the speaker and interpreted by another.

When one learns to read the bible daily for oneself, it is understood that His Holy Spirit aids in interpretation and revelation of His word. God is able to do exceedingly and abundantly more than we can ever ask or think. With the age of the internet we can evangelize faster and further than ever before. Perhaps God empowered this generation with his spirit because of its ability to go to the ends of the earth. The Bible is patterned by events that show how God moves after centuries of being silent. The call of Samuel, The birth of John the Baptist, and Israel's freedom from bondage in Egypt are all examples of this. God has a way of showing up big after long periods of time. Two thousand years after the church in Acts later God could be pouring out His Spirit on His church to expedite the coming of Christ by our witness.

 

Bibliography

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