 Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, 8 that we know impart and we prophesy impart. Now there are those that will say that means that you can give a false prophecy. You can be wrong about the prophecy. The problem is that it's not what that passage means. Hey smart Christians welcome back. A passage that you hear a lot especially now more of late is when you hear people who have given these false prophecies and you've got people that for whatever reason want to go in need to defend themselves. I can understand why they want to defend themselves if they've given a false prophecy, but also they want to go and defend others who have given a false prophecy. No doubt probably because maybe they had themselves given false prophecies or they have some sort of allegiance or there are a lot of similarities with them. The fact of the matter is the passage that they tend to cite is 1 Corinthians 13, 9. We'll go to that in a second, but then also what we see happening is that they are now starting to impugn actual legitimate biblical prophets that have never gotten a prophecy wrong and impugn them as to say that they were maybe not too sure about the prophecy itself. They weren't sure if that's what God meant. Well how they felt what they thought God meant has no bearing on the prophecy being true. You simply say what God says. If God says something, if God gives a revelation to you then you reveal it. Prophecy simply means to tell, to inform, to give a revelation. And so if it comes from God, you simply say it. Whether you understand it or not, whether you believe it or not, whether you're afraid of it or not, it doesn't matter. If it's truly a word from God and you say it, well then guess what? We know that you truly heard from God, even if it's giving what the thus sayeth the Lord. In other words, what the Bible says. We have his pure revelation from us. We can inform and tell people about that which is what Paul is getting at in 1 Corinthians. He's trying to get us to understand that the gifts or the numitikon, which literally means the spiritual things or things of the spirit, he's trying to get us to see that those things are for the benefit, the building of the body. And he goes in the 1st Corinthians 13 speaking about love. The reason why we should love is because that would cause us to not use our gifting or the spirit or anything that we have for the benefit of ourselves, but instead love is what he says to pursue. Not spiritual gifts. Do not let anyone tell you that 1 Corinthians 14 tells us to pursue spiritual gifts. It does not. It takes a person who either doesn't know how to read or doesn't want to read the scriptures properly. They want to ice a jeep reading to the text to tell you that God wants us to pursue spiritual gifts. It does not say that. It says desire the things of the spirit, but it says to pursue love. Why? Because if you pursue love, then what you want to do, you want to share love. Notice what he says in chapter 13. We'll go to that in a second. But if you want to pursue spiritual gifts, then you're pursuing spiritual gifts. Why? For yourself, which is why we see what we see happening in the church of Corinth, but also what we see happening today. People want to be something special. They want to pursue certain gifts, but it's only the spirit that can give you those things, not you yourself. But back to this point, there are those that have given an awful lot of false prophecies. Prophecies that have not come true, and there were those that will come back and give a defense. So let's go to 1 Corinthians 13. Notice what he says. Verse 18 says, Love never fails, but there are gifts of prophecy they will be done away with. If there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away with, for we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with now. I am not a cessationist. So therefore I am not believing or saying this to say that that means certain gifts have been done away with. Because if you notice in this passage, there are three mentioned items. There are three things that are mentioned here, tongues, knowledge, and prophecy. I think all of those are for the same reason. I think that what the Bible is trying to do is use some of these things of the Spirit for informing people. For example, tongues, what are they for? Prophecy, what is it for? Knowledge, what is it for? All of those are to inform people. There are those that will have you believe for example that tongues are for yourself. Whereas every other single gift that we have is for everyone else, but this particular gift is for yourself. That just takes a level of immaturity, arrogance, and just not knowing what the Scriptures say to come away with that. You are reading your own doctrine, your church theology, your own feelings, your emotions, experience into the text. Look at what he's speaking of. Now everything is coupled and covered in love. And if you love, what do you want to do? Give it out. Love is shown outwardly. Love is not demonstrated inwardly on yourself. We see that nowadays people love themselves so much and they want to prove it to themselves how much they love themselves. And so if my understanding is correct that speaking about love, it will never fail. But if there are gifts of prophecy, this is to inform revelation. That's what it's for. Most prophecy in the Bible is not a foretelling prophecy. Most prophecy in the Bible is forth telling me, speaking of what the Lord is saying right now. This is a revelation or information that is coming from God and the people are being told why for the benefit of the people. So going back to it, prophecy that will be done away with, well, when will they be done away with and why? That's the point. If there are tongues, well, I don't mean the tongues that we see today. The ecstatic tongues that no one knows about even though Paul says you should have an understanding, you should know he literally says in 1 Corinthians 12, I don't want you to be unknowing or ignorant or unaware. And then people come back and say, well, yeah, but it's okay to be ignorant, to be unaware, to not know what it is you're saying, to be unfruitful in your mind. That's contradictory, by the way, but tongues seem to indicate as we see it being used in the Bible, it's always meant to language and what's the point and purpose of a language? To communicate, to share something with you. And so if the purpose of language is to communicate and God gives the ability or some people the ability to speak in these languages, it's also to communicate. And so if it's to communicate, communicate what the gospel, to build up everyone else, because again, we're talking about love and love is demonstrated outwardly. If love is demonstrated outwardly and in this case, in terms of language, what do you do outwardly to show your love as regards to this gift? It is to give some information, to inform, to tell, by way of certain languages, a language that the person speaks and understands that you need to give them this information too. And then also, they will cease, he says. The question is when? What will cause them? Why will they cease? If there is knowledge, it will be done away with. Why? What reason will we ever need for knowledge to go away? Well, the point of knowledge is to help us, not for yourself. We don't gain knowledge for the sake of ourselves. That builds us up. But if we gain knowledge and we use it to help the body to share the information, then there we have it. And if love is demonstrated in us that we have some knowledge of what we want to do, we want to share it with someone else, thereby edifying the body. And so you can kind of see how these three things work together. Love will produce people to want to give a revelation in form of God and do so maybe in tongues or in languages and also through our knowledge. At some point in time, though, all of these things are going to go away. Well, that kind of helps me to understand when the perfect that he's speaking of will come. Not the close of the canon. I don't think so because even when the close of the canon happened, there were people who did not even have all of the canon. Remember, we didn't have printing presses. We didn't have a bookstore where we can go and get a Bible. We couldn't order it from Amazon. You had to wait for either someone to bring it to you by mouth. Or if you happen to have a copy from a scribe, a codex or what have you, well then amen. But typically in the early church, people did not have the full access to all of the words. So I don't think it could have meant the close of the canon. But he says, for we know in part and we prophesy in part, the reason why this is important is because this word right here in the Greek, this word gar, is post positive. We ship it to the front of that. So for what does the for mean? Well, he's just talking about it. He's not speaking about anyone having some sort of false prophecy, someone getting the information right or wrong and then coming back and saying, well, I got it wrong. But for we know in part, that is not even the point of the conversation. That's not what's being spoken of. What's being spoken of? The numitikon. And in this regard, it's couch in love. And so he's speaking about love as regards to us being not divided. Because that's the whole point of the letter of 1 Corinthians that we not be divided. Look what he says in chapter one. Look, we talks about about the family in six and seven and so forth. And so then he comes to chapter 12. Now concerning spiritual things or some version might translate it, spiritual gifts. So that there'd be no divisions that we don't esteem any gifts any higher than the next. Just like he says, that we don't esteem any parts of the body higher than the next. But all things are for the edification or the common good of everyone. And so here we get to chapter 13. And so he speaks about prophecy and he speaks about tongues, languages, which is what the word means, and then knowledge. All of those things have to do with people getting the word and growing in the word. That's the point of all three of these. Why would that mean that it couldn't be the canon? Because we still need those things. But what I think it means is when Jesus comes, when all of that is done and we're all with him, we won't need prophecy. We won't need someone to bring about revelation. We won't need someone to bring about languages. We won't need someone to give us their knowledge. As a matter of fact, even in the Old Testament in Jeremiah 31, as he's speaking about the new covenant, he's telling them that the time is going to come. You won't need anyone to teach you anything or for someone to say, no, the Lord. You will know the Lord for yourself. That time is going to come now. Do we still need folks to do that? We still need people to teach of the Lord, to know of the Lord, to help us understand that's why we've been given certain offices and certain roles and positions for the building of the body. But something Jesus says, Jesus says, he says, if I've told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? What's the point and how does that go along with this? There are a lot of things that we have not been shown that we haven't been told. And so if we take that understanding which Jesus is speaking of, because remember, Jesus just got to Nicodemus because he says, you being a teacher of Israel, you don't know these things. Speaking of the coming of the Spirit upon man's heart to regenerate him, well going forward into 1 Corinthians 13, the same thing. We don't know a lot. We don't know all that there is to know. And so it's not to be taken that we prophesy part of it. We only get part of it. And so that part, we might get it right. We might get it wrong. No, because here's the truth. Whatever revelation is true from God, whatever word that God gives a person, a supposed prophet, well then guess what? Whatever he gives you, it's still true. And so for a so-called prophet to get a word of God and to get it wrong, that's not the same as we prophesy it. We know in part and we prophesy in part. No, the prophecy or the revelation and the knowledge that we have in part is that we don't know everything that there is to know. But what we do know, we are responsible for saying it correctly. So when someone comes back and says that I've given a false prophecy, but that's only because I know in part. Well, that's them saying that God gave them the prophecy incorrectly or now you'll see people say, well, I received it correctly, but I just or they just communicated it incorrectly. You're still a false prophet. Even if you communicated incorrectly, there is no out clause. There's no exception. You are a true prophet of God. Even if you give a false prophecy because the fine line says, well, we know in part but we prophesy in part. And so again, that's not what this prophecy is talking about. So when someone comes and says, well, the reason why they got it wrong because it's passage, first of all, you're a false prophet too. You're not understanding the text. And so you are bad exegy. You are mishandling the text. That's not what he is speaking of at all. Where is this issue of false prophecy even being brought up here? It's not. The issue is giving information for the benefit of growing the body. And so again, when someone tells you who's given a false prophecy or someone is defending a false prophecy or false prophet and they run that passage, no, that would be contradicted because the Bible says if someone speaks presumptuously of God, saying that God said this and it doesn't happen. It's not true. God said, know that that person does not speak for me. Do not listen to him. Do not be afraid of them. As a matter of fact, just shun them, disregard them. You don't need to listen to a person like that. Someone that will come out and arrogantly and boastfully say that the Lord said this and it's not true. That's a person that might be dangerous because could you imagine if they just happened to get one or two things right and he may even be fooling himself and certainly fooling others. That's a dangerous person. Why not just say what the word says and leave it at that? If you get it wrong, you didn't say God told me and then try to look for excuse and outclaws. Well, we know in part but we prophesy in part. No, because God didn't even give a way out for false teachers. He didn't give a way out for false prophets. And so if you come across someone that wants to use the scriptures or in this case, twist the scriptures to defend their abuse and misuse of supposed prophecy, disregard that person, ignore that person. Better yet, mark and avoid that person.