 I've enjoyed sort of refreshing my mind on this subject and have found so much good stuff to share that I feel like I need either to postpone the worship service by a couple of hours or come back next week, but we're gonna move quickly through a lot of material. And I'll just try to sort of point you in the direction of some good resources and you can study these things out more carefully on your own. But so the lesson opens, there's a quote here at the top from a Spurgeon sermon that I want to read to you first. I was preached in 1872 and the title of it is The Paraclete and so Spurgeon said, Dear brother, honor the spirit of God as you would honor Jesus Christ if he were present. If Jesus Christ were living in your house, you would not ignore him. You would not go about your business as if he were not there. Do not ignore the presence of the Holy Spirit in your soul. I beseech you, do not live as if you had not heard whether there was any Holy Spirit. Pay your constant adorations to him. Reverence the August guest who has been pleased to make your body his sacred abode. Love him, obey him, worship him. Take care, never to impute the vain imaginings of your mind to him. And so that last sentence there introduces a few thoughts that Spurgeon has about the vain imaginings that we are, we I use loosely, inclined to ascribe to the spirit of God and so part of this class is simply to look at how does the Holy Spirit actually work and what is our view of spiritual gifts and how those are functioning today. It's interesting because this sort of dovetails a little bit with the book that we just started, The Forgotten Trinity. And the point that Spurgeon is making in this part of his sermon is addressed in by James, by Dr. White. I can't remember, it's sort of late in the book. Dr. White says, and I'll just read you part of what he wrote at the beginning of that paragraph. I think it's chapter nine or 10. He says, there is a reason why the Holy Spirit does not receive the same level and kind of attention that is focused on the Father and the Son. It is not his purpose to attract that kind of attention to himself. Just as the Son volunteered to take the role of suffering servant to redeem God's people, so too the Spirit has chosen to take the role of sanctifier and advocate for the people of God. But since it is the Spirit's role to direct the hearts of men to Christ and to conform them to his image, he does not seek to push himself into the forefront and to gain attention for himself. And so we see that the attention that is often paid to the Holy Spirit in our world today is dominated for the most part by what charismatic promote. Ecstatic sufferings. Ecstatic utterings. They are sufferings for those who have to listen to them. Ecstatic utterings that are unintelligible and that produce counterfeit powers of prophecy and healing and other supernatural abilities to name it and claim it as they say. I'm sorry, let me turn my phone volume off. So we wanna start with what, how does the Holy Spirit actually work? And this sermon of Spurgeon's really, that's the subject that he gets into. And so I wanted to start out by just summarizing briefly some of the points that Spurgeon made. And he points to passages in John 14, John 15 and John 16. And I wanna read those to you, speak to you a little bit about what those passages tell us about how the Holy Spirit works. And then look at this issue of cessationism, what our church believes on that subject. So in John 14, start with verses 15 to 17. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another helper to be with you forever. Even the spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him for he dwells with you and will be in you. And then again in chapter 14 verses 25 to 27. These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you but the helper of the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, do I give it to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. And then in chapter 15 verses 26 and 27. But when the helper comes whom I will send to you from the Father the spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness because you have been with me from the beginning. And then in John 16 verses five to 11. But now I'm going to him who sent me and none of you asks me where are you going? But because I have said these things to you sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away for if I do not go away the helper will not come to you. But if I go I will send him to you and when he comes he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment concerning sin because they do not believe in me concerning righteousness because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer concerning judgment because the ruler of this world is judged. And then continuing in verses 12 to 15. I still have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now. When the spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own authority but whatever he hears he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. And that the Father all that the Father has his mind therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. So I want to just review some of the what we're to learn from these specific passages and I'm gonna quote from some of Sermon Spurgeon which was as most of his are really good. He says first of all in 1416 that the Holy Spirit is another helper and so Spurgeon says we learn here that the Holy Spirit as the paraclete is to be to us all what Jesus was to his disciples. Read the text I will pray to the Father and he will give you another comforter plainly teaching that the Lord Jesus Christ is the first paraclete and that the Holy Spirit is a second paraclete occupying the same position as the living Jesus did. It would not be easy to describe all that Jesus was to his disciples when he lived among them. Now all that Jesus was the spirit of God is now to the church. He is another paraclete to remain with us forever. Spurgeon has a lengthy explanation of paraclete and the different nuances to the meaning of that word but generally it's translated as comforter or helper. And he says this. If there is any, if there is today any power in the church of God it is because the Holy Spirit is in the midst of her. If she is able to work any spiritual miracles it is through the might of his indwelling. If there is any light in her instruction if there is any life in her ministry if there is any glory given to God if there is any good accomplished among the sons of men it is entirely because the Holy Spirit is still with her. The entire weight of influence of the church as a whole and every Christian in particular comes from the abiding presence of the sacred paraclete. Treat the Holy Spirit with love and tender respect which are due to the Savior and the Spirit of God will deal with you as the Son of God did with his disciples. So I hope that the way that he explains that helps you to think more clearly about what the Holy Spirit is doing among us and in this church and of the necessity of having a right understanding of those things and of not dishonoring the Spirit of God in the ways that often happens in charismatic circles. So he is another helper. In that second passage from chapter 14 in verse 26 it says he will teach you all things and so the Spirit enables us to understand the things that Christ has taught us. What Christ has taught us is meaningless to us if the Spirit does not work in us to transform us by those things that we've been taught and I'm not reading from Spurgeon's sermon now I'm reading from my own notes but people who read the Bible and do not obey the Bible have not been taught the Bible by the Spirit. They may read it and have some sort of surface level understanding of it but it is the Spirit of God it is the Spirit of God who makes these things effective in us transforms us. When you understand, when you have been taught by the Holy Spirit you repent and believe and are rescued and delivered and you have peace in your soul. In chapter 15 in verses 26 and 27 we have this, he will bear witness about me and you also will bear witness. So we know from Acts 1.8 when the Spirit has come upon you you shall be my witnesses. If the Spirit has not come upon you I suppose you could fake it and you could make an effort to be his witness but if you are not his witness the Spirit has not come upon you. And so the Spirit of God produces in us a desire to glorify God. Spurgeon said it this way. At this present time our master and head is gone from us how are we to answer the attacks of the world? Why we have another paraclete to come to the forefront and speak for us and if we only had confidence in him beloved he would have spoken for us much more loudly than sometimes he has done. But whenever we learn to leave the business in his hands he will do two things for us. First he will speak for us himself and next he will enable us also to bear witness. Now the Spirit of God if we would only trust him and give up all this idolatry of human learning, cleverness, genius, eloquence, and rhetoric and I do not know what else besides would soon answer our adversaries. He would silence some of them by converting them as he answered Saul of Tarsus by turning him from a persecutor to an apostle. He would silence others by confounding them by making them see their own children and relatives brought to know the truth. If there were not a miraculous spiritual power in the church of God at this day she is an imposter. At this moment the only vindication of our existence in the presence and the work of the Paraclete is the presence and the work of the Paraclete among us. Is he still working and witnessing for Christ? I fear he is not in some churches but we see him here. And he goes on to recount in his years of ministry the conversions and the working of the spirit of God in their congregation and we are thanks to God able to say that about our own church. In John 16 we have this, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. And we know that that is a main work of the spirit opening the eyes of the sinner to his offenses against God causing him to see his need for righteousness and causing him to fear judgment. And finally we have he will guide you into all truth and this is something more than causing you to understand the truth. It is the spirit magnifying Christ in your hearts helping you to appreciate and love all the beauty of Christ and his teaching all the wisdom of God as revealed in the Bible. It's a spiritual discernment that enables you to recognize and refute error. So that is just a very quick summary of what we see in John 14, 15 and 16 about how the spirit of God works. And the fruits of the spirit are what he produces in them There are multiple, well, four main passages in the Bible about those fruits, what they look like. Romans 12, six to eight, it says, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. If prophecy and proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness. 1 Corinthians 12, eight to 10, for to one is given through the spirit the utterance of wisdom and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same spirit. We're gonna come back and we're gonna dig deeper into these things, but this one in particular gets sort of twisted. It depends on the sort of the lens through which you see these things. What is the utterance of wisdom? What is the utterance of knowledge? By going on in verse nine, to another faith by the same spirit, to another gifts of healing by one spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. So the Charismatics would take that and say that all of the, well, we're gonna look at the continuum of continuationists versus cessationists, but the sort of extreme continuationists would say all of those things are still at work in the church today. And that is not what we believe. 1 Corinthians 12, 28, and God is appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. And then Ephesians 4, 11, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers. So we're gonna look at those and understand how they worked in the early church, why they are no longer necessary, many of these gifts that we're talking about here, and how the theology that gives rise to what we see in sort of the extreme Charismatic group where we have all modern day apostles who are all receiving revelation from God, where we have prophets who have special revelation all the time, all of that is rooted in a theology that almost always is a damning false gospel. But not all Charismatics are unconverted, so I don't wanna say that. I mean, I know some who are continuationists who I believe are converted. Some are poorly discipled. Some are just stubborn. And some are people we respect. Their theology is reformed, but they're open to, I think, error. So we have this continuum of the... When Pastor Markos first wrote this lesson, he asked him, I said, well, where did you find this continuum? And he said, well, I sort of came up with it myself. So it was pretty good. But it starts on one extreme with apostolic continuationists, and then to the other end is extreme cessationists. So I wanna describe those to you and then tell you where we are and then look at why we are there. The apostolic continuationists are those I was describing a minute ago. They believe we still have true apostles today who are receiving and revealing new revelation from God, who are able to perform signs and wonders. We have true prophets today who can foretell things to come. And I talked with Pastor Markos earlier this week about this lesson and he, as we were talking about this, he said, well, these are the worst kinds. And it's true. We see this madness and craziness that comes with people who claim that they, are the direct recipients of revelation from God today, which just leads to total chaos, which was close to the name of a book John MacArthur wrote years ago called Charismatic Chaos. And if you haven't read that, you should. The other one you might consider reading is this one, Strange Fire. But so that's the apostolic continuationists. And then there's the continuationists or partial cessationists. And these believe we have no apostles today, but that there are prophets who can prophesy the future and that God continues to speak to them with new revelations through visions and there is a small minority within this group who have a biblical gospel, but they're an anomaly. And they're only fairly recent in this history of Charismatic Chaos. Wayne Grudem is one of them. He wrote a systematic theology that I often use. And I remember when I first started reading it, Tom Matugi said to me, well, it's good, except you've got to watch for that one section on spiritual gifts. And it's true, he takes the position and we'll get into this a little bit more later that the modern day prophets are not held to the same standard as the biblical prophets that they can prophesy and just because they don't get everything right doesn't mean that we should just say there are no prophets today. And he goes through this sort of lengthy defense of that by looking at Agabus in Acts 21 and it turns out that he's not right. There's the open but cautious group. They say that you can't biblically rule out the possibility of these gifts being active even though they agree that much of what they see does not correspond with biblical practice. And D.A. Carson is one of the people who has that view. Then there are the cessationists and this is where we are. We are cessationists and we say God can do miracles as he chooses but he's not operating through these giftings that were evident in the early church. We have no tongues, no prophets, no new revelation. We believe we have the completed, sufficient word of God and I wanna sort of take a little bit of a detour right here. And as I was reading and studying this subject I found this which I thought was really helpful. It's a position paper concerning the continuance of revelatory gifts in the present day reported by the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America and adopted by their General Assembly March 8th, 2000. And it takes you sort of section by section through our confession and addresses the sections of our confession that speak to this issue of how the Spirit of God works and answers any sort of answers, questions about even words that the confession itself uses. I wanna just give you a couple of examples. I guess I should tell you that before I go there that the last group in this continuum are the total cessationists who are cessationists in the sense that we are but in addition to that they say God is not performing any miracles at all. Miracles have ceased. And that really does put God in a box so wouldn't go there. But so some sections of the Baptist Confession that, and Walter Chantry is one of the people who was on this committee that was one of the names I recognized. He wrote a book that we I think still have on our shelf called The Sabbath of Delight. But so the very first chapter, the first sentence in our confession says, the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience. Therefore it pleased the Lord at sundry times and in diverse manners to reveal himself and to declare his will unto his church, committing the same holy unto writing. Which makes the Holy Scriptures to be most necessary. These former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people now being ceased. So our position is that there are no revelatory gifts operating. We have the closed canon. It's sufficient and complete. And so if someone comes in here and says to you, I have a word from the Lord, you can say no, you don't. Yeah, right. You have the completed canon of Scripture. That is your word from the Lord. That is how the spirit of God speaks to you. There are about 10 different sections in here. Here's another one. It's still in chapter one, section six. The whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture, under which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the spirit or traditions of men. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the word. In chapter one, section nine, the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself. And therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture, which is not manifold but one, it must be searched by other places that speak more clearly, not by somebody coming and telling you that they have a special revelation from God about that Scripture. In chapter one, section 10, the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men and private spirits are to be examined and in whose sentences we are to rest can be no other but the Holy Scripture delivered by the spirit into which Scripture so delivered our faith is finally resolved. So there's no more revelation. And if you think about it, I mean, Christ is the maximum revelation of God. And to claim to add to that really is taking glory from God to yourself. And that is really at the heart of what motivates most of these people who come up with all kinds of nonsense. We were talking yesterday with an unconverted man who'd never even heard of Charismatics. And there's a, even in his sort of outsider perspective, recognizes that these people are self-willed and sort of self-glorifying when they go to such great lengths to draw attention to themselves. I'm not taking questions. Go ahead. How do total sensationists view salvation? Total. Sensationists, like you said, they don't believe in any miraculous work from God. So like, how do they view salvation? I don't know. Total sensationists, I don't know, I don't know. I guess they don't view salvation as being all that miraculous. I'll see if I can find out and get back to you later. How's that? That's usually how I answer people at the door when they ask me a question. I don't know the answer to. So, I mean, I won't go through this whole thing, but it's interesting here. This paper actually addresses the whole Agabus issue that Grudem and a lot of others have raised in trying to defend the existence of prophets today. So I recommend it to you. And sort of the underlying point is that our confession speaks very directly to these issues. So, we're sensationists. And if you have a biblical understanding of apostles and a biblical understanding of prophets and a biblical understanding of tongues, then you will be able to connect the dots very simply. I say that simply. I've been working on this for a long time this week. And there are times when I wanted the Bible to just say, there are no more prophets. And it really, it does, but you have to pay attention. And I'll show you that in a second. But so the argument, essentially it's parallel in a sense to the argument that Sam Waldron includes in his book, what is the name of his book? Does anybody remember it? Dude, the miracle gifts continue today. That's the subtitle. I can't remember the, oh, no, it says to be continued. That's a question mark. And so Sam Waldron in this book has what he calls the cascading argument. And this lesson sort of follows that outline. But the cascading argument is there are no, first, there are no apostles of Christ on earth today. Second, because there are no apostles of Christ, there are no prophets. Third, because there are no prophets, there are no tongue speakers. And four, in view of the first three, there are no miracle workers on earth today. So you can, on Dr. White's Alpha and Omega website, you can see the whole outline of Waldron's argument. Or you could read his book. I haven't actually read his book, but what we'll cover here sort of parallels the argument of his book. So let's start with a biblical understanding of the apostles. I say start. I've been talking for 40 minutes already. Ephesians two, 19 to 20. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone. So here is where the Bible tells us that while there were prophets in the early church, of course we know there were prophets in the Old Testament, but in the early church, the foundation was built on the apostles and prophets. It has been built. We have it. It's the New Testament. It's the canon of scripture. And there is no need for apostles and prophets. The even the analogy itself of being the household of God built on the foundation suggests as much. Waldron makes an interesting point in his cascading argument. And that is that this phrase apostles and prophets is the way in which the Bible summarizes the New Testament canon. So we have the New Testament. We have what we need. We have what the apostles and prophets in the early church were delivering to the people then. That's what we have now. And so we don't need apostles and prophets. And he points when he's explaining that argument, he also points to the use of the prophetic word or the law and the prophets or Moses and the prophets as the way that the Old Testament is summarized. And so the use in Ephesians 2.20 of apostles and prophets is a way of describing the New Testament canon. And so we believe the canon is closed. That we have all that we need. And so there's no need for apostles and prophets. Now apostles themselves, we know the way that the Bible defines and describes apostles, there were distinguishing marks that they had. If you look at 2 Corinthians 12, 11 through 13, well Paul says in verse 12, the signs of a true apostle were performed among you with utmost patience, with signs and wonders and mighty works. So this is one mark of an apostle being able to perform these signs and wonders and mighty works. And those signs and wonders were affirming that their message was from God. In 1 Timothy 1.1, Paul, an apostle of Christ by command of God, our Savior and of Christ, Jesus, our hope. Apostles were directly appointed by Christ. It's another distinguishing mark of an apostle. And so you can't have a, someone who claims to you that Christ appeared to me and appointed me an apostle as denying scripture. Probably doesn't know scripture. And a third mark is they've been eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9.1, am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? And another interesting point in this argument about apostles is in 1 Corinthians 15, 3 to 8 where Paul is giving us the gospel. He says, for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. So the last of all the apostles was Paul. You know, I've read this, I don't know how many times and that never really just zinged me like it did this week. Paul was the last of the apostles to see the risen Christ and no one alive today, regardless of what they say, has seen the risen Christ. We have really mainstream, I say mainstream, it's almost a derogatory term. Pastors who will allow people to preach in their churches who claim that all kinds of things, I have been to heaven and David gave me a tour and the guy who wrote 90, was it 90 minutes or 90 seconds in heaven, 90 minutes. Was it invited to speak at First Baptist Orlando to kick off a series, a preaching series on heaven? What a way to start. So there are no more apostles today and if we have this biblical understanding of why there are no more apostles today, we can grab onto that and hold it. It's important that you be able to do that. I remember when I first came to this church and we started going out, witnessing with some of the people here and I had been doing that for some time, but I'd never been challenged in quite the way that I was when I came here. Because most of my earlier evangelism efforts had been with people who had visited our church, which at the time was First Baptist, but here we were just going out everywhere and I ran into, I don't know who I was with, but we stood at the door and these people answered and they were charismatic and yeah, yeah, yeah. I speak in tongues and on and on and went through all this thing about their gifts and I really wasn't very prepared to argue the point, which is why I then went back to my Bible and started reading carefully, especially 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14 and listening to sermons on it and studying it out and being prepared for the next time. It is, that's one reason why evangelism is a means of grace. When you go back and you're challenged on something, you need to defend what you believe, well you go back and you read with a different frame of mind so you need to be prepared. When somebody says I'm an apostle, you need to be prepared to say, well, according to the Bible, you're not. So then let's look at a biblical understanding of prophets. We have in Deuteronomy 13 and 18, two different passages about prophets and in 13 it's a standard of orthodoxy that's established, 13, 5, but that prophet or that dreamer of dreams that that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death because he has taught rebellion against the Lord our God. So if you're not teaching what conforms to the revelation that we have, you're a false prophet. And in Deuteronomy 18, 22, we have when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. So these two standards have not been rescinded. Nowhere does it say in the New Testament that we know God no longer is going to require you to be orthodox and right. And how you can sort of tangle yourself up and not to come to the conclusion that you could be unorthodox and wrong and still be a prophet of God is hard to imagine. So there's not that much in the New Testament that speaks directly to New Testament prophets. There's some passages. It's not like the Old Testament where prophets are front and center. The apostles performed a prophetic function. But apart from the apostles, there aren't that many, we see specifically described as prophets. One of them though is Agibus. And Agibus appears in Acts 21, 7 to 11. And I don't have time to go through this whole explanation with you, but Agibus says in 21, 11 and coming to us, he took Paul's belt and bound his own feet and hands and said, thus says the Holy Spirit. This is how the Jews of Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him to the hands of the Gentiles. And MacArthur goes through this prophecy and how it unfolds and the chapters that follow, including in Acts 28, and explains how the prophecy, there's nothing in scripture that in any way undermines or diminishes the truthfulness of that prophecy. In fact, everything that we have really shows that it was fulfilled just as Agibus had said. And so we have here a New Testament prophet foretelling what's going to happen, and we see that it comes true. So a New Testament prophet functions in just the same way as an Old Testament prophet. That's the point. There's not a church in the Bible there's not a changed standard for New Testament prophets. In Acts 1532, we see and Judas and Silas who were themselves prophets encouraged and strengthened the brothers with many words. So their prophetic ministry involved encouragement, explanation. In 1 Corinthians 14, 3, we have on the other hand, the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation. So we have these references to prophets. There's nothing that we have in the New Testament that says that they would function any differently from the way the Old Testament prophets functioned. And we have Ephesians 220, which says the apostles and New Testament prophets have laid the foundation. And so if you understand their function, you understand that we don't need them anymore. We don't need prophets anymore. Martin Lloyd Jones wrote and MacArthur quotes him, let me see if I can find that quote. Yeah, he says, once the New Testament documents were written, the office of a prophet was no longer necessary. In the history of the church, trouble has arisen because people fought that they were prophets in the New Testament since, that they had received special revelation of truth. The answer to that is that in view of the New Testament scriptures, there is no need of further truth. That is an absolute proposition. We have all the truth in the New Testament. We have no need of any further revelations. All has been given. Everything that is necessary for us is available. Therefore, if a man claims to have received a revelation of some fresh truth, we should suspect him immediately. The last issue in this is tongues. And if you have a biblical understanding of tongues, you'll see, for example, 1 Corinthians 14, 20 to 22. Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants and evil, but in your thinking be mature. In the law, it is written by people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners. I will speak to this people and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord. Thus, tongues are assigned not for believers but for unbelievers. While prophecy is a sign not for unbelievers but for believers. And what Paul is quoting there is Isaiah 2811, I think it is, where the issue is that these tongues that are not understood are used by God as a signal of his judgment. On the other hand, Acts 2, 5 to 13, we see tongues being used by God to spread the gospel. Now they were dwelling in Jerusalem, Jews devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound, the multitude came together and they were bewildered because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, are not all these who are speaking Galalans? And how is it that we hear each of us in our own native language? And he goes on to talk about all of these different people from different regions who are hearing that the gospel preached in their language. That was a miraculous sign that God used just a second matey. And so, for someone to say, but this happened actually once in a church I was in, Sunday morning worship and this lady stands up and starts, and the pastor rightly said, does anyone here understand what she's saying? And no one did, of course. And he said, well, please have her removed. And a couple of the deacons went and took her out. That's good. So to close this, I wanna go back to Spurgeon's sermon. If I can find this on page 130. He says in his sermon that we just start out, don't let these vain imaginings insult the spirit of God. Says, take care never to impute the vain imaginings of your fancy to him, the Holy Spirit. I have seen the spirit of God shamefully dishonored by a person, this is 1872, right? I have seen the spirit of God shamefully dishonored by persons. I hope they were insane who have said that they have had this and that revealed to them. There has not for some years passed over my head a single week in which I have not been pestered with the revelations of hypocrites or maniacs, semi lunatics who are fond of coming with messages from the Lord to me and it may spare them some trouble if I tell them once for all that I will have none of their stupid messages. Never dream that events are revealed to you by heaven or that you may come to be like those idiots who dare to impute their blatant follies to the Holy Ghost. If you feel your tongue itch to talk nonsense, trace it to the devil, not to the spirit of God. Whatever is to be revealed by the spirit to any of us is in the word of God already. He adds nothing to the Bible and never will. Let the persons who have revelations of this, that and the other go to bed and wake up in their senses. I only wish they would follow the advice and no longer insult the Holy Ghost by laying their nonsense at his door. So let's pray. And I'm ready, I'll answer your question after. Father in heaven, thank you for the clarity of your word and how we can just have complete confidence that you have given us everything we need for life and godliness. In Jesus' name, amen.