Let God Speak 2: Receiving Prophecy page 1

As most of you know, my wife Debbie is an internal auditor working in Local Government. Before she worked for Medway Council she was with East Sussex County Council. In this line of work you get to investigate all sorts of departments within local government: schools, libraries, social services, housing, council tax, and so on. One of the disappointments for Debbie about working for Medway is that you don't get to audit her favourite area of a local council's work, namely the Fire Brigade. It was always the highlight of her work with East Sussex for some reason I can't fathom, but with the unitary authority here in Medway, the Fire Service remained under Kent County Council.

A spiritual version of the Fire Brigade is invisibly present in many churches, and to our great detriment. In our reading this morning (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22) Paul knows of this danger when he says in verse 19:

'Do not put out the Spirit's fire'

or, as other translations have it, 'Do not quench the Holy Spirit'.

So when the Good News Bible paraphrases it as 'Do not restrain the Holy Spirit', we are to understand the danger that even sincere Christians want to throw a bucket of water over the work of the Holy Spirit and put out the fire. Fire is dangerous, we argue. We miss the fact that fire is purifying.

In particular, Paul is at pains to say that we should not put out the fire of the Spirit when it comes to the Spirit's gift of prophecy, for he goes on to say in the next verse:

'Do not treat prophecies with contempt'.

Treating prophecies with contempt is to Paul tantamount to putting out the fire of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, prophecy - as I argued in the first sermon in this series - is a good gift of God. Our fundamental attitude to prophecy given within the Christian Church is meant to be positive, because the Holy Spirit empowers people to bring an important message from God. I gave you my rough working definition of prophecy in that previous sermon; here is another definition, this time from the greatest New Testament scholar of the last century, the late Professor FF Bruce. Prophecy, he said, is

'the declaration of the mind of God in the power of the Spirit'
[FF Bruce, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, Word Biblical Commentary; Word, 1982.]

If the Holy Spirit wants to declare the mind of God to people, should we not take that desire seriously? Therefore our primary frame of mind regarding prophecy needs to be a welcoming one.

However, that does not mean we should be naïve, and blindly accept every message where the speaker claims it is a prophecy. Alongside our positive attitude there needs to be discernment. That is why Paul goes on to say in verses 21 and 22:

'Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.'

Given that last time and at the beginning here we established a positive attitude in principle to prophecy, what I propose to go on to in the rest of this sermon is the whole area of testing prophecy. What tests might we apply to ourselves and to others when wondering if something is a message from God (be it something that has come into our mind, or something we have heard someone else say)?

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.