It's absolutely a reality. Yeah. Yeah.

But the goal is primarily to inwardly to build up the church rather

than

outwardly to stave off some worldwide disaster, that sort of thing.

Yeah. Well, I mean, Nije, before we started recording today, you made a comment. We've never really, in our conversations, talked about the debate about what theologians call continuationism and cessationism, this idea of the two concepts that cessationism would say that the gifts or the majority of the gifts ended at the end of the apostles era or that first century kind of generation versus a continuationist approach that would say these gifts continue. Nije, I think you and I would both fit into the continuationist camp and would say that we believe that these gifts continue. But I think an important question to ask is like, so you're doing history here. Is that historically valid? For example, in the Pentecostal world, there's a lot of people that would say, in early 1900s, the Holy Spirit came and all this stuff happened that people spoke in tongues and miracles that hadn't happened for 1,900 years. Is that, I mean, historically, did the Holy Spirit sort of bounce for 1,900 years and come back? And you and I, a careful reading of the church history would say, no, absolutely not. That these gifts and prophecy, tongues, whatnot, there's a ton of evidence in the history of the church that these continued. In fact, my very close friend of mine, Dr. Mark Cartlidge, wrote a fabulous book called Encountering the Spirit, which is a history of charismatic expression through the history of the church. It's throughout the history of the church. I mean, it has been going on the entire history of the church just quietly at times. It's come and gone. In fact, I would say my greatest critique of the cessationist approach, we'll just set up all the critiques online here, but my greatest critique of the view that would say that the gifts have ceased is if you believe that the gifts ceased at the end of the life of the apostles and simultaneously believe that the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit brought the New Testament writings together in the fourth century. How do you square those two things at the same time? Because to believe in the Bible is to believe that God was leading the church to close the canon, to bring the New Testament writings together. Neijay, do you think there's, am I here? Or is there something to that?

Yeah, you know, I think largely the cessationist approach is concerned about two things. The first one is people trying to claim new authority to kind of supersede the Bible. Which is a good, a warranted fear. Yeah, that's a concern. And the second one we would call phenomenological. That means it's born out of a Western, a largely Western's experience to say, hey, because I don't encounter prophets today, then they ended. Or more commonly, if when we say cessationists, they still believe in the spiritual gifts, but they believe that the miraculous gifts have largely ceased. We're talking about certainly in their view, healing and certainly in their view, prophecy. And then often they include tongues. And so they say, because I don't witness someone walking to my church, healing somebody and walking out, then they say, OK, these must have ended. And Craig Keener, who's a wonderful New Testament scholar, brilliant New Testament scholar, wrote a book about 10 years ago. The Gift and the Giver, right? He did. That was an older book, but he wrote a bigger, he likes to write big books. So he wrote a bigger two volume book called Miracles. And the first half is really explaining kind of philosophically and historically how he got to the cessationist viewpoint and why it's wrong. And then the second one is actually his wife is from Africa, I believe Congo, but I'm not 100% sure. And so he has gone to Africa many, many, many, many times. And he has either witnessed healing happening, medical healing happening firsthand, but more commonly, he's heard firsthand eyewitness testimony to modern healings. So much that he actually traveled around parts of Africa and recorded all of these testimonies about healing. So just because it hasn't happened in your little neighborhood doesn't mean, like you said, it hasn't happened throughout the world. I think this is actually a misunderstanding of why God gave us these gifts. The cessationist view, I think, is a misunderstanding. So now I'm going to get some emails, AJ. But what the cessationist viewpoint says, and I'm thinking of scholars like Thomas Schreiner and John MacArthur, what they say is those miraculous gifts were signs of the gospel to get Christianity kind of legitimacy in that early phase. But if you read 1 Corinthians carefully, especially chapters 12 through 14, you're going to see that these gifts were given, Ephesians as well, these gifts were given to strengthen the church.

And

that never ends. We're in a constant process of continuing to strengthen.