Pentecostals and Prophets

LOL @ me - I guess I'm the one who didn't read the OP carefully...... I guess I understand this discussion better now......

My church is not a "legalistic" type church, but we are charismatic - I mean gifts-practicing charismatic, not a building with the word Pentecostal over the door but without the "power thereof", if you know what I mean. In our city we are known as the charismatic church that "indulges the prophetic" - I love that.....

And I think that one aspect of the answer to the OP's question lies in the attitude behind that phrase - "indulges the prophetic". I think that many of the churches more "reasonable" concerning lifestyle rules (meaning non-legalistic ones) are also more "reasonable" (ie: rational) about many things, including the gifts. They have reasoned away anything that smacks of the emotional or highly-charged, some would say "low-brow" (or "undignified" )...... and along with this bathwater they have thrown out the baby, meaning the gifts.

I recently guest-led worship in a church with the word Pentecostal on their sign, but these people were not free in their expressions of love and joy in the Lord's presence, and worship was difficult. A prophetic word even came forth during one of these services, and there were some solemn "praise the Lord"s after it, but it was not heeded, at least not that day. There was a specific response called for within the word, and it fell on almost all deaf ears. Hmmmm...... this brings me to another reason that this sort of bound-up, legalistic/religious church sometimes seems to have more prophetic words spoken in it - perhaps it's because the people aren't listening, so the Lord keeps trying again and again to speak??

to quote OUSA..... forgive me......
tal

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Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.
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1 Corinthians 14:1

No worries!

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What are you talking about? Are we reading the same manuscript here?

It seems perhaps that Pentecostals focus more on prophets than a lot of churches do, and that is good, because the New Testament does speak of prophets. However, in my experience Pentecostals also have a weakness in that they do not tend to test prophets very thoroughly, but too often naively accept what may sometimes be false prophets.

It my experience in a Pentecostal church the rest of the Christian Church was put down a lot as being inferior, so it may surprise some Pentecostals that the rest of the Church has actually recognized prophets for the past 2,000 years. However, the Church has historically put into effect some pretty strict rules in regard to discerning whether or not a prophet is for real.

Some of these guidelines are: -

1. check to see that the person is of a sound moral character and a good reputation,
2. the prophecy must conform to Christian truth and morality,
3. a prediction must be outside the possibility of natural knowledge which can be faked, such as occurs sometimes in counterfeit revival meetings where people fill out a form or are overheard and information is transmitted to a phony evangelist,
4. no prophecy which condemns a person to hell is to be accepted, as those things are to be determined at the judgment and not today,
5. we ought to establish whether or not the prophecy actually came to pass.

Deuteronomy 13 also gives some similar guidelines from an Old Testament perspective.

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