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Just calling a group a church does not make it so in God’s eyes.
A true church functions according to God’s design, which
includes many aspects. Among them are the practice of Christian
love (1 Cor. 13), sound doctrine (the church is to be in
fellowship with the
apostles, who were commissioned with Christ’s authority),
and purity in life (1 Cor. 5:6-8). Sound doctrine implies
preaching based on the Bible, and purity implies the exercise of
church discipline. [7]
The two things—having the Holy Spirit and having His gifts—go
together. Anyone who is united to Christ is united to the
whole of Christ. If
you come to Christ, you come to personal fellowship with Him,
and that fellowship is the basis for all the benefits of
salvation, including spiritual gifts. We do not
earn the privilege of
having spiritual gifts by going through some special additional
steps. The gifts of the Spirit are gifts of grace, not merited
by us but given freely out of God’s bounty. Spiritual gifts are
gifts from Christ. [9]
The Holy Spirit is present and blesses us through sermons and
exhortations from fellow believers. But the messages are always
fallible and must be checked by the standard of the Bible. The
necessity of testing later works by the Scriptures is implied by
the finality of revelation in Christ (Heb. 1:1-3), the
foundational character of the teaching of the apostles (Eph.
2:20), and the fact that the canon of Scripture is complete.
[16]
The revelation given in Christ and in His appointed apostolic
interpreters is never to be superseded or surpassed. [18]
When someone speaks in
tongues privately, he is praying or praising God. God
understands, even though no one else does. Speaking in tongues
publicly is appropriate only if it can be interpreted, so the
church as a whole can be built up. [37]
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