The following message is by pastor John Piper.

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Well, good, solid Bible, believing, even reformed people disagree about the meaning of the gift of prophecy.

So you see right there in verse six, we are beginning now,

probably what will take a few weeks with a break here for Mission's Week to work our way

through this list of gifts and the first one is the gift of prophecy and as we

undertake to talk about that this morning. We're up against pretty significant

disagreements among very, very godly and Bible believing people. For example, Richard Gaffin has written a book called

Perspective on Pentecost, New Testament teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and he takes one view and then

Wayne Grudham who I think was a student of Richard Gaffin at Westminster wrote a book called The Gift of Prophecy in the

New Testament and today and it takes another view.

So these are pretty different views.

And what I'd like to do is describe them and then tell you which

one I agree with and then walk you through Bible verses to show you why and then show you the strongest arguments on the other side

and then how we can all be happy together.

Okay, and I believe use this gift in a biblically appropriate way that won't get us into craziness and trouble.

Before I do that, we make sure that I take away from you a misconception when I say

prophecy in my mind probably most of you a lot of you have in mind mainly prediction.

That's not all that the prophets in the Bible did.

If you're reading through Jeremiah

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