Can Someone Impart Spiritual Gifts to Others?

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Can Someone Impart Spiritual Gifts to Others?

April 7, 2025

Questions about whether or not someone can impart the gifts of healing, prophecy, words of knowledge, etc. to others and whether being an apostle necessarily means one is part of the foundation of the church according to Ephesians 2:20.

* Can someone impart the gifts of healing, prophecy, words of knowledge, etc. to others?

* Is being the foundation of the church (see Ephesians 2:20) a necessary or accidental property of being an apostle?

Transcript

This is the hashtag SDR-esque podcast from Stand to Reason with Amy Hall and Greg Koukl. Yes, it is. Oh, people don't see the antics just before you push the button and we start talking.

But anyway, it's nice to enter the show with a chuckle. Yes. Alright, this first question comes from James.

Is impartation biblical? For example, can someone impart the gifts of healing, prophecy, words of knowledge, etc. to others? Several in my men's group are moving in that direction after listening to Bill Johnson and Randy Clark, which makes me very uncomfortable. Oh, well, I don't know Randy Clark, but I don't know Bill Johnson is, and I would never.

It's not that the guy can't say something true, but the the that well is so poisoned, it's better to stay away from it entirely. Bill Johnson from Bethel. Yeah, the new apostolic Reformation.

We do see circumstances where there's the laying out of hands in the book of Acts that has a consequence of manifestation of spiritual spiritual gifts, like speaking in tongues or something. Then one has to figure out what's going on there. And whether this is merely descriptive, this is what happened then for particular reasons, or it's prescriptive.

This is the way it works. Always is supposed to happen. And we have leaders that have the capability of laying on hands and imparting spiritual capabilities.

Now, okay, now I see this in light of Bill Johnson, because this is the way they understand in their ecclesiology, their doctrine of the church, they understand the imputation or the transference of gifts. They are the new apostles, new apostolic Reformation and AR and they have the ability then to lay on hands and impart. These gifts, I don't see any good justification with that in the scripture, because it appears the few times when we see that happening, that it is unique in the circumstances.

We don't see a pattern of that. Now, there is a reference. I think in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, where Paul makes a comment about Timothy, Timothy's gifts, go ahead.

He says, I, for this reason, I remind you to kindle a fresh, the gift, the gift. of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. Well, that's interesting, because it doesn't give any detail.

I suspect that's just about receiving the Holy Spirit. The next line is, for God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking about it.

Yes, it could. It certainly is ambiguous. So you can't, you can't take that text, which is, I don't think there's another parallel in the in the epistemic.

You can't take that as, in a certain sense, doctrinal or prescriptive. This is the way it's always done. My says, look, and here's a principle for everybody.

And that is anything that's really important to be practiced regularly by Christians is repeated frequently, because it's foundational. You're not going to find a stray verse that makes reference to something that is going to be, this is the standard prescriptive practice of all Christians. Or at the very least, if it's not repeatedly, then it's clearly.

Okay, so you could have a statement that, that provides a clear prescription, not necessarily repeated a lot, but at least the individual references unambiguous. They're not just referring to something that happened like right, right. Well, in this case, that isn't the case.

You know, we just have this, the gift. How does he put it? The gift of the spirit or the spiritual? No, he just says, I remind you to Kindle afresh the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. It's also an interesting way of characterizing the gift that is in you.

You know, I mean, I have a gift of teaching. I don't know if I would call it the gift that's in me. It's the gift that I possess.

The spirit is in me. That's why I think it might be just referring to that. So I think the point we can make here is there is certainly an ambiguity about this passage.

And the other passage in the book of Acts where Philip is laying hands on the Samaritans, for example, and you have a couple examples. That is the passage or the distribution in a certain sense, in a unique sense of the Holy Spirit. It only happens a couple of times.

And after that, when Paul talks about the doctrine of the spirit, Ephesians chapter one, he says that we have, having believed we have received the Holy Spirit of promise. So whatever happened in the transition in the book of Acts early on in the book of Acts, later on in the doctrinal segments where Paul talks about the details here, it's clear that the standard after the transition is that believing is what stimulates the reception of the spirit, which by the way, you see very clearly in Acts chapter 10, where Peter goes and he speaks to Cornelius, the Gentile, and in the middle of his sermon, no altar call, all of a sudden they manifest possession of the spirit. They have a physical manifestation, very similar to what the apostles did in the upper room on Pentecost.

And indeed, that's what Paul said. He said, these men have received the Holy Spirit the same way we have. So we can't withhold water from baptism.

That's appropriate next because they've received the spirit. And so how do they receive the spirit having believed Ephesians one and by that belief that came automatically? So even in that case, now you're enough into the New Testament age that no laying on of hands is necessary. Now, I don't know what to make of that laying on of hands with Timothy.

Why did Timothy receive the spirit because his Paul's hands were laid on him. That's well into I'm trying to think that was the second missionary journey, I think, where he met Timothy because then they went on to Macedonia when Timothy was with them, as I recall. So that's anomaly and anomaly.

I don't know entirely what to make of that. But what seems to be obvious is you cannot build a ecclesiastical practice of church leaders having the authority to pass gifts to sift different people by the laying on of hands. By the way, it just occurred to me and I think it's in 1 Corinthians 12, where in that is a whole passage about spiritual gifts, also Romans 12, maybe check both.

But in one of them, I think 1 Corinthians, it says that the Holy Spirit distributes the gifts as he wills. So the distribution is done by the spirit. Now, I guess people like Bill Johnson could say, yeah, how does he do that? He does it through the apostles and where apostles or whatever.

The text doesn't actually say that. It doesn't intimate in any sense that there's an intermediary. It says the Holy Spirit is the one who's involved with passing that out.

And since we don't see this consistent practice in the early church in the record here, I don't think there's a justification for presuming or for concluding that church leaders who are apostles, according to Bill Johnson in that movement, have this authority. To me, it's a huge red flag because you have leaders now taking on for themselves a certain kind of authority to distribute gifts in this point, which it's not clear the Scriptures have given to them. What's the downside? Well, the downside is the excessive of trying to think of the right word here, that this puts spiritual leaders, leaders of the church, in a much more authoritative position where the ones even distribute spiritual gifts.

We're in charge of everything. And this is what happens with these kinds of groups. And the NAR has been around.

I don't want 10 years or so. Very early on, my second or third year as a Christian, there was a whole thing called the discipleship movement. And the idea there was the authorities in your life, the spiritual authorities, they know God's will for your life.

They're the ones who distribute the decisions for your life and the spiritual gifts, whatever. They're the ones in charge. God has made them in charge.

You follow them and everything. Now, that's excessive. That's more than the text allows in terms of power of leadership, local leadership.

And so when you have a group that seems to be gathering to themselves more authority than the scripture allows, this is a recipe for disaster. Now, we know a lot more about Bill Johnson and the New Apostolic Reformation. And we know that it is a disaster.

And this is just one element of it. Now, Doug Givit and Holly Pivak, P-I-V-E-C. Givit G-I-V-E-I-T-I-E-T-E-I-T, I get them wrong.

But find the book. The God's Super Apostles is one of their books. I think they've written three books.

And they are very careful in their assessments. Doug is a big influence on my own life as a professor of a Talbot when I took my MA in philosophy. And those are the books that can chronicle and itemize the excesses of Bill Johnson, Bethel, and the whole crowd around the country that are part of the new, the so-called New Apostolic Reformation.

So I think that James is right to be concerned with his friends who are following the lead of what I think it's safe to say a false teacher in Bill Johnson. And don't get wide-eyed about the so-called signs and wonders and stuff like that. These people have all kinds of strength.

They lay on people's graves in order to absorb the spiritual power of the state that is buried in the ground below them. They call it, I can't remember what they call it, but they got a lot of things like that. This is bizarre.

And it starts out sounding okay, and they make a big deal about the Ephesians four-fold offices in the church, which include apostles. And they say, see the church has to have apostles, but it's in prophets and teachers, etc. But if they just turn back a couple pages in chapter two, Paul says that the foundation of the church is the apostles.

That foundation has already been laid, and Jesus is the cornerstone, and the rest are built on top of that. So the church has had apostles, has had, and they laid the foundation. That's what we read their words in the text.

And it is the apostolic authority of the text itself that is one of the criteria for canonicity. So even the early church recognized that these guys were unique, and therefore we should be reading what they said, because that's foundational to the church. After that, there's no more apostles.

By the way, those were the guys assigned by Jesus to represent him and to provide his guidance. Well, once they died, there are no more apostles like that. That's why there's no new scripture for the church.

Yet these guys in the New Apostolic Reformation have taken on the mantle of prophet and apostle, illicitly, in my view, a wrong application of Ephesians four, and have a massive following and are doing all kinds of damage. Give them a wide berth. James, tell your friends, there's nothing good that dwells here.

Yeah, especially if they're in your men's group at church. This might be worth having a discussion with the pastor and getting him involved. You explained this so well, Greg, but there is no sense that we get to choose any sort of gifts for someone else.

We can't even choose for ourselves. Right. And I was thinking about also in Ephesians four talks about Jesus giving, you know, giving some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists for the equipping of the saints until we attain to the unity of the faith.

So there's always this image of God giving us our gifts so that they all fit together in a particular way as one body. And it's always like here, this comes from Jesus. You mentioned a verse that talks about the spirit.

There's no sense that we are giving them to other people. So I agree with you there. Now, I'm going to throw a question in here.

Greg, I wasn't sure we were going to get to this, but since you actually brought it up, you can answer this one. This one comes from David. Ephesians two, twenty tells us that the apostles are the foundation of the church.

My question is this, is being the foundation of the church a necessary or accidental property of being an apostle? I'm not sure I'm thinking about it now. I'm not sure it's appropriate to call it a property. It is a role that they play.

I mean, you might want to technically call it a property. I don't think that helps in our discussion about trying to figure out the role they play in the church. The apostles are chosen by God to be foundational in the structure of the church.

This is Ephesians chapter two. I can go there just to read the passage. Yeah, I guess this would apply in the sense of, are there apostles today? Are apostles necessarily foundational, which means it would only be in the past? Right.

Are they today? And if so, are they foundational today or are they not foundational today? No, I think they are foundational today. The original apostles are still foundational. Not new apostles because the foundation has already been laid.

You don't keep laying the foundation after you've built the structure. Here's what Paul says in Ephesians chapter two. He's talking about just a little bit earlier that the dividing wall of the law has been broken down.

There used to be one of the functions of the law was to separate Gentile culture from Jewish culture because there was the danger of being eclectic and syncretistic, bringing in pagan religious practices. So the Mosaic law represented a wall. Okay, but that has been broken down and the two have become one new man.

Paul describes there at Ephesians chapter two. And so there's no longer any distinction. We are all one in Christ.

Okay. And then he says this. Now it's interesting.

He says, and through him, Jesus, we both Gentiles and Jews have our axis in one spirit to the Father. So there's a spiritual element to here. The spirit is what gives us the new birth and joins us together in the new covenant as one people, whether Jew or Gentile, male or female, slavery.

Verse 19. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens. So when he says you, we speaking to the Ephesians who are Gentiles.

You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and are of God's household having, then built, watch this, on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing. Notice the, the building is being built into a holy temple of the Lord in whom you are also being built together into a dwelling of God in the spirit. Now the architectural motif is really helpful.

You have a cornerstone. Okay. The cornerstone sets the direction of each side.

All right. And that's the, the first thing that gets laid. And then you have as part of that foundation, the apostles and prophets.

That's foundation. Then you build on top of that with other stones. And what Paul is saying here is we are those stones that are built on top of the foundation.

In other words, the foundation has already been laid. No more prophets, no matter in the sense of authoritative. I don't mean some who can give prophetic utterance.

It's a different issue. But prophets were voices of authority in the Old Testament. Okay.

Like Samuel, for example. And in the New Testament, the apostles were voices of authority because they had been vested with that authority by Jesus himself, the upper room discourse. X, a rather John 15, 14, 15, 16 in there.

And so now we got the foundation. Now here's what I'm waiting on on top. You have the stones.

Okay. That's been going on for 2000 years. There's a whole bunch of stones underneath us.

We're not building the foundation again with the authoritative prophets and authoritative apostles. Here's what I'm waiting for. You know, here's what's coming next.

Maybe it's my prophetic word, so to speak. Jesus was the cornerstone. But wait a minute, building is a rectangle.

Therefore it needs four cornerstones. Jesus was one of them. Who's going to come along next and say, our group is the next cornerstone? Because, you know, you got to have four cornerstones, one's not enough.

I mean, that's just bizarre, but, you know, stranger things have happened, you know. And so you can see how bizarre that is. The cornerstone is to set the stage.

Then you build the foundation. And on top of that, you have the other things. Paul identifies in Ephesians chapter two that apostles and prophets are at the foundation.

Therefore, when you go to Ephesians four and you look at that list of gifted people, Paul is not saying, now we need new apostles. In every generation we need new apostles and we knew new prophets because that's more foundation stones when the foundation has already been laid right in the same book we learn about that. So in the internal evidence of the book of Ephesians, it disqualifies that way of understanding the fourfold offices there at Ephesians four.

So do you think if you're saying the prophets he's talking about are not what we would call a prophet today, like there are other kinds of prophets? There may be legitimate gifts of prophecy where people will speak for the Lord in a unique circumstance. So is it possible the same thing can be true about apostles? That there can be apostles not the same as the apostles that were the foundations but apostles today? Well, I'm open to that. Well, not apostles.

No, because we do have a prophetic gift. And we have Agabus, for example, in the book of Acts, speaking forth, a word of private information giving it to the church and there's going to be a famine, for example, another time I think the same guy said, Paul, you're going to be arrested in Jerusalem, whatever. So there are opportunities of forth telling because that's a different role of a prophet than the authoritative leaders of the commonwealth prior to the kings.

And so Samuel's the perfect example because God, the people rejected the judges, they rejected God and Samuel's a prophet here and so he thinks they're rejecting him. God says, no, they're rejecting us or asking me and they're asking for a king. Anyway, in the same way that the prophets were a foundation for the nation of Israel theologically and the apostles are a theological foundation for the church.

There can be people who have, at least arguably, there can be people that have prophetic words that are legitimate like an Agabus. But I don't see any indication in the text that Agabus was a leader of the church and was exercising authority over the church because he could deliver prophetic words under circumstances. But when Paul talks about his apostleship, it's very clear when he defends his apostleship that he is an authority.

You mess with him, you're messing with God. I don't think that is happening now. So to bring it back to the question then, is being the foundation of the church a necessary accidental property of being an apostle, you would say that the office of apostle was back then and they were the foundation of the church.

Serve that role. Okay. So hopefully that answers his question.

Yeah, I hope so. I'm not using, you know, like a property language here. But I'm just saying that it was in God's economy, God's purpose was to build a foundation with certain people and they had a unique role at a period of time to lay that foundation and we follow them.

And again, I want to emphasize the most important requirement or characteristic of a book that was considered New Testament canon was this apostolic authorship. That was the absolute most important issue. It was the first thing.

If it was written by an apostle or a close associated apostle and therefore under that apostle's direction, like Gospel of Mark, for example, with Peter in the background, then it's canon. It's God's word to us. No question.

But notice how they understood those apostles to have a unique role that was foundational. That's why their works made it into the canon. Any other works that were too late to be an apostle were considered spurious.

So the Gospel of Thomas is spurious because it's second century. Thomas was dead a long time before that was written. And so by the time that was written and so obviously it couldn't be apostolic.

This is all to point out that the apostles in the first century had a very unique role and the church understood it as such. And this is consistent with Ephesians 2 that the apostles are at the foundation. Therefore, 2000 years later, we're not laying the foundation of the church anymore.

But this is what they're trying to do. They're trying to, you know, abscond for themselves the authority the apostles had and they don't deserve it. Well, thank you, David and James.

We appreciate hearing from you. David, you got your question in there because it came up for the first question. It's so good for you.

If you have a question, please send that in on X with the hashtag SCRAsk or go to our website at str.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Coco for Stand to Reason.