The Church, Many Parts, Many Gifts

We've talked about temporary gifts and permanent gifts and noted that some gifts of the Spirit were given for the establishing of the church and did not continue after the foundation of the church had been laid. Other gifts continue on down to today. We noted the gift of apostles as a temporary gift. There are no apostles today. Paul said he was the last of the apostles. We talked about spiritual gifts of signs or miracles and noted that they went with apostolic ministry and we would assume that they are not present today either, The gift of healing where an individual is able to heal people is not present today, but God definitely does respond to the prayers of His people and sometimes heals some illness or does some other supernatural thing. We noted that the gift of tongues was very simply the ability to speak in an earthly foreign language that you had never learned or studied. That's clearly set forth in Acts chapter 2 and is the pattern through the rest of Acts.