Authority & the Supernatural Gifts

  If the best gift is the one that is most needed, can we extend that valuation to the person being used in that gift? Does the person who has the most and/or best gift have the most authority? Again most structural religious organizations have been built to accommodate certain beliefs. If the Lord wanted us to use the scriptures as a pattern to set up a church structure, they would be so clear that there wouldn’t be 2,000 official denominations in the United States alone, each of them “scripturally based.” So the gifts are operated out of “functional authority.” We are quickly approaching a time when most of the moving of the Spirit of God in and through His people will occur outside organized religion of any kind, simply because those in legal authority—according to a name on the door—have usurped the Spirit’s authority over what happens inside, and are therefore unwilling to let the Spirit have His way, because it could be “out of order.” This is not to say that there is no order in the church! There definitely is. And it’s very simple: Jesus is in charge! If Jesus Himself approached the church in physical form, how many churches would turn Him away from the pulpit either because He hadn’t cleared His message with them beforehand or because He wasn’t a member of that church organization?   When someone is dying of cancer, or is wounded in heart or head, or in the depths of despair, they want to be set free by God. They don’t care whether the one setting them free is “under an approved, ordained authority,” neither does God, and neither sh