Pastor's Blog

I want to tell you something, “You’ve been blowing the whistle, and you lost all the power with the whistle.” (Whee ee ee ee ee! Louder than that.) At first she was a little... didn’t respond quite right, but came around. I said, “Look here, if you would leave your whistle alone and not make all that noise, and lose all the power of the Spirit, the Lord would use you. The next time the Spirit of God comes on you, try not to let it go with Whee ee ee ee. Nobody gets anything out of that. You’re wasting our time, and it’s hard on our nerves. Just hold it in, and ask the Lord to help you know what to do with it.”

She said, “Well Brother Beuttler, thank you, I’ll try, but I don’t know how I can keep still.” I said, “You try.” We had a few classes, and I noticed something to my side and looked her way. There she was hanging onto the whistle (stuffing a handkerchief in her mouth). All of a sudden, she burst out and gave her first message in tongues. There was no whistle after that. She was cured. A little later, the Lord also used her in interpretation.

Now she was quenching the Spirit. First, she was disbursing the Spirit; later she was quenching it, but trying to learn. The Lord used her in interpretations. She graduated, and I received a letter from California, which said,

“Brother Beuttler, I want to thank you for the story of the whistle. The Lord isn’t only using me in messages in tongues, interpretations, but also in prophecy, and it has enriched my ministry.”

Now she had to learn. Many people quench the Spirit out of ignorance. Nevertheless, “Quench not the Spirit” is still one of the rules of the Word of God. By suppressing the Spirit willfully, we are vexing the Spirit of God; we are hurting the Spirit; we trouble Him.

As we read here, we are not to stifle the Spirit.

“Do not stifle the utterance of the Spirit.” (Knox).

“Do not dampen the Spirit of God” (Muhlheimer).

The Spirit of God is a person, and we should avoid suppressing, quenching, depriving the Spirit of God of His free manifestation and movement. Now the human spirit, that is something else, as I already said. Perhaps I will stay with this context. In verse 20 it says: “Despise not prophesying.”

To “despise” simply means to “treat with contempt.” Prophesying is speaking in the Spirit of God in the language understood by the hearers. I noticed we had two prophetic utterances this morning. It is speaking in the Spirit of God in the language of the speaker and the hearer without the use of speaking in tongues and interpretation.

In fact, the two are equal. Tongues and interpretation has the same effect as prophecy, but there is a difference. I might go into that some other time. In the meantime, “do not treat prophesying with contempt.” I was in a church in the States where all week long we had no manifestation of the Spirit of any kind. At the end of the week, I said to the pastor, “Brother, don’t you have the gifts of the Spirit in operation in this church?” He said to me, “Oh, we don’t bother with that stuff.” And that’s a Pentecostal man. “We don’t bother with that stuff.”

But the Book says, “Covet earnestly the best gifts, especially that you may prophesy.” It says, “Covet to prophesy.” Paul said, “You may all prophesy one by one.” This word “covet” in the Greek is a very strong word. It means “to be in hot pursuit,” and prophesying is one of the gifts which is open to all Spirit-baptized believers.

“Despise not prophesying.” What Paul had in mind was the spurious. In his day, there were also false prophets and false prophesying as we have in our day. I have heard them. We had a fellow in school. He gave what was meant to be, or purported to be a prophecy. “Behold, thus saith the Lord...” and then he gave a terrific rebuke to somebody. After chapel was out, he happened to walk past me.

He said to me, “Brother Beuttler, what did you think of my prophecy?” I wanted to keep him guessing, so I simply said, “Nothing.” That didn’t really answer him. He said, “What do you mean by ‘nothing?’” I said, “I mean nothing, nothing.” Then he said, “You mean, you didn’t accept my prophecy as authentic?” I said, “Of course not.”

He rebutted, “I want to tell you, that was the Lord. I spoke in the Name of the Lord. Oh well, never mind now. I had it in for a fellow, and I wanted to give him a good piece of my mind in the Name of the Lord, so I put it in the form of a prophecy.”