He pulled me out of the miry pit and put my feet on solid rock! How can I not praise Him? ALL blessing and honor and glory and power and dominion and authority be unto the Lamb of God, who shed His blood that I might live. Hallelujah! What a Savior!
Just to clear up one easy misconception which frequently arises when those not in fellowship observe these types of behaviors, there do exist very real spiritual gifts which are not based upon empiricism or rationalism.
The gift of evangelism and pastor-teacher are ‘SPIRITUAL’ gifts, given by God the Holy Spirit to some believers. These are spiritual communication gifts. The spiritual gift of evangelism is a gift which provides a believer the ability to SPIRITUALLY communicate with unbelievers.
The spiritual gift of pastor-teacher is a gift which provides a believer the ability to SPIRITUALLY communicate with believers.
Too often, people observe somebody who is worldly, has become a religious leader, calls themselves or forms a worldly organization to label them as a pastor-teacher or as an evangelist, without ever being given that spiritual gift from God.
Many believers and unbelievers then identify the counterfeit as being somebody with that gift. They confuse the gift as an intellectual talent, or a charismatic ability to enthrall the masses. That is not necessarily the spiritual gift. More often, that is a symptom of emotions and the glands in both the speaker and the audience.
I have rarely witnessed those with those actual gifts, but when they are observed, they rarely inflate their status based upon those gifts. Like Christ, who did not consider His identity with the Father to be something grasped, yet nonetheless very well understood He and the Father were one and placed His faith in Him, likewise those with those communication spiritual gifts in fellowship and practicing with those gifts manifest to the listener being addressed a spiritual truth which logic, reason, nor any physical phenomenon may explain.
Accordingly, while some who are frauds may be well exposed, be careful not to lump all reported supernatural events as not having any substance in truth, nor associate those spiritual gifts as identical with religious fraud.