Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What is the Gift of Tongues? | Questions You're Asking | 1 Corinthians 14.1-25

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we're answering questions you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So follow 10-minute Bible Talks on Facebook, vote on your favorite questions, or you can just give your own, and you might hear it right here on the podcast. Borat 2 is coming out, and I don't personally plan on watching it or really recommend anyone. else to do so, but I will confess that I have seen the first Borat when it came out, which again,

Starting point is 00:00:39 I'm not telling anybody to watch. But one of my favorite scenes in that movie is when Borat stumbles into a Pentecostal revival. Now let me give you some context. Borat is a made-up character, and he's played by Sasha Baron Cohen, but Cohen's character, he comes into real-life situations. In other words, he walks into a real-life non-staged events, in this case, a Pentecostal revival, and he plays this made-up character, and the people around him have no idea that the character is made up. So anyways, Borat, he comes into this room, and people, they're dancing around, they're falling to the ground, and you guessed it, they are speaking tongues into the mic and off of the mic, just all over the place. Now, the tongues, at this revival, at least,

Starting point is 00:01:23 honestly sounds a lot like gibberish. Man, it's accompanied by this kind of wild, bodily, spiritual ecstasy. Now, as you can imagine, Borat eventually gets the mic and he begins to speak in tongues, or at least speak the same way these people are speaking. And the preacher in the room, they're all cheering for him. Like what he's saying actually makes sense to them. To them, it's not gibberish at all, apparently. But of course, it is gibberish because Sasha Baron Cohen is turning the whole revival into a comedy sketch. He's not doing this by making fun of it. He's doing it by going along with it. Now, I'm sorry if what I'm saying offends some of our listeners. I'm not trying to make fun of tongues, but I am trying to make a point. There's not much said in the Bible about the

Starting point is 00:02:10 gift of tongues. You can read the vast majority of it in 1st Corinthians 14. Now, a little context helps before we hop into this passage. Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians, not because they were stand-up, top-notch followers of Jesus. He wrote it to them because their church was actually a shameful embarrassment of moral failure, classes, pride, and bizarre spiritual expressions. Now, I know I haven't actually explained what speaking in tongues is, and I'm going to do that. I'll circle back. Don't worry. But I want us to stay in Corinth for a moment, because apparently the gift of tongues was common in Corinth, despite all of those issues. Apparently, people were standing up in worship, and they were loudly speaking in tongues, but this was actually a problem for the Apostle Paul,

Starting point is 00:02:57 not because speaking in tongues is a problem, but because there were no interpreters. In other words, you've got all these people standing up saying things, but no one knows what they're saying. Without an interpreter, Paul says that these tongue speakers, they only served themselves, not the church, which is kind of exactly what you would expect from the Corinthian Church. It's a place full of a lot of pretty selfish people. Now, let's pick up what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14.6. Now, brothers and sisters, if I come to you and speak in tongues, what good will I be to you unless I bring you some revelation of knowledge or prophecy or word of instruction? Verse 9, unless you speak intelligible words with your tongue, how will anybody know

Starting point is 00:03:38 what you're saying? You'll just be speaking into the air. Undoubtedly, there's all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. If then, I don't grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I'm a foreigner to the speaker, and speaker is a foreigner to me. Verse 13, for this reason, the one who speaks in a tongue should pray that they may interpret what they say. Verse 16. Otherwise, when you are praising God in the spirit, how can someone else who is now put in the position of an inquirer say, amen to what's being said, to your Thanksgiving, since they don't even know what you're saying? In other words, he's saying, look, if there's no interpreter, no one's going to cry out, amen. No one's going to say, hey, I get that because no one understands it.

Starting point is 00:04:21 Verse 23. So, if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks tongue, and inquirers or unbelievers come in. Will they not say that you're out of your mind? Borat could have done his stick in Corinth, apparently. That's what I'm gathering, at least. And it would have made, at least according to the Apostle Paul, it would have made the entire church look out of its mind. And again, that's exactly what happens in the Borat skit.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Now, Paul's point here is clear. Our worship of King Jesus should actually attract in interest unbelievers, not repel them away from him. Our worship should actually be comprehensible, understandable to unbelievers. It shouldn't sound like insanity. So when I talk about tongues, I don't really have any interest in discussing wild expressions of the gift, which the Apostle Paul clearly forbids. Now, all of this is going to beg a question, why do we have so many churches today that are doing the very thing Paul warned Corinth not to do? Why do we have these churches where we have people speaking in tongues in an incomprehensible manner, despite Paul's warning against doing this in worship? Well, it all goes back to a revival in the early 1900s in Los Angeles on Azusa Street.

Starting point is 00:05:36 Now, during this revival, people who were converted began to speak in tongues spontaneously. The revivalists, they looked back at the book of Acts, and they noticed that some of the conversions in the book of Acts were also accompanied by people speaking in tongues. And so they drew a connection between genuine salvation, genuine conversion, and speaking in tongues. Now, we have to keep this in mind. This is in America in the 1900s. And so at this point, most people, most Americans, already thought of themselves as being Christians before they were truly converted to Christianity. Now, this historical and cultural dynamic led people to speak of having a second baptism, right? Because they already thought of themselves as being Christians who had some sort of First baptism. Well, now they're going to talk about having a second baptism by the Holy Spirit. And again, this idea could only come out of a cultural context where everybody already sees themselves as Christians. Now, to differentiate their baptism by the Spirit, the second baptism,

Starting point is 00:06:35 these revivalists and theologians said that it should be accompanied with miraculous gifts, like the gift of tongues. If we fast forward to today, you still have movements like Pentecostalism that emphasize the connection between conversion and tongues. And that's why they have services that make Christians look like insane people to outsiders, because they actually think part of their mission is to initiate outsiders into this insanity. Right? The insanity of whatever's happening is a sign of true conversion. Now, in reaction to this whole movement, to the movement of Pentecostalism,

Starting point is 00:07:11 there's been a whole different movement of Christians that have claimed that the miraculous spiritual gifts like tongues and healing, that those gifts actually ceased after the first generation of Christians. They'd say, look, these gifts were given by God to show the authority of the apostles and the early church to people on the outside, but they stopped after the first generation because there was no more need. Now, I'm not sure this kind of reactionaryism is wise or biblical, although I would certainly prefer it over something that makes King Jesus look crazy. I want to ask a question. Are there any other options. I think there are. If we can clear the ground from both the craziness and the reactionary responses to the craziness, we can get closer to what we actually see in the New Testament.

Starting point is 00:07:59 We're almost out of time, so I'll briefly try to explain my point. What was tongues in the New Testament? We need to answer that question. And when did tongues manifest itself in the early church according to Acts? And finally, when might we expect to see tongues in today's world. Okay? So first, what was the gift of tongues? Well, I really want you to go and read Acts 2 on your own, because if you do that, you'll read the story about how the disciples receive the Holy Spirit, and they go outside, and they begin to speak to Jews who are actually from countries all over the world. In other words, their first languages are all different kinds of first languages. But the Spirit gives the disciples the ability to speak in, you guessed it, tongues,

Starting point is 00:08:44 the ability to speak in languages that they didn't know themselves. So in Acts 2, speaking in tongues is simply speaking in a language that you yourself don't know, and it's often for the purpose of communicating the gospel to someone in their own first language, okay? That's the first time we ever read about tongues in the Bible, shape how we understand tongues. Now, why then do some people talk in gibberish and call that tongues? Well, I think it's because in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, he talks, about speaking in the tongues of angels. And this is why some people extrapolate that speaking in tongues is actually speaking in the language of heaven. As evidence for this, they point out the fact that

Starting point is 00:09:25 people couldn't understand each other in Corinth whenever they spoke in tongues. So they said, look, it must not be a human language. It must be the tongue of angels. Well, not so fast. First of all, it's not really clear if Paul is being serious about speaking in the tongue of angels. In fact, in context, it looks like he's exaggerating. It looks like he's exaggerating. It looks like, like he's saying, you think that speaking in tongues is so great? Well, even if you spoke in the tongue of angels, it would be no good if nobody could understand you. Okay, but why then couldn't people understand each other? Well, do you understand someone who's speaking in a different language? Do you understand someone who's speaking in Mandarin? Well, probably not unless you yourself

Starting point is 00:10:08 speak Mandarin. No one could understand the Corinthians speaking in tongues because they were speaking in other languages that no one else in the room knew. This is why Paul explicitly says they needed an interpreter, not to interpret the tongues of angels, but to interpret the other languages that they were being miraculously empowered to speak. Okay, so the gift of tongues is the gift of speaking in a language that you don't know by the power of God's spirit for the proclamation of the gospel. When do we see this gift happen in the New Testament? Well, we don't actually see it every single time that someone is converted. That's not a pattern in the New Testament. We do see tongues most often when the gospel breaks through to a new people group or a new region. For example, when Peter converts the first

Starting point is 00:10:56 Gentiles, they begin to speak in tongues. Or before that, when the apostles first proclaimed the gospel for the very first time, they also speak in tongues. So where might we expect tongues today? Well, I think that the miraculous gift of speaking tongues might be expected on the edges of missionary work, wherever the gospel is reaching new languages. I also think, though, that on a smaller, less miraculous scale, I think that the gift of tongues is present whenever Christians speak to unbelievers in a comprehensible manner that actually changes hearts. For example, an American Christian who doesn't talk in Christianese all the time, but he's able to talk about Jesus in the normal vernacular of a secular person, well, that American Christian, they are showing on a small

Starting point is 00:11:43 smaller scale, a kind of gift of tongues. And this is why I started with Borat and Paul's warnings, because comprehensibility is actually at the heart of tongues. Tongues are a gift for proclaiming the gospel in comprehensible terms. There's nothing spiritual about calling crazy talk spiritual. Paul commands us to pray for the gifts of prophecy and tongues because he believes that the proclamation of the truth, that's prophecy, in comprehensible terms. So let's proclaim the truth in comprehensible terms, that's tongues, that this is a gift that God has given us so that we can do what he's commanded us to do, which has proclaimed the good news to people all over the world, both locally and abroad.

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What is the Gift of Tongues? | Questions You're Asking | 1 Corinthians 14.1-25

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