"Battalongasota: Praying and the Gift of Tongues" 1 Corinthians 14:1-19 Sunday Evening Worship Service

First Corinthians 14, I'm just going to read the first paragraph and we'll go back through it again in a second.

It begins this way: Pursue love and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you can prophesy.

For the one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God, for no one understands him.

He utters mysteries in the spirit.

On the other hand, the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and their encouragement and consolation.

The one who speaks in a tongue builds himself up.

But the one who prophesies builds up the church.

Now I want you all to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy.

The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets so that the church may be built up.

I used to work for a sports facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico that was owned by a guy who lived in Las Cruces, which is like, you know, three, four hours away.

So we never saw him.

I was hired there and uh I worked there for a while.

I was promoted to manager of this place and never met the owner.

And then one day I got a message that the owner was going to come in the next day and he wanted to meet with me.

And so I was supposed I wasn't supposed to work.

I came in and met with the guy.

He brought me into a uh like his own little office there, kind of a back room that I'd never been in before.

And he told me that he knew that I was a Christian.

I was a youth pastor also at the time.

The whole gym thing was my side hustle.

All youth pastors have side hustles.

Uh and so he knew that I was in in youth ministry and uh asked me if I was a Christian, and I said yes, and then he asked me if I'd ever prayed in tongues.

And I said, no, um, with my skeptical eyebrow and everything.

No.

Now at the time I was uh part of the Calvary Chapel movement, which taught that tongues was an ongoing gift today, but that it shouldn't be practiced in church.

There's a bit of a logical tension with that right away.

We talked about that last week a bit, to say something, you know, this is a spiritual gift that's important for Christians to have, but do not do it at church.

Like there's a little bit of an inherent contradiction in that.

That I was kind of aware of.

That was on my radar, that how can you say something's important for the church, just don't do it at the church.

But I was just comfortable with that tension and I wasn't thinking much of it until the boss man sat me down and asked me if I'd prayed in tongues.

And I said no, and he said that his his church thinks that you're you have no evidence or grounds upon which to be confident of your salvation unless you have prayed in tongues.

It's the sign that you have the spirit, and that's very common in the uh in the Pentecostal church.

There's there's a lot of churches that would teach that even to this day.

Uh this was you know 20 years ago.

So then he uh he had me, I told him I I never prayed in tongues, and he said, Do you want to learn?

And I had enough Calvary Chapel in me to say yes to that question.

And so he had me sit down on this chair, and then he down, he then got on his knees beside me and laid his hands on me, and he told me just to repeat after him, and I was supposed to repeat these phrases over and over and over again.

And he told me that as I'm repeating the phrases, to let those sounds and that just kind of the feeling of those sounds leaving my body for that to be my prayer.

And the language he used was to disengage your mind and kind of free your tongue and let that just come out of you, and that will be prayer.

And, you know, I don't know what was in my heart at the time.

I don't know how sincere I was in my effort to do that, but I did repeat the sounds he gave me, and I repeated them faster and faster.

And, you know, I was probably skeptical enough to not actively try to detach my mind, but it is one of those like Gordian knots, like the more you try to not think about thinking about something, the more you're thinking about the thing you're not supposed to be thinking about.

And that was my experience in trying to not think about praying in tongues.

So it was uneffective and um ended up leaving that job anyway for seminary.

Praise God.

Is that the biblical gift of tongues?

I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences or know people that have had those kind of experiences.

Are you supposed to pray?

Does the Bible teach that you are supposed to pray in a language to God that you don't understand?

And when you say, I don't think so, my church doesn't do that, people will often bring you to 1 Corinthians 14, where Paul here even says, you know, in verse 5, I want you to speak in tongues.

Therefore shouldn't you be doing that?

What does the scripture teach about this?

Well, it might surprise you to know that the word that is translated tongues here in 1 Corinthians 14, it's a very common Greek word.

It is used over 50 times in the New Testament, and it is uh Glosalila, the sometimes means a literal tongue, but normally it's an actual spoken language.

Let me give you some examples of the way it is used in the New Testament, and I hope that will help fill out what this means for you.

Revelation 13, verse 7.

Revelation 13:7

It says the Antichrist, well, and then Revelation 17, verse 15, the Antichrist will have authority over every tribe, every nation, and every tongue, meaning that he will rule all languages of the world.

Revelation 17:15

Revelation 7, those who are martyred came out of the great tribulation, and they're described as coming from every tribe, every nation, and every tongue.

It's a word for language.

It means that there will be people, that the tribulation will go around the world and will affect people in every language group.

Those are some negative uses.

There's positive uses.

1 John chapter 3, verse 18.

1 John 3:18

We are supposed to love with deeds and truth, not with words and tongue, which means not with just words and speech, not with words and language, but actual deeds and actions.

Like I said, there's 51 uses of this word in the New Testament, and they are always related to actual speech or actual physical language, or the actual tongue, like you'll see in Acts 2 in a second.

Now there is this truth that outside of the church in the Roman world, at the life of Christ in the Roman world, even for centuries before Jesus, for 300 years before Jesus, there was a common practice in the Roman world of people going to temples and praying in what is often called today tongues, praying in kind of a gibberish language.

Every Roman deity had a temple, and many of these Roman deities would be worshipped in their own language.

There were languages that developed around the temple.

Now, just like the Roman gods were not real, the languages that were spoken in those temples were not real.

So when you hear like, you know, the language of uh Dionysies or whatever, that doesn't mean that language actually existed.

It was the same kind of ecstatic speech that you would hear, you know, today spoken all around the world as praying in tongues.

They did the same kind of thing, but to the Roman deities.

They would, you know, Andalon to Chandalon, they would they would just let the speech flow out of them in the Roman temples.

Plato writes about this even in his own writings.

It is often called aesthetic prayer or even erotic prayer, is the Greek word that is used for it from the Greek word eros, which is a word for love.

In C.

S.

Lewis's book, The Four Loves, he has a section devoted to Eros.

Eros is not a word used in the New Testament, uh, but it was common in the life of Jesus, a very common Greek word for love, and it is love that is more sensual.

And so some people uh have deduced that in the Roman temples as they're worshiping their gods with that erotic kind of prayer that it was a sexual worship of the gods.

Um, I don't know if that's necessarily true.

I think by that it means more like a sensual kind of prayer.

You weren't praying with your head, you weren't praying with knowledge in those Roman temples, but you were praying with your senses.

It was a sensual experience, the sounds coming out of your mouth, the way it felt to detach your mind and just have this ecstatic utterances or ecstatic speeches often referred to as erotic prayer.

That was very common in the Roman world, and of all the places in the Roman world it was common.

It was common in Corinth.

It was common in Corinth.

But before we get back to Corinth and 1 Corinthians 14, I want you to flip over to Acts chapter 2, because this is where this is the first time in the church that you're gonna see the gift of tongues or the gift of languages used.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And I often just say the gift of languages because I think that is a better way to translate the Greek word that is rendered sometimes tongues.

I think it is better to translate it languages, but it is confusing.

I understand why in like Acts 2 it's translated as tongue, because there's tongues that are shaped, you know, fire that is shaped like tongues that are coming down out of the sky.

That doesn't mean they were shaped like languages, they weren't shaped like you know 501 Spanish verb books coming out of this the sky.

They were shaped like the you know the fixture of a physical tongue, and so that's why it's translated consistently.

But it makes more sense when you remember that the word for tongue is used for both the the physical tongue and the language, it's the same word.

And we have the same kind of concept in English too, by the way.

You know, when you ask somebody what is your mother tongue, you don't mean by that where their mother's tongue is.

You mean by what language did you grow up speaking?

That's what the word means.

The tongue just is it's a metonym there, it stands in for uh the language that's spoken.

Also, you know that it's an intelligible language.

Like if somebody is mumbling, you would say, Does the cat have your tongue?

That means what they're saying now doesn't make sense.

It's not coming out clearly, so something is wrong with their tongue.

So even that little idiom in English expresses that when the tongue is functioning properly, it is clear, articulate, understandable speech, perhaps even in your mother tongue.

Well, in Greek they didn't, they used that word very, very frequently uh for the actual spoken language.

And this becomes important in Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

This is the birth of the church, the beginning of Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Pentecost had arrived, they were all in one place.

Suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind.

It filled the entire house where they were sitting.

Now, if you pause here for a second, they're all sitting in a house.

This is all basically all the believers in the whole known world here sitting in one house.

Before we keep going, ask yourself in your mind, not out loud time, but in your mind, where should they be?

And what were they commanded to do?

They're commanded to get on up out of there and go into all the world, preaching the gospel to all creation.

Jesus said that in Matthew 28.

The angels said that here in Acts chapter 1.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

They were supposed to get on Jesus' last words to them.

If you draw your eyes back up to chapter 1, verse 7, you're supposed to get out of there and go to Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.

That's what they're supposed to do.

They're supposed to do that when the Holy Spirit falls on them, though.

And so they're like, they're assuming that they are being obedient, which is an assumption, if you know these guys, assuming they're being obedient, they're the planes lined up on the taxiway, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come so that they can take off.

That's giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The more skeptical interpretation is that they're not eager to go out in the whole world.

The more skeptical interpretation is they're kind of afraid of going the whole world, and so it's going to take persecution to push them out the door.

But until now, they have justification by saying, Hey, we're waiting for the Spirit.

That's what you said to do.

Verse eight of chapter one, Jesus said, You'll receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

They're waiting for that.

Well, chapter two, the wait is over.

They're in the house, and verse two, suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind.

It filled the whole house, verse three, and divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.

Tongues here are not an arbitrary symbol.

The fire appears in them in a visible way.

There's something like fire that lands on them that looks like tongues.

It doesn't burn them.

There's no description of them being burned here.

This is a very public and visible image of the Holy Spirit filling them.

The reason it is in tongues is because they are supposed to go to the nations.

That's where they are supposed to be out the door going is to the nations.

And so the Lord will fill them here with his spirit to drive them to speak to people about Jesus in different languages.

Get outside of Israel.

You can't understand the gift of tongues until you remember that there's no concept of missions in the Old Testament.

Israel was not supposed to be missionaries to the world in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament, they were supposed to draw people to themselves by living their life, and people were to journey to Israel and encounter Yahweh that way.

That's what Solomon said when he dedicated the temple.

That's just the normal Deuteronomy chapter 4.

Deuteronomy 4 · chapter mention

You lead a transformed life, people will come and encounter Yahweh that way.

Israel never really did that, so it didn't happen that way.

They're not sending missionaries out.

You know, the one obvious exception would be Jonah, and he stands as a condemnation on Israel that the Ninevites weren't coming there, that he had to go, and of course, Jonah was a very bad missionary.

He did not rejoice over the conversion of the Nineveh once they converted and God heard their prayer.

Jonah remember pulled up a chair and rooted for their destruction.

Just like a middle schooler mission trip right there.

This is not an example of real missions.

The New Testament comes and it's go, go, go, go.

Get into the world.

You'll have the Holy Spirit.

The gospel's gonna go from being in Israel to being in every nation and every tribe and every language.

We covered that from Revelation earlier.

And so the Spirit comes to them like tongues of fire, demonstrating they're gonna go everywhere.

And in case that you're like, oh, you might be reading into that symbolism.

Well, verse 4, they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and right away they began to speak in other tongues.

Now, the word tongues here, it is the word for actual spoken languages.

That's what this word means.

They were not speaking in gibberish, they were speaking in actual languages as the Spirit gave them utterance.

You know this because verse 5, there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews.

This is the feast of Pentecost, okay?

So people are there from all over, uh, Jews from all over the Roman Empire, devout men from every nation under heaven, and devout they're indicating Jewish.

And at the sound, the multitude came together.

In other words, the sound that's happening in the house, it's drawing a massive crowd because people don't know what's coming on, going on.

They're seeing tongues like fire landing on these people, and critical, the end of verse six, everybody was hearing them speak in his own language.

So they were not hearing Andalanda, they were hearing Ola come ostas.

They were hearing everything in their own language.

And this is astonishing, verse seven.

They were amazed and astonished and said, Are they not all Galileans who are speaking?

I mean, in other words, they're from like Tiberius.

They're from the Lake of Galilee, the Sea of Galilee, which is, I mean, that's first of all, Israel itself is kind of considered backwater in the Roman Empire.

But the backwater part of the backwater part of the Roman Empire is Tiberius, where these fishermen are from.

This is going to come out later in the book of Acts.

Remember when they say, how can you be this articulate?

You guys are fishermen from Galilee.

Nothing good comes from up there.

They're not educated people up there, but they're speaking in all the languages of the Roman Empire.

How is it that each of us hear them in his own native language?

Verse 9.

Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia.

I mean, you're going through what is modern-day Saudi Arabia, through that, Judea, Cappadocia.

Now you're up in the Asia Minor and Europe, Pontius and Asia, Phragria, Phamphylla, Egypt, parts of Livia.

So you're making a circle there.

He's going like from Saudi Arabia up through Asia Minor, Europe.

Now he's jumped over the Mediterranean.

Crete, here, Cretans here, and then Arabians.

He's gone full circle all the way around the clock in verse 11.

We all hear them telling in our own languages the mighty works of God.

So this is not a subtle or an abstract point here.

It's very critical to understanding what's happening in Acts 2, that everybody heard them in the actual languages of the places they were from.

These people all spoke Greek.

The disciples didn't need the gift of tongues to reach the crowd that was here.

They've all journeyed to Jerusalem, they all speak Greek, they all speak and read Aramaic.

They could have communicated in one of those languages.

Both were commonly spoken throughout the Roman Empire, and definitely in Jerusalem, and yet that's not what happens.

Most of these people are trilingual, they would all speak Aramaic, they would all speak Greek, and they would definitely all speak whatever language of their own nation.

And it's interesting, the gospel goes to them in the language of their own nation, not in the language of the Old Testament, Hebrew, not in the spoken language of the Jews, Aramaic, not even in the language of the New Testament that united the whole Roman Empire, Greek.

The gospel goes to them in their heart language, the language, their mother tongue.

That's how the gospel will hit them.

That is a pattern for Bible translation to this day, by the way.

We send missionaries around the world to translate scripture into the mother tongues of people, people that, you know, live in Chad or in Algeria or in Papua New Guinea.

There are languages that those people all speak.

You know, everybody in Chad speaks Jajan Arabic or French, but you can give them the gospel in those languages.

But this is a pattern here.

The gospel is going to go to every tongue.

Even those little languages that only a few thousand people speak.

It'll be translated into that language, and people will hear about Jesus in their own tongue.

This is so this is not a subtle point.

Missionaries for thousands of years have put their money where their interpretation is in this, in reaching people in their language.

So here it's all Jews, and then verse 12, they were all amazed and perplexed.

What does this mean?

And others say they're filled with wine.

I mean, this is like one of those classic atheist defenses right there.

A classic non-believer defense is, uh, they're all speaking in the language that I should know, but maybe they're drunk.

That doesn't make any sense.

And you know that because Peter right away is like, uh, verse 14, we're not drunk.

It's like the morning time.

And Peter says in verse 16, this is what the scripture says.

In the last day, verse 17, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.

So it's very common here to say, see, the tongues indicate being filled with the spirit, which is true, but that's not what's underlined here.

What's underlined here is the all flesh.

People from every language group.

That's the point of the sign.

Every language group will experience this.

So that's tongues at the start of the church.

Skip over in your Bible to Acts chapter 10.

Acts 10 · chapter mention

Here is uh what's called today Caesarea Maritime.

This is uh along the coast, kind of by where Tel Aviv is today.

This is the Greek part of Israel.

Um Caesarea Maritime was named Caesarea after Caesar.

It was supposed to be the Roman city in Israel.

It's got the Roman architecture, it's where the Roman king ruled over uh Israel.

It was basically an entirely Gentile city, and the gospel gets there.

It's the closest massive Gentile outpost to Israel.

The highway to Damascus goes, uh basically starts from there.

This is where the Gentiles and international trade and commerce are during Jesus uh during Jesus' lifetime.

And this is where at Caesarea chapter 10, verse 1, there was Cornelius, a centurion.

He is going to have a centurion, he's going to have the gospel come to him.

He was a devout man who feared God.

He's going to see an angel in verse 3, and then he's going to preach the gospel, and people are going to get saved.

And then Peter in verse 9 is going to get a vision to go to this place.

Remember Peter from the book of Galatians, who didn't want to eat with the Gentiles here.

He's the one that God sends to the Gentiles.

You can see why God elevated Saul in a few chapters to be the apostle to the Gentiles.

Peter gets the vision of all the food that is in front of him that the Gentiles eat, and he's supposed to eat it.

And Peter says, No, I've never eaten anything unclean.

This is that chapter, this is that place.

Very Gentile-centered place.

Peter finally gets there, and now he's giving the gospel to people that heard it four days earlier.

And verse 34.

Peter opened his mouth and he spoke to these Gentiles.

Truly I understand that God shows no partiality in every nation.

Anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.

The word that he sent to Israel, preaching the good news of peace through Jesus Christ.

You yourselves know it happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee, after the baptism that John proclaimed, God anointed Jesus, and he's going to describe a little bit of a gospel message there.

You can skip down to verse 42.

He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.

This is not just for Jews, it's for Gentiles too.

Verse 44, while Peter was saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell on everyone who heard the word.

And the believers from among the circumcised, the Jews who'd come with Peter were amazed.

Do you see the role reversal here?

Before it was the people from all the nations who were Jewish, but from all the nations, they were amazed.

Now it's flipped.

Now it's the Jews from Jerusalem who were with Peter.

They're seeing these Gentiles have the Holy Spirit fall on them.

Verse 45.

No offense, Gentiles.

That was the Jewish response.

Whoa! Gentiles get the Holy Spirit too?

Even a Gentile?

Verse 46 the proof.

They were hearing them speaking in tongues, languages, and extolling God.

So then Peter says, Could you hold water for baptism from These people?

I mean, they are radically saved.

So you've seen Jews filled with the Spirit speaking in languages.

You've seen Gentiles filled with the Spirit speaking in languages as a demonstration to the Jews, the gospel is going to the nations, Peter says.

And one more example, Acts 19.

Turn right to Acts chapter 19, which takes place in Ephesus.

Acts 19 · chapter mention

There are Jews in Ephesus, of course, but it is a Roman city.

There in Ephesus.

They're encounter disciples of John the Baptist.

John the Baptist disciples are going to hear the gospel and they're going to repent and believe.

Paul's going to ask them, look at verse 2, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?

And they said, No, we didn't even know there was the Holy Spirit.

We know there was a Holy Spirit.

They skipped that part.

You know, they were sent out by John the Baptist before the cross, before the resurrection.

They believed John's sermon.

This is like a dispensational time warp here.

They believe in the Savior, but the Savior hasn't been crucified and resurrected.

They're now in time, they're after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of the Savior, but they don't know about that.

So they're out there believing in the promise.

This is like an Old Testament saint in living color here in New Testament church times.

So what happens to them?

They don't even know about the Holy Spirit.

And Paul is astonished.

He's like, I've been traveling all over, I'm all my missionary journey.

He's never heard of something like this.

And what were you baptized then?

And they said into John's baptism.

So Paul said, Well, John baptized with repentance, telling people to believe in the one who is going to come after this, Jesus.

And of course they believe in Jesus now that they're hearing about him.

So verse 5, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

When Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them.

They began speaking in tongues and prophesying.

There are about 12 men and all.

Interesting, there were 12 of them.

This kind of closes out that dispensational time warp period.

This now is exclusive and exhaustive.

The Jews got saved, spoken languages.

The Greeks got saved, spoken languages.

And now you have the disciples of John the Baptist, they get saved and they speak in languages, and that kind of builds the church up and launches it into the world.

That right there, you've now looked at all of the New Testament descriptions of the biblical gift of tongues.

That's it.

And you'll notice that key to all of them was that they were actual spoken languages as a testimony to the fact that the news of the gospel was going to go to every tribe, every nation, and every language group.

So now flip back to 1 Corinthians 14.

1 Corinthians 14 has description of the gift of languages or the gift of tongues in it, but I'm going to make the case for you tonight that it is not the biblical practice of those gifts.

What was happening in Corinth was clearly like the false gift that we started tonight by talking about.

It was the false gift like was practiced in all the pagan temples.

It was that kind of languages.

Like so much of the Corinthian church, they were borrowing their practices from the world and bringing them into the church.

Let's not be too hard on them because remember, they don't have a New Testament yet.

They're still trying to figure things out.

But seriously, there's also no church you would least rather imitate in the New Testament than the Corinthian church.

Everything in the Corinthian church is bad.

First and 2 Corinthians are written to them, not because they're excellent, but because they are slandering Paul and they're revolting against the apostles.

That's what's happening.

So you would never say, you would say, I want to be an Acts 2 kind of church.

That's great.

You would never say, I want to be a 1 Corinthians 5 kind of church.

I wish we were more like the church in 1 Corinthians 6.

And they have orgies at communion, they're suing each other, they're sleeping with their parents.

I mean, there's every kind of malpractice taking place in the church, revolting against the apostles.

I mean, the place is a dumpster fire.

You would never look at this and say, we should build our church after this.

So it's so interesting that people will latch on to how they practice the gift of tongues and say, oh, this is what they got right here.

Let's do this.

The same is, of course, true of their spiritual gifts.

Now, part of this is owing to the nature of Corinth.

Corinth was, you know, a small piece of land.

There used to be a port there because of the way the water shifted and the city rebuilt, and I'm not going to bore you with the whole history, but now what happens is that boats would be brought out of the water and drug over the lands to the other side.

This is a place where sailors would spend a week or two while their boats are being hauled across on land.

This would be like a modern-day truck stop outside of Flagstaff, Arizona.

That's what you're dealing with, Corinth here.

This is not a hotbed of virtue here.

That's where the church is planted, which is a remarkable testimony to God's ability to save even the most immoral kind of people.

But that's the Corinthian church.

They're saved.

They have the pagan temples in their city.

And some of them are genuinely saved and genuinely confused about what to do.

They don't know what food to eat.

They got all kinds of issues.

One of those issues is that apparently they were bringing into the church the ungodly practice of prayer from their temples.

And you can see why that would be tempting.

If you've grown up in Corinth, you see all of the temples to the other gods, and everybody goes into them and prays in that kind of ecstatic utterances, and now you're convinced like those gods aren't real.

Those gods aren't true.

I'm a Christian.

This is my church.

I know who the true God is, but you might be tempted to keep praying in the same way you did at your other, you know, your previous temples.

You might bring that method of prayer into the church, just aiming it at Jesus this time.

And that's apparently what was happening.

People were praying in the church with gibberish, really, an unknown language, something detached from the languages of the world, like they did in the temples to their pagan gods.

Apparently, in some of these, people were even saying that Jesus was cursed.

I know you're in chapter 14, but look over at chapter 12.

Verse 3.

I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says Jesus is cursed.

So apparently that was happening.

Apparently they're going, Andalon Shandalana, Andalon Shandalana, Jesus is cursed.

Andalan Shandalana, and Shandalana.

And Paul says, This is not the biblical gift.

You can't say, and their defense would be like, I've detached my mind from what I'm saying.

I'm not aware of the words coming out of my mouth.

And Paul says, if you're cursing, let's start bottom shelf here.

If you're cursing, you're not acting spirit-filled.

If you're cursing Jesus and you mean it, the Holy Spirit's not in you.

And so kind of the rest of chapter 12, 13, and 14 is unraveling what he says in chapter 12, verse 3.

He's going to now go on.

Biblical gifts aren't against Jesus, they help his church.

That's chapter 12.

Biblical gifts aren't cursing Jesus, they're the manifestation of the love of God seen in Christ.

That's chapter 13.

Now back to tongues, chapter 14.

What is the biblical gift of tongues?

So there's this tension.

I'll give you a brief outline.

There's only three points on it, not like this morning where there is a million.

Three points.

The real gift of tongues versus the Corinthian gift of tongues.

I chose a font that is hard for you to read on the second half of this to make the point.

Isn't it easier when you can read something?

Like language works when it's easy to understand.

The real gift versus the Corinthian gift, which was counterfeit, it was, I'm saying gibberish, it was a fake language spoken in the Roman temples and brought into the church.

And so we see this.

Let's work our way through chapter 14.

The one who speaks, verse 14, I mean verse 4 of chapter 14, in a tongue, or it means like in this gibberish language they have, is building himself up.

Here's a little uh cheating sheet for you here to keep track of what's going on in chapter 14.

When the word is singular, I think it's Paul describing the illegitimate gift of gibberish.

He's using the word language, but that's because he's being nice to them.

You could translate it gibberish.

Do you remember when we looked at it earlier in Acts 2?

It was people speaking in the languages of the world.

Here it becomes singular.

They're speaking in a language, or I'm going to say a gibberish.

Someone who speaks in that kind of gibberish builds himself up.

And you can look back at verse 2.

The one who speaks in that kind of gibberish speaks not to men, but to God, for no one understands him.

He's uttering mysteries in the spirit.

That's the nicest thing Paul says about it in this chapter, by the way, is they're not talking to people, they're talking to God.

And it is amazing how many people latch onto that and say, See, it's your prayer language to God.

He doesn't mean this in a good way.

Uttering mysteries in the spirit is not a good way to pray.

Verse 4, the one who speaks in that kind of gibberish is building himself up.

Again, that is not a good model for prayer.

In fact, that'll be our first contrast in our outline.

The real language versus spiritual language.

The real language is spoken in the world and is understandable by people.

You saw that through the whole book of Acts.

But here in verse 2, it's spoken not to people.

It's a quote, spiritual language.

It's too spiritual for you to understand.

It's too spiritual for me to understand.

You think, aren't you the one saying it?

It's too spiritual for me to understand.

I'm speaking not to men, but to God.

So that right away, you might say, yeah, but that could be in your own personal prayer language.

Okay, fine, file that away.

We'll get to that objection next.

But right now, I realize right away what you're seeing in 1 Corinthians 14 is categorically distinct from everything we saw in the book of Acts.

Every language we saw in the book of Acts was spoken to people, and people heard it and understood it.

So if you jump into 1 Corinthians 14, you can't say, see, the book, the gift of tongues from the book of Acts is still happening in the church in 1 Corinthians 14.

No, it's something different.

At the very least, it's something different.

This, by the way, is the normal charismatic response to what I'm teaching tonight.

The charismatic pastor listened to what I was teaching tonight, he would say, Yes, but the gift of prophecy and the gift of tongues and the gift of healing and the gift of knowledge in Corinthians is different than what was happening in the book of Acts.

There are different kinds of gifts.

Prophecy can be fallible, tongues are to God, not men, knowledge can be fallible or obscure.

They change it and redefine it.

And if you do that, that's fine, but you cannot connect it then to the book of Acts and say, see, the early church did this, so do we.

Not really.

To the first distinction.

In the book of Acts, the gift of tongues was real languages.

Here in 1 Corinthians 14, it's some kind of spiritual language that people don't understand.

The second distinction: the real gift builds up the church.

That's all of 1 Corinthians 12.

We're not going to go through that all again tonight.

But if you recall 1 Corinthians 12, the spiritual gifts are given for building up the body.

It's the word edification.

The word edification is you're building up the building.

An edifice, a building.

That's the word.

You're building it up.

Spiritual gifts were given to build up the body.

Your thumb is given to you to help you out.

It's part of your body.

It's got gifts.

It can do things only a thumb can do.

Work a remote, slide screen to screen, app to app on your phone.

Only your thumb can do that well.

Your thumb was given to serve you.

It builds up the body, can hold a fork, can hold all kinds of things that help feed your face.

The thumb is very useful.

It's building up your body.

If your tongue were to say, hey Jesse, I'm out today.

I'm gonna take a day off.

I'm gonna build myself up.

Leave me at home.

The tongue doesn't get a vote that way.

That's 1 Corinthians 12.

Your thumb doesn't get a vote that way.

That's 1 Corinthians 12.

Your thumb is stuck with you whether it likes it or not.

Every part of your body is that way.

It's designed to build you up.

You as a Christian are designed to build the church up.

Not yourself.

So that's the real gift.

It builds up the church.

What a contrast with verse 4.

The one who speaks in this kind of tongue, this gibberish language, builds up himself.

The one who prophesies builds up the church.

We don't have time to talk about prophecies tonight, but for the context here, it's just proclaiming the word of God.

The one who's proclaiming the word of God intelligently and in a way that can be heard and understood, that's building up the church.

But the one who speaks in this gibberish language that's to God, your personal private prayer language that you learned at the Roman temple, that language, at the very least, even we're going to say, we don't need to say it's demonically possessed, we'll at least say it's building you up, though.

Now, Paul is aware of what happened in Acts 2 and of Acts 10, and certainly of Acts 19.

He was there.

And so he says in verse 5, you know, I wish you could all speak in tongues.

This is the real gift now, languages, plural.

I wish you could all speak in the languages of the world.

Better, though, would be prophesying.

The one who prophesies is greater, the one who explains the word of God is greater than the one who speaks in the languages.

You know, unless someone interprets.

That way the church can be built up.

So right here he's saying, if you had the biblical gift of tongues practiced in the church, and you recall in Acts 2, 10, and 19, they were not practiced in the church.

It was evangelists of context.

Paul says, fine, you want to do this in the church?

Great.

If you did them in the church, they have to build people up.

And the only way, if you're speaking the languages of the world in church, the only way that would build up the church is if somebody translated so that everybody could understand.

Then it would build up the church.

Verse 6, hey, if I came to you speaking in all these different languages, how and the real gift, Paul says, if I came to you speaking in the real gift of tongues, how would that benefit with you?

How would that help you?

I mean, today, if the Apostle Paul walked in, you would say, Oh, that's great.

I would let him preach.

He could finish the sermon.

And the Apostle Paul gets up here, and let's say he finished the sermon in Greek.

Would that help you?

It might help a few of you.

But most of you would say, Oh, we respect the Apostle Paul, but we probably learned more from a pastor that spoke English.

It sounds like sacrilegious to say, but we can understand the English.

That's what Paul is telling the Corinthians.

If I came speaking in languages, oh, that's so great.

It would help you 0%.

It just would.

Unless there were somebody interpreting, you could imagine in Corinth there's people from all over the Roman Empire.

So that could potentially work.

It's possible there's people in Corinth that speak different languages of the Roman Empire that aren't shared.

And so maybe there's a place for that to work in Corinth as long as it was interpreted, but if there's no interpretation, it does not help at all.

It's just building up yourself.

Have I preached the rest of the sermon in Spanish?

That would be showing off to you that I can speak Spanish.

It would be building myself up, and unless you spoke Spanish, it would help you not at all.

Unless somebody translates.

So now we're gonna carry under a third distinction here.

A language is understood, but verse indistinct.

And that's where Paul goes in verse seven.

The real gift is something that could be understood.

That's because it's a real language.

How different that is in verse seven.

If even lifeless instruments, such as the flute or the harp, the flute or the harp.

So those instruments don't have any minds, they don't have a tongue.

But if they don't give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played?

You know, if the guitars are just up here for our singing earlier, and the guys are up here and they're just hitting the guitars, it's not going to help.

They have to have distinct notes to it.

Or verse 8, if the bugle gives a indistinct sound, who get ready for battle?

This is a world without, you know, the emergency alert system.

Didn't exist then.

No silver watch or what amber alert or whatever those different things are on the screen.

This this world didn't have that.

They had fire watches on the wall.

And the guys who were watching on the wall had trumpets and they had to have specific sounds for the trumpet.

One sound meant fire.

Everybody go grab water.

One sound meant the visigos on the horizon.

Everybody grab a sword.

I mean, there's one sound meant the emperor's coming.

Everybody get in line.

Like there's different sounds.

And if there was a fire and the guy got up there and made the same sound as the viscost, he wouldn't know if you need swords or water.

It would be totally pointless.

All think of all the effort you had to have that watchtower staffed for the last six years of your life, and finally there's a fire, and the guy forgot what the fire sound was.

That's what it's like to come to church and speaking in a language people don't understand.

And I sit in the front row next to Sarah Lehman Sunday morning.

She's on her violin.

What if I grab the violin from her one morning?

Ha ha.

Josie shaking her head.

She would say, No, you hold it the other way.

I don't even know which shoulder it would go on.

And I Bill gets up and starts the music, and I'm going to town, moving my fingers, and everything.

If you came up to me and said, you know, in the third measure, that was actually an eighth note, not a quarter note, that would mean nothing to me.

I don't even know if that sentence makes any sense.

That's not my problem.

The problem was not that the eighth note became a quarter note.

That was not the problem.

The problem is I don't know which side is up on the violin.

It would not be edifying to the church for me to do that to you.

It might work if the violin had no strings on it.

I just go through the motions.

Those are the examples that this passage is using about somebody who is praying in a language that he doesn't understand in church.

You may as well have a violin with no strings on it.

You may as well have a trumpet and the guy has no thumb to hold the buttons down.

Or keys or whatever they're called in a trumpet.

Verse 9, this is what you're like if your tongue, in your mouth, a physical tongue, you're uttering a language that nobody understands, nobody would know what you mean.

You would be speaking into the air.

That's the gift of tongues like the Corinthian church practiced it.

Now Paul says, verse 10, there are doubtless many different kinds of languages in the world.

He's not denigrating what was happening in Acts 2 and 10 and 19.

There are, of course, different languages in the world, and they all have meaning.

But if you don't know the meaning of the language, you're foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker would be a foreigner to you.

Somebody comes in here speaking Swahili, you don't speak Swahili, it's not going to help you.

It'd be, it could be in the United States of America, the guy comes in and speaks Swahili, and you would feel like you're the foreigner.

That's what Paul says praying in different languages in church.

It makes the whole church feel like foreigners and not in the good sense.

Paul says in verse 12, this is what you are doing.

This is what you're like, he says.

You're eager for manifestations of the Spirit.

They want to experience the Acts 2 kind of thing so badly that they're making up gibberish and bringing their pagan practices into church.

So now Paul's going to try to help them a bit.

Verse 13, I wish, I wish the one who, well, first of all, the one who speaks in a language should pray that he can interpret.

You got gibberish coming out of your mouth?

You better pray that you can interpret it.

Verse 14, I wish.

If I prayed in a tongue, if I prayed in this kind of gibberish, my spirit would pray, but my mind is unfruitful.

That's a key verse to put in a square for people that say, hey, it's a private prayer language.

Okay, fine.

It's a private prayer language.

Your spirit is going to town.

Your mind is producing zero fruit.

What are you supposed to do?

I pray with my spirit, Paul says.

I'm going to pray with my mind also.

Because some might say, hey, would you rather pray spiritually or mentally?

Oh, mentally is bad in prayer.

That's too much doctrine, too much thinking.

Paul says, this is a false dichotomy.

I reject the question.

I want to pray with my spirit and with my mind.

Verse 15, I want to pray with both.

Otherwise, if I gave thanks with my spirit, you know, if I'm speaking in gibberish in the church and I'm saying thank you, Lord, for your wonders and your mercies, how could anyone say amen?

Nobody'd have any idea what you're saying.

You might be preaching well enough, you might be giving thanks well enough, but the church isn't being built up, he says in verse 17.

Nobody's being edified because of your quote-unquote spiritual gibberish.

Now Paul says, I thank God I speak in the biblical gift of tongues more than all of you.

Again, another diss at the Corinthians.

Paul says, Listen, I do this way more than you.

Nevertheless, in church, I'd rather speak five words with my mind to instruct others than ten thousand words in this kind of gibberish you're speaking.

Ten thousand, it's singular again, the gibberish.

I'd rather have five words you can understand than ten thousand in your quote unquote spiritual language.

This is not meant to be a mathematical formula, by the way.

Like if a person preaches and prays in tongues for five minutes, that means we get, what is it, five times ten, you know, four hours of a sermon makes up for five minutes of tongues.

That's not the point.

Record myriad here, just as it's an exaggerated number.

It's hyperbole.

Paul says, I'd rather say five words you can understand than 10,000 trillion in this kind of gibberish you're speaking in.

You're being like children, verse 20 says.

Grow up.

Now, I wish we had more time for this, but it's running away fast.

Verse 21 explains why the gift of tongues was happening.

It was prophesied in the Old Testament.

The gift of tongues in Acts 2, Acts 10, Acts 19, it was prophesied in the Old Testament.

It's from Isaiah 28.

We began our service by reading the whole chapter tonight.

Remember that when you read the chapter, it was judgment on Israel, judgment on Jerusalem, judgment on Ephraim, judgment on the 12 tribes, God's pouring out his judgment on his people, on the people of Israel.

And he says, You'll know there's going to be a cornerstone coming.

There's going to be, I'm going to put the gospel there, and I'm going to bring my kingdom to the earth.

But you are going to be judged.

You've made a covenant with death, not with Yahweh, and you're going to be judged when I come, and you will know that you're being judged when you have foreigners speaking about the covenant of life to you.

When you hear people speaking in foreign languages about Isaiah 28, put a hemp below here.

If you're hearing a sermon on the book of Isaiah in a Gentile church, you're going to think, whoa, why are Gentiles preaching from the Torah given to Israel?

It's a sign of judgment to them.

And I've even heard Jews say, you know, a very sobering reality is that the Old Testament text exists and has been kept and curated and is explained and taught and researched by Christians today more than even Jews.

It's designed, that reality is designed to show judgment on Jews.

We've preached more from the book of Isaiah.

Pastor Ryan has preached more from the book of Isaiah here at Emmanuel than you'll hear in a synagogue over the course of your lifetime.

That's a sign of judgment.

That the Old Testament is kept alive through men of foreign tongues.

That's Acts 2.

That's Acts 10.

That's Acts 19.

That is not on the shandelandal.

It's foundationally different.

God designed it for judgment.

He quotes that here.

In verse 23, if the whole church comes together and speaks in language, outsiders and unbelievers there, they'll think you're out of your minds, by the way.

Verse 22 is languages assigned not for believers, but for unbelievers speaking to the Jews.

The gift of languages was a sign for them.

But in the church, everyone's gonna speak.

If everybody got together and everybody spoke in languages, and outsiders or unbelievers came in, they would say you're out of your minds.

Like even if you had the real gift, Paul's saying.

Even if Acts chapter 2 came to live here at Emmanuel Bible Church and we all spoke in the languages of the world.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And we had one non-Christian here, they would walk in and they would hear like United Nations on display and they would think, You guys are loco.

That's crazy.

Spanish would be help if you knew Spanish.

You're just putting on languages on display.

It doesn't serve anyone.

A non-believer would see that.

Acts chapter 2, nobody thought they were crazy.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

They made up the thing you might be drunk, but they all stood condemned by the word of God.

So verse 26.

What then, brothers?

Come together.

Someone has a hymn?

Someone has a language or interpretation?

Let all things be done for building up.

Notice he says that if you have the gift of language, you want to use it in church, make sure you're building up the church.

Well, earlier he said, if anyone has a gift of language, you're not using it to build up the church.

Some people say, look at verse 26.

That means that you can use tongues in church as long as you're building other people up.

No, because earlier he said, when you're using that kind of gibberish, it does not build the church up.

So here's your test.

Verse 27.

You want to speak in a language in church?

Great.

Let there be only two or at most three, each in turn, and let someone interpret.

That right there would kill the charismatic gift of tongues overnight.

If this is practiced.

It's supposed to be done in church, two or three, with an interpreter.

If there's no one to interpret, keep silent.

Speak to himself.

Speak to God.

But let two or three prophets speak, the others weigh what is said.

Verse 33.

God is not a God of confusion, but of peace, and this is the rule for all of the churches, Paul said.

All of the churches have that command.

So what of people who just say sounds with their mouth that they don't understand?

Paul tells you it's unfruitful, doesn't help them, doesn't help others, it's not useful.

What if people who want to do that in church?

Paul says it won't convict you of sin, it won't be an evangelistic outreach to unbelievers, it won't even convict the Jews who the sign was given for.

Rather, the gift of tongues falls in the same category as the gift of apostleship, the gift of healing, the gift of miracles.

Those were unique gifts for the early church to authenticate the apostles and establish the apostolic ministry and to build the church from childhood to maturity, to bring the scripture into the church, to pass it along to the next generation.

To reiterate, God still does miracles.

God still, I'm not putting God in a box.

He can still do miracles, he can still heal.

But it is the difference between the person speaking in any language of the world at will, the person healing at will, the person doing miracles at will, versus the person praying to God for God to heal and God to do a miracle.

One authenticates the person like the gift of tongues did, the other authenticates God.

With the establishment of the early church, those miraculous, so-called miraculous sign gifts that Paul calls them in 2 Corinthians, they died out with the apostles.

In fact, they died out in the pages of the New Testament.

We looked at that last week.

Let's pray.

God, we are grateful for your word.

We're grateful that you are worshipped in spirit and truth.

That are, and those two are not intention, but your spirit reveals truth.

Your spirit points us to truth.

Our mind engages with truth.

Our mind informs our spirit.

Your spirit opens our mind and our eyes to behold wonderful things from your word.

Your spirit applies those truths to our heart.

Then we pray from our mind and our spirit together.

And you hear and you answer our prayers.

We can give you glory for the prayers that you've answered, and we know what we've prayed.

Our church is strengthened as we use gifts to build one another up, not to promote ourselves.

So, Lord, we ask that you would be glorified in our church, that your word would be on display in our church and in our lives as we scatter, that we would magnify the wonders of the gospel to the watching world.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, DC area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to ibc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.