1 Corinthians 14
My son was talking with two of his friends when he was about seven or eight years old and his first friend said, “My dad’s so smart he can talk for an hour on any subject.” And then the second one said, “My dad’s so smart he can talk for two hours on any subject.” And then my son said, “My dad’s so smart he can talk for 3 hours and he doesn’t even need a subject.”
Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy. 2 For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries. 3 But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort. 4 He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the church.
5 I would that ye all spake with tongues but rather that ye prophesied: for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues, except he interpret, that the church may receive edifying.
6 Now, brethren, if I come unto you speaking with tongues, what shall I profit you, except I shall speak to you either by revelation, or by knowledge, or by prophesying, or by doctrine? 7 And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped? 8 For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?
9 So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air. 10 There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.
11 Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me. 12 Even so ye, forasmuch as ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may excel to the edifying of the church. 13 Wherefore let him that speaketh in an unknown tongue pray that he may interpret.
14 For if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful. 15 What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also. 16 Else when thou shalt bless with the spirit, how shall he that occupieth the room of the unlearned say Amen at thy giving of thanks, seeing he understandeth not what thou sayest? 17 For thou verily givest thanks well, but the other is not edified.
18 I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all: 19 Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.
20 Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men.
21 In the law it is written, with men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord.
22 Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not: but prophesying serveth not for them that believe not, but for them which believe. 23 If therefore the whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?
24 But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: 25 And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth.
26 How is it then, brethren? when ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying.
27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret. 28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God. 29 Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge. 30 If any thing be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the first hold his peace. 31 For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted. 32 And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. 33 For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.
34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. 35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
36 What? came the word of God out from you? or came it unto you only? 37 If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord. 38 But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant.
39 Wherefore, brethren, covet to prophesy, and forbid not to speak with tongues.
And then in verse 40 ends with; “Let all things be done decently and in order.”
Spiritual gifts were given by God to build up the body of Christ but some of them have become a battleground for many years, going all the way back to the church at Corinth. I think most of the friction comes because we either don't understand what the scripture teaches or because we've been part of a fellowship which has the wrong interpretation on the subject of spiritual gifts.
Let me begin by sharing about my personal background. When I was about twenty I accepted the Lord at a place called Rochdale College which was not a college but was actually the source of most of the illegal drugs in the city of Toronto. I had been a drug dealer there when I met a man who led me to Jesus Christ and it transformed my life.
Now, this man’s name was Alex and he had been an officer in the Salvation Army and then he got involved in the charismatic movement and both his desire to know and practice the word of God and his openness to the charismatic experience affected me and many others for the first part of our Christian life.
Soon after I was saved; Alex, myself and a guy named Phil began a Christian commune at Rochdale and our goal was to reach the rest of the hippies with the gospel. None of us were involved with a local church and we began teaching Bible studies at our commune every Monday night and these Bible studies drew up to forty people; some were from the building and a few came in from outside.
Most of us who lived in the commune believed in tongues, healing, discernment of spirits and all the rest. It’s difficult to determine if any miracles actually took place back then or if people just said they did as a way of increasing their influence over others.
Every Thursday night we all attended a group called the Catacombs where both Alex and Phil had been elders. The Catacombs was a charismatic fellowship that had begun with Merv and Merla Watson and a handfull of kids and it grew to well over a thousand and it effected every church in the city of Toronto because all the young people from every church attended there.
Eventually Catacombs called a Pentecostal Pastor to head it up and then it became a Pentecostal Church and eventually it fizzled away.
Our commune grew to around twenty-five to thirty and then half of them decided to start a second commune in the Parliment Street area and eventually both of them faded away too.
A few years after I was saved I met my wife at Catacombs and she had been part of Churchill Heights Baptist church where her family attended and because of her I began attending as well. Through her and her families influence as well as my own personal study I came to the conclusion that the sign gifts had ceased to exist after the first century and most of what was taking place was simply a misunderstanding of scripture. But, it’s easy to be skeptical and forget that God is still involved even though He doesn’t always do the same thing the same way.
There were a lot of strange things going on back then just as there are today. When I first got saved there were all kinds of stories going around about people picking up hitchhikers and the hitchhikers would tell them that Jesus was coming back and after they repeated this a couple of times they disappeared. And of course, as the story went; the one who disappeared was an angel! But listen, did God give the job of evangelism to angels? Because if He did; then you and I can quit witnessing because I’m sure they can do a much better job.
A couple of Sundays ago I was driving somewhere and listening to a man on the radio out of Kitchener who was trying to raise money for missions and evangelism and he said there were five thousand, ten thousand and sometimes twenty thousand people who had been saved by reading a single tract. Now, hearing this, wouldn’t you want to send him some money?
So, when we hear these things; it’s easy to be skeptical but listen; does God still work miracles? Absolutely. But there are certain things that He’s done in the past that He hasn’t repeated. Like the miracles in the book of Exodus that He used to punish the Egyptians, the many miracles of Jesus like His feeding of the five thousand and the three different times He raised the dead and then in the book of Acts and 1 Corinthians we also have the speaking in tongues. These were miraculous acts that were performed for a purpose and they don’t need to be repeated.
So, does God still enable people to speak in foreign languages they've never learned? I doubt it; but there are all kinds of stories going around that He does and yet; none of these stories are first hand. And these things always happen so far away that we can’t confirm whether or not they’re true.
There was a book out twenty or thirty years ago and I think it was about somewhere in Africa or somewhere where an entire village got filled with the Holy Spirit and everything from speaking in to raising the dead took place. The book was a huge seller but then someone from a Baptist mission went over there and he said nothing happened and that the guy who wrote the book lied about everything. So, who do you believe?
So, let me approach the subject of spiritual gifts in three stages. First, we’ll look at spiritual gifts in general and then the sign gifts in particular and then we’ll conclude with the reason God gave us these gifts.
I Gifts in general
Spiritual gifts are the abilities that are provided by the Holy Spirit that enable us to minister to or in the body of Christ. These gifts fall into three catagories and they are:
- Speaking Gifts: Word of wisdom, prophecy, evangelism, pastor-teacher and teaching.
- Service Gifts: Administration, exhortation, faith, giving, helps, serving, and showing mercy.
- Sign Gifts: Discernment of spirits, miracles, healings, tongues and the interpretation of tongues.
If you were to add all the spiritual gifts together, you’d come to about 20 and these gifts are found in four books of the New Testament and they are in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4 and in 1 Peter 4.
We’re told that the purpose of all these spiritual gifts in Ephesians 4:12-15 is, “for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, 13 till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; (And then we’re told why He has given these gifts)
14 that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, 15 but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ.” So, the gifts of the Spirit of God, now listen very carefully, are always meant to unite us and never to divide the body of Christ.
Some Christians according to I Peter 4:10 only seem to have one gift while 1 Corinthians 12:31 tells us we can always get more because it says we can "desire earnestly the best gifts."
Let me illustrate how many of these gifts work. Let's say we had a potluck in the basement of the church and someone dropped a plate full of dessert on the floor. This is how people with different gifts would respond.
· Someone with the gift of prophecy which is preaching truth would say, "that’s what happens when you’re not careful.”
· While someone with the gift of service would say, "Oh, let me help you clean it up.”
· Someone with the gift of teaching might say, "The reason that it fell was because it was too heavy on one side.”
· And then someone with the gift of exhortation might say, "Next time, maybe you should let someone else carry it.”
· But someone with the gift of giving would say, “Here, you can have my dessert.”
· While someone with the gift of mercy would say, “Don’t feel too bad. It could have happened to anyone.”
· And then someone with the gift of administration might say, “Clare, would you get the mop? Emery, please help pick this up and John, would you go get him another dessert?”
Listen, we’ve all been gifted differently and so we all act differently and we serve differently.
If Paul were to write a letter to us today, he would say something like this: “Brothers and sisters, say one of you owned a set of tools. Would you spend all your time counting them, naming them, organizing them, polishing them, and putting them on display? Would you not simply use them?”
So it is with the gifts of the Spirit: they are tools not to be admired, but to be used. They are not medals to be won, or trophies to be displayed, or treasures to be guarded. They are to be used and as you serve God with whatever opportunities He gives His Spirit will reveal the gifts He’s given you.”
II The sign gifts
There are many languages in the world today. According to one study there are 6,909 distinct languages. And the full Bible is available in 554 different languages while the New Testament is available in another 1,333 languages and at least one book of the Bible is available in 1,045 other languages.
How many languages still need translation? In addition to over 2,267 active projects worldwide, work still needs to be done in a further 1,800 languages because there is an estimated 180 million people without access to any Scripture in their language.
In our world of many languages and even more dialects and accents, it is easy to be misunderstood. Some companies discovered this when they started marketing their products in overseas markets.
• When Gerber first started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as the United States with the cute baby on the label. Later they found out that in Africa, since most people can’t read; companies routinely put pictures on the label of what is inside. So, what do you think they thought was in the baby food jar?
• When Coca-Cola first shipped to China, they named the product something that when pronounced sounded like "Coca-Cola" but the characters used actually meant, "Bite the Wax Tadpole." They later changed it to a set of characters that mean "Happiness In The Mouth."
• When Pepsi started marketing its products in China a few years back, they translated their slogan, "Pepsi Brings You Back to Life" but in Chinese it meant, "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave."
• Coors beer translated their slogan which was, "Turn It Loose," into Spanish, where it was read as "Suffer From Diarrhea." There might have been some truth to that.
• The Chevy Nova never sold well in Spanish speaking countries because in Spanish, "No Va" means "It Does Not Go".
At the Tower of Babel God confused the languages of men and the only other biblical incident that can rival is the confusion that took place was at Corinth. And it’s interesting that the gift of speaking in tongues is only mentioned in the book of Acts and here in Corinthians.
These Corinthian believers were so confused about the issue of languages that Paul had to write an entire chapter just to deal with it. And the one thing we have to understand is that this ability to speak in an unknown tongue was always a language that was known to someone and even though the person who was speaking didn’t understand it; there was always to be someone who could interpret it or they had to be quiet.
In Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles it says, “Everybody understood in their own language.” But when we come to Corinthians, there’s a lot of confusion and it seems as though they might have been exercising this gift but had substituted a pagan, ecstatic kind of speech which was common in pagan religions.
Let me give you a little background on the Corinthian situation. These Corinthians had allowed the entire world system in which they existed to infiltrate and influence their assembly.
For instance, chapter three tells us they were all hung up on human philosophies and hero worship just like their society was. And then in chapters 5 and 6 it says they were involved in terrible, gross, sexual immorality. And chapter 6 also tells us they were suing each other in court and then in chapter 7 we see what a mess they had made of their homes and marriages. In chapters 8,9 and 10 we see how they had been confused about pagan feasts and idolatry and things offered to idols. And in chapter 11 they were confused about the role of women in the church and then in chapter 12 they were confused about the issue of spiritual gifts. And in chapter 13 he tells them what they really needed was to understand what true love was all about.
The biggest problem they had was; they had allowed the world to influence and infiltrate their church. And once it came in, all the pagan rituals of the past; with all the ecstasies and eroticism came with it.
And many of the people in the seventies who got involved with the charismatic movement did so because their churches were dead and they were looking for spiritual life. The problem was that many of them experienced new kinds of worship and emotion but these fellowships didn’t result in evangelism or any kind of mission outreach.
I have been in many charismatic or Pentecostal fellowships and in the majority of them it’s a woman who speaks in tongues and then another woman who interprets the tongues. This is true of the Pentecostal church in Kitchener and also one in Orangeville. But what does Paul say about that?
In 1 Corinthians 14:34, he says, “Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. 35 And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.”
I’ve always wondered, when someone gives an interpretation of a tongue is this supposed to be God speaking? Because if it is, then we should write it down and if it isn’t then should we consider this to be substandard revelation?
Now, let me focus on the gift of tongues. By definition – it’s a supernatural ability to speak in a known language which has not been learned by the one who is speaking but Paul says that this gift can only be exercised when someone with the gift of interpretation is present.
The word “gifts” comes from the Greek, “charismata,” which is the root for the word “grace.” Grace gifts are those divine abilities which are distributed by the Holy Spirit. 2 Corinthians 12:12 says these gifts were given to the apostles and they were critical to the church in its early stage. These gifts were especially important in the first century, before they had the Bible which wasn’t in its completed form until around three-hundred and twenty-five.
In simplest terms, speaking in tongues is when someone speaks in a language that he does not know. If I were to stand here and start speaking Chinese, which I’ve never learned a word of, that would be an example of speaking in tongues. In Acts 2, this is apparently what happened because people from all over the Roman Empire were gathered and they heard the apostles speaking in sixteen different languages.
I believe the apostles were praising God in languages they had not learned. Maybe Andrew was declaring the glory of the Lord in Egyptian, and even though he had never studied it; there were Egyptians present who heard and understood what he was saying. This was a miracle and the words that were spoken came from the Spirit of the Lord.
There is a problem today because very, very few people who claim to speak in tongues claim to be speaking a human language. Linguists have listened to thousands of tape recordings of tongues and rarely have found even a fragment of another known language.
So, the gift of tongues was the ability to communicate in a language someone had never learned while someone else who spoke this language could tell others what the speaker said. It’s not what’s known as ecstatic utterances or some kind of emotional gibberish where someone is out of control.
The gift of tongues is a language and it wasn’t some kind of an indicator of spiritual maturity but these were gifts that were given by the grace and goodness of God.
Paul also said that speaking in tongues was not for every believer. 1 Corinthians 12:29-30 says, “Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? 30 Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?” If we were to say that all spoke in tongues then logic would demand that all would be apostles, prophets, teachers, miracle workers and healers.
And if God is still enabling people to speak in languages they've never learned then why are we wasting so much time sending people to learn various languages in order to communicate with those who can't speak English?
Listen, if you check every prayer that Jesus every prayed, and then looked to see every single thing He ever said about prayer you’ll notice there’s not one word, anywhere that suggests that any of our prayers should be unintelligible. In fact, Jesus said the exact opposite in Matthew chapter 6 when He said, “When you pray, use not meaningless repetitions as the pagans do.” And the word for “meaningless repetitions” is not even a word. It’s what we call in English an onomatopoeia.
Do you know what an onomatopoeia is? It’s like we say a bee goes bzzz, or a zipper goes zip, or the plane goes woosh. You see, it's not even a word. It’s a kind of a figure of speech. And what Jesus is saying is, “When you pray, don’t say ‘woosh, bzzz and zip’ because that’s not the kind of communication that God is interested in. That was what the pagans did. They used gibberish to talk to their gods and Jesus told His disciples that they were to pray intelligibly or as Paul says we are to pray “with the understanding.”
When Jesus went into the Garden to pray to the Father in John 17, He spoke clearly and not in some sort of heavenly language. So, why should we? When God spoke to God, they spoke in a language that was clear and understandable.
So, first, speaking in tongues can be self-induced. I remember being at a charismatic group where people were being taught to speak in tongues and those who were unsuccessful were told to go home and practice until it came. Second, speaking in tongues can be group-induced. I’ve seen a group of kids in a circle where they were told to recite several unintelligable words or phrases until they started to speak in tongues. Third, speaking in tongues can also be satanically-induced because when the devil doesn’t succeed in taking the Bible from us, he works hard at taking us from the Bible.
The purpose of tongues was three fold: First, it was meant to authenticate the ministry of the apostles. Second they were to show both the disciples of John and the gentile believers that they were all on equal ground with the rest of the believers and then third, they were also given as a sign of judgement indicating that the nations had rejected God’s salvation.
So, why is there so much conflict over the issue of spiritual gifts? Jonathon Swift said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
III The reason God gave us gifts
He gave us gifts or spiritual abilities so we can encourage one another. Spiritual gifts are given to the Church to unite it, not to divide it. In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul exhorts believers to endeavor “to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” and he explains that God gave the ministry gifts “for the perfecting of the saints . . . till we all come in the unity of the faith” Spiritual gifts were given to built up the body, not destroy it.
So, why were we given the power of the Holy Spirit? It was given so we would be His witnesses and not to show everyone how great we are.
Conclusion
There was a dog in an ancient fable who was crossing a bridge with a bone in his mouth and when he looked over the edge of the bridge and he saw his refection in the water he noticed the bone in the reflection looked so much better than the one in his mouth, so he dropped the one he had and ended up losing what was real for a reflection and he ended up going hungry.
And I’m afraid that many of our friends in the charismatic movement have dropped the reality of the word of God for their Charismatic experience, and now they’re spiritually hungry.
