The Holy Spirit Gifts Us To Speak In The Tongue Of Heaven

What an incredible and ecstatic experience for the twelve Apostles, the Mother of Jesus, Jesus’ brothers, and other women to experience the gifting of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. As Luke reports, it had been a dramatic event. While they were together, the event started with a sudden sound from Heaven, like the rush of a mighty wind. It filled all the house where they were sitting, and there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

As Luke reports in Acts 1:15, there were about 120 people at the beginning. Then, many people were attracted to the place by the sound and heard the Apostles speaking their respective languages. Peter then gave the main address to the crowd. At the end of his sermon, about three thousand were baptised, and the church was born.

How did it all come to be? Jesus promised the Holy Spirit, and that was expected to happen. But how did the average disciple who only spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic, the common language of Judea in Jesus’ day, speak in foreign languages? The brief bios of the disciples in the Gospels tell us that they only had primary education. Apart from the Aramaic they knew, they may have been able to hold a basic conversation in Greek.

St Luke says that the foreigners to Jerusalem heard the disciples speaking in other languages because the Spirit made it possible. What does that mean?

Today, I want to draw our focus on the topic of disciples speaking in foreign languages.

Besides the main event of the Holy Spirit coming upon the disciples, the disciples speaking in many languages has been the most important feature of the Pentecost story for me. Why? The foreigners hearing the disciples speak eloquently in their native tongues brought them to the faith. By this, did I mean the Arabs and Egyptians heard the disciples speaking in Arabic and Egyptian? Not necessarily.

I thank God for an experience I had in Sharjah, a small emirate of the UAE. It was the 5th of April 2015. The day was a Sunday on which an Ethiopian congregation that I had assisted in establishing was celebrating their third anniversary. This three-hundred-strong congregation was founded and led by a godly husband-and-wife team, Pastors Sebhat and Konjit.

All the congregation members were migrant labourers: housemaids, cleaners, drivers, construction workers, and the like. The two pastors, too, were labourers (driver and housemaid). They worked for a wealthy Emirati who, for some reason, had given Sebhat and Konjit better terms of employment and good living conditions.

Over the six years of their life in Sharjah, the couple earned a Certificate of Theology (from the Gilgal Theological School in Sharjah). The congregation was formed through the dedicated ministry of Sebhat and Konjit among the migrant workers during their spare time. The ministry mainly involved praying with frequently mistreated, underpaid, and often physically or sexually abused female labourers.

Since I helped them to establish their congregation and provided a hall for worship at the Anglican Church premises in Sharjah, I was the chief guest at the third-anniversary celebration service.

Today, I can admit that I was not physically or emotionally fit to attend the service on that day. Physically, I was exhausted. Emotionally, I was disturbed because I was facing an exceedingly difficult time in the chaplaincy. There were visible and invisible forces within the chaplaincy that were working to destabilise the church's work. The situation was so unsettling that I had almost decided to conclude my ministry there and return home to Melbourne. However, I did not know how to resolve the issues satisfactorily and draw my ministry to a conclusion.

However, I agreed to attend the service because I wanted to recognise and affirm the ministry of these two remarkable servants of God. I knew well that, according to their custom, the service would go on for at least three solid hours. I also knew that the whole service would be conducted in Amharic, a dialect spoken by Ethiopians, and I would not understand anything they said.

Following a warm welcome to me through an interpreter, my five-minute congratulatory remarks, and an opening prayer, the service started with singing songs of praise one after another. This practice of continuously singing songs of praise. This praise and worship lasted for about an hour, with a loud band playing in the background. Then three long Bible readings followed and a long pre-sermon prayer by the pastor’s wife, Konjit. I remember that this prayer went on for about 15 minutes. All of this is in their language, Amharic.

Then, Pastor Sebhat started his sermon, and I settled in for the next two hours of the service. Despite Pastor Sebhat’s illustrative and energetic delivery, I did not know what he was saying. Then, as soon as he delved into the less energetic second part of the sermon, something remarkable happened.