Tongues Series

How many of you have been filled with the Spirit and spoken in tongues at least once in your life? How many continue to speak in tongues on a regular basis? Pentecostals need to understand that tongues are not the goal. Tongues are an equipping so that we can reach the goal. Equipment is something that has to be used if its purpose is to be fulfilled. I may have a bulldozer, but if I never crank it up and use it, I won’t benefit much from it. Imagine the owner of a bulldozer who is working as hard as he can to move a mountain of dirt with a hand shovel. All he has to do is crank up the bulldozer and get the job done much easier. Many Pentecostals are operating that way.

When I got baptized in the Spirit, my experience was very different from that of my brothers. I was 15 years old; they were 10 and 13. One night, they both got filled with the Holy Spirit. It was an emotional, demonstrative experience for both of them. They were both speaking fluently in tongues. They were dancing in the Spirit. They started at about 9:30 pm and went to about one or two in the morning. Every time one would stop speaking in tongues, the other would start up, and that would get the other one going. When I saw all that, I began to pray that I would also be filled with the Spirit. About two weeks later, the opportunity came, and I was prayed for. I felt no emotion. The Spirit gently prompted me, and I said a few syllables in tongues. Those praying over me heard me speak in tongues and celebrated my being filled. I left wondering why my experience was so very different from my brothers’ experience. The next day I went through a horrific spiritual battle wondering if I had received the same thing they did. By God’s grace, I decided to receive it from the Lord and use the limited ability God had given me. Over time, the more I prayed in tongues, the more liberty I received. Praying in tongues is now an essential part of my prayer life. Being baptized in the Spirit is not about how much emotion you experience or even the amount of liberty you have in your prayer language. It is something that happens at a deeper level than that. Its purpose is to empower us for service. We are introduced to speaking in tongues when we are baptized in the Spirit.

Everything I have said is preliminary and foundational to our subject. I have not yet addressed the gift of kinds of tongues listed in 1 Cor. 12:10. I have talked about the baptism in the Holy Spirit because that is our introduction to speaking in tongues. That equips us to operate at a higher spiritual level in our devotional lives. Now let’s talk briefly about the gift of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians 12:10 as “kinds of tongues,” one of the nine gifts of the Spirit for the public worship. In the public service, this gift of tongues is to operate in conjunction with the ninth gift, “interpretation of tongues.” We will talk more about that next week. What we need to understand at this point is the relationship between operating in tongues in our personal life versus the gift of tongues (or more accurately as Paul puts it, “kinds of tongues”).xiii