According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): The gifts of tongues and prophecy continues to be at the center of great controversy in the Christian Church. But God never intended it to be that way. Have we totally missed the point of why these gifts were given? Join us for an important study in 1st Corinthians chapter 14 next on According to the Scriptures.

On behalf of Calvary Chapel Modesto, welcome to According to the Scriptures. Pastor Damian Kyle is in the process of taking us verse by verse through the book of 1st Corinthians. We find ourselves in chapter 14 today where we discover some valuable instruction regarding the gifts of prophecy and tongues. We'll soon see how they are to be exercised, so let's meet up with Pastor Damian now in 1st Corinthians chapter 14 and see what these gifts are all about.

Damian Kyle: If you're ever in an environment where the gift of tongues, somebody speaks in tongues and does so because someone else has the interpretation of that tongue, then what you'll hear is something being spoken to God in a language that you don't understand. And then when the interpretation comes, it will sound very much like a psalm directed toward God. I'll use Psalm 8 as an example of that. It'll be something like, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all of the earth, you who set your glory above the heavens."

"Out of the mouth of babes and infants you have ordained strength because of your enemies that you may silence the enemy and the avenger. When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained, what is man that you're mindful of him and the son of man that you should visit him," and so forth. It will have that kind of a direction and that feel and it will be upward in its direction. Very rarely do you ever hear a tongue properly interpreted in this way, and so the beauty of the gift when it's properly interpreted is virtually lost in my experience upon the body of Christ today.

Which brings us to the second issue, area of correction that verse two corrects, and that is that it helps correct a wrong view that many many other Christians hold about the gift of tongues and the idea that the gift of tongues is evangelistic in nature. That it is given for the purpose of preaching the gospel. That when God gives the gift of tongues to a Christian, then he has supernaturally given to them the ability to speak the gospel in a foreign language without them having had to learn the language. And thus they'll attempt to find out what dialect you're speaking and then send you as a missionary to that nation in order to preach the gospel.

But again, it's the same problem as the other end of the spectrum. The problem with that interpretation or understanding of the gift of tongues is with the direction, and the direction is all wrong. In preaching the gospel, you have God speaking to and through man, as opposed to what the spiritual gift of tongues is and that is man speaking to God. Again, when those 120 up in that upper room began speaking in tongues on the day of Pentecost, they were not preaching the gospel. They were declaring the wonderful works of God.

Otherwise, Peter would not have had to just minutes later then preach the gospel to that gathered multitude and it would have already been accomplished through the gift of tongues which they recognized in their dialect. And when Peter did rise up to preach the gospel to that crowd, he didn't do it in tongues. He did it in a language that he understood and that the crowd understood. And so these things that get corrected related to this. I think it's heartbreaking. I'm not going to be the solution to it. I don't know what the solution to it is apart from God.

He can do whatever he wants in an instant and so I'm content to leave these things with him and then try to be faithful in accurately and rightly dividing the word on these issues. But here on the gift of tongues, you think about, just think in your own experience. I am sure around the world, all I know is the United States and all I know is a very small part of the United States. Maybe it's present in a dominant form in some other part of the world, but I doubt it because I've been in some other parts of the world and it follows the same kind of track that we do here.

And I think about this gift of tongues with it the interpretation and I wonder, does anybody practice this? How much of the body of Christ, how many of us will live our three score and 10 and go into heaven and we will never hear a gift of tongues manifest in a service and then have it be properly interpreted? And I suspect as we'll see later in the chapter here, even here tonight, as he talks about this gift as being something that edifies the user, but I have to guess that this gift is so incredibly beautiful in the way that God intends it to be manifest in the public assembly.

And that because the body of Christ is loaded by and large to one end of the spectrum or the other, that you almost never run into a proper handling of the gift. Now he talks about prophecy in verse three and what prophecy is is when the Holy Spirit speaks a message from God through a human instrument. And so prophecy's direction is always the opposite of the gift of tongues. It is always from God to man. And it is spoken, prophecy is, in a language that people understand and you notice that it speaks edification, exhortation, and comfort to the people.

Edification, a proper prophecy will, the word edification means to build up. It will strengthen and build up the hearers spiritually and in their walk with God. It will speak exhortation. It comes alongside to help. It encourages people in their walk with the Lord. "You're going to make it, it's going to be fine," and so forth. And then comfort. In other words, it's a word that will oftentimes comfort or console us or cheer us up. And it's a wonderful way to think about a prophecy as it is something as Paul puts it here, it is something that either builds up or it stirs up or it lifts up God's people.

That's the purpose of the gift of prophecy and how we need all three of those things in our lives. And so when a Christian believes that God has given them a prophecy from God that they are to share with someone or a group of people, the prophets did both on an individual basis and a congregational basis in the Old Testament. It's good to test that prophecy by asking ourselves, "Does this what I believe that God is wanting to speak through me, does it build people up? Will it stir them up, challenge them, or will it lift them up?"

And it's a good test. Sometimes I've been in a meeting like an afterglow where somebody has a prophecy and you'd think you'd been hijacked by a pirate. "Ah, you're going to hell every one of you in the room," you know? And they just hammer you to death for like one and a half minutes. And I just stand up and say, "How many of you were built up by that just now and comforted and lifted up by that?" So it's as much a safeguard for our own understanding how God uses the gift of prophecy in our willingness to be used by him in that regard.

So in verse four, he says, "He who speaks in tongues edifies himself, but the gift of prophecy edifies the church." And so this gives us a very important insight I think into the gift of tongues. Why it is given by God, why bother with it and all the associated controversy? The gift of tongues edifies the user of the gift. It edifies the person who has this gift and then speaks in their prayer language to God. It builds them up spiritually. It builds and strengthens that person's inner man. And so yes, it blesses God, we've already seen that.

But it also edifies the user of the gift. So sometimes you'll hear people who don't necessarily particularly like the gift of tongues and they dismiss the gift of tongues as just a selfish gift and a selfish action because it doesn't edify the church as a whole unless it's interpreted. But to have individual Christians edified through the gift of tongues, to be built up by it, not only makes them stronger, but a stronger saint in any Christian assembly is going to make that Christian assembly a stronger church than it would otherwise be. And so it has a far-reaching effect in terms of its work of edification within the body.

You notice too, but that happens privately in a Christian's life. You notice too what is happening when a Christian exercises the gift of tongues. You notice in verse two that in the spirit he speaks mystery. So we'll just look at this point that in the spirit he speaks. Now in verse 14, "For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful." So a prayer language is a person praying to God and Paul saying, "My spirit prays." So let's unpack that just for a moment.

First Paul tells us that when someone speaks in tongues, something very real and very significant is occurring between them and the Holy Spirit, between their spirit, that is the new man, the new creation that is in us by virtue of being born again. Something is occurring between our spirit and God the Father. So when we normally pray we are communicating to God from our intellect, from our spirit, our emotions. And here with the gift of tongues, our spirit, what was birthed in us when we were born again is able then to speak directly to God. Our spirit speaks directly to God.

Additionally, Paul declares that to pray in tongues is to pray or to speak mysteries. That is we do not know exactly what it is that we are saying to God, except that it is prayer and praise and thanksgiving being directed to God and that as a result of that we are being built up spiritually, which apparently and rightly from God's perspective is all that we need to know about the gift of tongues. That when we use it, if you have the gift of tongues and it is never interpreted in your lifetime, then you know enough to use it to realize that I am speaking prayer, praise, thanksgiving to God and this is building me up spiritually by the Holy Spirit.

In my pastoral experience, I think that next to the misuse of the gift of tongues in the public assembly by some churches, that this is what keeps many Christians from becoming open to the gift for their own life. And it's because we feel silly because we don't know exactly what we're saying to God. We are praying something to him but we don't know exactly what it is in terms of the exact words. We just know in general what is being spoken to the Lord. But we know as I said a lot more than we realize.

We're not completely unknowing in the exercise of the gift of tongues in the sense that we know we're offering prayer and praise and thanksgiving to God, which should be enough for us to know in order to receive the gift if God has the gift for us and then to exercise that gift in our devotional life with the Lord. I am personally convinced as well that praying in a prayer language is simply the Holy Spirit praying through us what he knows we need to be praying to the Father in order for us to be spiritually edified and to be spiritually built up.

And so you think about how often in our Christian life related to prayer to God, related to praise to God, communication with God, communion with God, there are times where you find that what you feel toward him, what your heart is wanting to communicate to him, that you do not possess the vocabulary for it in the language in which you are most conversant. Your heart is so full and overwhelmed with what it senses toward God and what it wants to say to God and as we meditate upon him and his grace and his love in our life.

Sometimes, there are times where we can find ourselves where we're on a mountaintop experience spiritually. We're filled with such joy, we're filled with such awe of God. He's just shown us something that we just can't believe that he's shown us. He has just done something for us that is mind-boggling to us and we don't know how to express our worship to him in the vocabulary that we possess. So the gift of tongues can help with that. And then there are the times where we find ourselves in very deep trial and discouragement or heartbreak and we don't know what to pray.

We do not know what to pray. There are no human words that we can even begin to encapsulate what it is that we're feeling and needing to communicate to God or when we're in the midst of spiritual warfare and so forth. And so as we are in these kind of places in life, when God has the gift for us, then we're built up spiritually as we use the gift. It would seem that while this gift can have a place in the public assembly when it's interpreted, it is given supremely for the personal devotional life of a Christian.

You notice in verse 18, Paul says, "I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than y'all." More than all of you. Now that's astonishing. And he says, "Yet in the church..." He said, "You think you guys use the gift of tongues? You think you guys are conversant and experts on the gift of tongues? I'm glad I speak in tongues more than all of you." And yet he said in the church. So clearly he's talking about speaking in tongues more than all of you in his private life, in his private devotional life with God.

He says, "Yet in the church I would rather speak five words..." "Jesus died to save you." "...with my understanding that I may teach others also than 10,000 words in a tongue," which of course nobody can understand without an interpretation from God and the gift of tongues requires that interpretation. Now clearly Paul doesn't want us in any way in this entire chapter to come away thinking and misunderstanding that he is speaking in any way negatively of the gift of tongues. Again in verse five, "I wish you all spoke with tongues." Wow.

In verse 18, "I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than you all, more than the Christians in the church at Corinth." And that's a double wow on all of that. So he not only had the gift and he used the gift, but he used it more than even these zealous Corinthians and he thanked God for the gift. And so even in writing to the church at Corinth now to correct this misunderstanding and misuse of the gift, Paul wrote glowingly of it and nobody in their right mind, nobody indwelt by the Holy Spirit or baptized in the Holy Spirit would ever consider Paul to be a kook or unstable or crazy by any serious Christian.

And so if you're someone who looks at the gift of tongues and you have a sense that God wants to give that gift to you, but because of your whatever you look at it and say, "You know, I have a real problem with saying something that I don't understand. I have a real problem with taking that step of faith and having the faith that this is meaningful for God and that it is edifying for me." And then so often with so much abuse surrounding the gift of tongues that sometimes Christians can be even hesitant to admit that they have the gift of tongues lest they be thought of as a kook of some kind.

And I think it's a wonderful blessing in this chapter for no other reason than to be able to look at it and to say this is how valuable the Apostle Paul considered the gift in his own life and how dominant a part of the Christian life that it was for him. In other words, Paul is just in every way that the Holy Spirit can say it, saying that the gift of tongues is safe and it is legitimate. Somebody says, "Well okay, I'll give you that related to Paul, but it would sure help me if there was a place in the Bible where Jesus spoke favorably of it."

It's important to realize that the gift of tongues did not just pop up on the day of Pentecost out of nowhere in the sense of surprising the disciples or the church. Jesus prophesied of it in Mark chapter 16 verse seven and he said, "And all these signs will follow those who believe in my name, who believe in my name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues." And so all of this is by God's design.

Guest (Male): Pastor Damian Kyle on According to the Scriptures. Thanks for joining us today as we continue through 1st Corinthians. If you'd like to get the CD that contains today's message from 1st Corinthians, give us a call: 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. I should also mention Pastor Damian's messages are found at accordingtothescriptures.com, as well as oneplace.com, and on most of the major podcast apps.

So if you missed one or two messages on the radio, there are many ways to catch up. It'd be our honor to pray for you, so keep those prayer requests coming. Leave a comment or prayer request at accordingtothescriptures.com or you can email us at atts@ccmodesto.com. Again, that's atts@ccmodesto.com.

Your financial support is greatly appreciated and it helps us bring Pastor Damian's messages to the radio on stations like this all across the nation. If you would like to make a donation to the ministry, please visit accordingtothescriptures.com. Then join us next time for According to the Scriptures with Damian Kyle when we'll return to our series in 1st Corinthians. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto and made possible through the support of you, our listeners.