1 Corinthians 13:1-14:1 [NLTse]
If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
8 Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! 9 Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! 10 But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.
11 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 12 Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
14:1 Let love be your highest goal.
Sermon
I’ve been the pastor here at First Presbyterian Church for almost seventeen years. I’ve preached from every book of the Bible (even Song of Solomon that people say nobody preaches from) and through some passages that life-long Christians have told me they’d never heard anyone preach on before. But I’ve never preached about speaking in tongues. I have talked with different ones of you personally about the practice, and I’ve prayed with different ones of you in these beautiful and mysterious languages, but I’ve never preached about it before. So, by God’s grace, here we go…
First let me begin with a definition: Speaking in tongues is Holy Spirit-inspired speech in a language that is unknown to the speaker. So, if I learn Spanish in order to share the good news with and be a blessing to my Hispanic neighbors or a Hispanic community nearby – even though my native language is English and I am speaking in Spanish to a person, or a crowd, or a small group – I am not speaking in tongues: I am speaking Spanish. I’ve learned the language so it’s a language that’s known to me. If I’ve never learned and don’t know a word of Spanish but find myself preaching strange words that are being understood by the Hispanic folks around me, and someone tells me that I’m speaking fluent Spanish: That’s speaking in tongues, speaking a language that is unknown to me by the leading of the Holy Spirit. Or I may be praying, and I begin praying strange words that have come into my mind that don’t make any sense to me, even if nobody around me understands their meaning either, and even if there’s nobody around me to understand them because I’m praying alone, that is speaking – or praying – with tongues. Tongues is Holy Spirit-inspired speech in a language that is unknown to the speaker.
The Bible speaks in several different places about speaking or praying in the Spirit, as tongues is sometimes called. In Mark 16 the Lord Jesus Himself, after His resurrection, said that His followers would perform miraculous signs including casting out demons, speaking in new languages, and healing the sick. (vv. 17-18) And tongues praising and preaching accompanied the coming of the Holy Spirit that very first Pentecost, and accompanied the Spirit’s coming when many who were baptized by the Holy Spirit across the Book of Acts received Him. And the place of tongues is discussed and debated in Paul’s First Letter To the Corinthians, in chapters 12 and 14.
In every instance tongues is spoken of as a positive experience, a gift God has given to individual believers personally and privately to enhance and bless their personal and private worship, as well as a gift given to congregations-as-a-whole when the Lord is desiring to share a special message with His church, that is, when someone is present who’s been gifted to understand the tongue-message that has been spoken.
I think I have shared before my first experience of the blessing of tongues at the congregational level. Amy and I were worshiping at Christ Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia. And in the middle of the congregational prayer time the pastor’s wife began speaking aloud in this strange language. I remember the pastor all-but-glaring at her as he said something like, “I know that my wife is aware that we are not to speak aloud in strange tongues unless someone is present who is able to interpret what they’ve said. So I trust,” and he continued giving her a fairly hard look, “I trust there must be someone here who understood what she just spoke.” And then a lady in the far back corner of the room raised her hand and said, “I understood her clearly…”
I regret that I don’t remember what God’s message was to us all that morning, but He sure got our attention, and Sunday Services were never again the same as we all began to anticipate the Holy Spirit’s personally speaking and guiding and encouraging us as we met together during Worship.
I first experienced spiritual language (as some call it today) as a personal practice when I was in seminary. Although I had believed in Jesus for many years, I had only truly submitted my life to Him the year before. So I’d already been born again, come alive, been made new in Christ for about a year (if I remember it correctly). And it had been a wonderful adventure! The Lord had been teaching me new things. I was understanding aspects of God’s character and of the gospel that I’d never grasped before. And I was growing in my own discipleship by leaps and bounds.
The night I first prayed in a language unfamiliar to me – the words of which I believe the Holy Spirit had put in my mouth – I was at a Bible Study focusing on the person and work of the Holy Spirit. The Study had ended with a time of extended prayer where we were encouraged to ask God’s Spirit to give us the gifts He wanted us to have so that we could love Him better, love others better, and to help us do our part of spreading His Kingdom – person by person – across the face of the earth.
And I remember kneeling there, wondering what might happen. Because others there at that little Presbyterian Church praised God and prayed with tongues, and I’d never asked them what it was like and how it worked. I didn’t know if God was going to just ”take over” my mouth or if it was going to feel weird or if nothing was going to happen to me at all and God would choose to give me another gift or other gifts instead. The teacher had told us to simply speak whatever words it seemed that God was putting into our mouths or that came into our minds. And so I did.
I can tell you that it seemed like gibberish to me, only, there were some words that sounded to me kind of like Hebrew mixed in, too. (Which got me wondering if I was just making the whole thing up, since I had just finished my Intro to Hebrew class a month or so before.) But the words kept coming into my mind, and so I kept at it: Hoping it was something real and that it would indeed be something wonderful, just like I’d heard others say.
So I continued speaking the funny words. And it didn’t strike me at all as a very spiritual experience. But I was encouraged by others who’d been given their own “spiritual language” to praise and to sing with. And they told me that, just as praying had been a strange discipline that I’d had to learn and believe God was truly listening-to when I first believed, that I needed to keep at the practice, continuing to ask God to give me words and language to speak, and to speak them trusting that God knew their meaning and that He would be blessed by it as I did, and that, just like my regular praying, that I would grow to be blessed by it, too.
Of course, now, speaking and praying with tongues is as much a part of me as praying in English. When I don’t know what to pray I am blessed to believe that the Holy Spirit is praying through me with these words that sometimes seem like strange noises and groaning. And when I’m so filled with wonder and praise and love for our Father, praising Him in the Spirit is so much more freeing than trying to struggle to put my thoughts and feelings into words that don’t even begin to capture the bursting going on inside me.
The apostle Paul spoke to the Corinthians thanking God that he spoke in tongues more than any of them did. And the apostle John was given The Revelation while he was in the Spirit one precious Sunday. I believe that our Father would have us all experience this beautiful gift. I don’t believe every born-again Christian has to. Nor do I believe that every Spirit-filled believer necessarily will. But even as the Lord Jesus says that tongues will be one of the miraculous signs He will give us, and even as the apostle Paul desires that we might all speak in tongues, it is my hope that our Father would give each of you your own spiritual language, as well: To strengthen your faith and to encourage your faith because of its supernatural nature; to help you praise and pray when our English words either seem to fail us or seem lacking; and, to nurture in you an ever-greater fellowship and intimacy with God that we know He longs for and that I know you long for, as well.
We’re going to worship God singing Him a song. And then, let’s pray…