Thursday, December 15, 2011

The Charisms: 8 - The Gift of Tongues


Shortly before Jesus ascended into heaven He commanded his disciples to go and proclaim the good news to all creation. He told them that one of the signs that would accompany them would be "new tongues" (Mark 16:17), or "new languages" that they had not learned. We see them doing this to amazing effect on the day of Pentecost when God poured out His Spirit upon them.

There are two types of this gift, which is unintelligible to the user, unless he has the accompanying gift of interpretation (see The Gift of Interpretation of Tongues): one is the ability to pray in tongues; the other the ability to speak in tongues.

Every believer can receive the gift of praying in tongues, which is a lovely way of communicating with God. "For," as Paul writes, "those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them, since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit" (1 Corinthians 14:12).

When a person prays in tongues he does not use his human intellect, "for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God" (Romans 8:26-27). Through tongues, we utter mysteries in the Spirit, build ourselves up, praise the Lord, thank Him, and give signs to unbelievers (1 Corinthians 14:2,4,16,22).

Speaking in tongues is a rare gift, whereby people hear the speaker speaking in their own language. We see this demonstrated in Acts 2, when the apostles "were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability" (Acts 2:4).

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