Understanding Prophecy, Discernment, and Speaking in Tongues

the authority of the prophetic message is not in its form it's in its content now let me explain to you if you come to me for a word of counsel right and you come and you share your life with me and tell me what you're involved in it would be possible for me having listened to you to say dear friend i want to give you a prophetic word just for you before you go so let's bow in prayer and let me give it to you and then in the first person singular i can speak to you and tell you that i believe that this is what god has to say to you at this moment in your circumstances a present word from god for your present situation [00:52:33]

the gift of new testament prophecy is the application of god's given word to god's given people in a given moment in time search the scriptures to see if these things are so let's go on let's try one or two more distinguishing between spirits the gift of distinguishing between spirits is simply the gift of discernment john writes of it in 1 john 4 1 dear friends do not believe every spirit but test the spirits to see if they're from god and we find in apostolic times that there were some specific instances where this became particularly apparent [00:52:34]

for example in acts chapter 16 we have the record of one who was speaking true words but paul detects in this girl something that is actually evil once they were going to the place of prayer acts 16 16 we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future she earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune telling and the girl follows paul around and she's shouting these men are the servants of the most high god and she keeps it up day after day and finally paul became so troubled that he turned round and said to the spirit in the name of jesus christ i command you to come out of her and at that moment the spirit left her [00:55:36]

paul was given a unique gift in that moment to discriminate between what was going on in that individual to some is given a unique ability to recognize lying spirits if you think about it it was a particularly important gift before the new testament canon was completed one commentator says the holy spirit's discerners were the church's protectors john owen writing of this said that god gave a special gift of discerning spirits to contend against quotes the mischief done in the church because at that time with an abundance of spiritual gifts in operation and the ease with which they could be counterfeited it was absolutely necessary that they would know what was true and what was false [00:57:55]

traditional pentecostalism for those of you who come out of that background or understand it traditional pentecostalism wrestling with this distinguishes between the spirit the the acts 2 experience of god's spirit where they were all baptized and all spoken tongues traditional pentecostalism says this every believer must be baptized in the holy spirit as a post-conversion experience and as a result of their baptism in the holy spirit they will involuntarily speak in tongues having done so traditional pentecostalism says they may not however continue to have a gift of tongues as per first corinthians 12 and 14 [01:11:48]

can we equate what paul describes here and in chapter 14 that is this public expression of truth in these other languages with the largely private unstructured language which our charismatic brothers and sisters give testimony to in other words is what they're talking about and what the new testament here is talking about one and the same thing we're going to examine this in detail in chapter 14 but it seems to me that what paul is talking about is something very different than the expression of someone who with all sincerity may claim to possess a quote's private prayer language [01:16:56]

it's once again an area of study where undue dogmatism is really unhelpful and where spiritual sensitivity is vital and you can take some of your favorite theologians and lay them end to end they won't reach a conclusion for example charles hodge regarded both the pentecostal ied acts 2 tongues and the corinthian tongues as the same a gift of other languages abram kuiper regarded both as the uttering of unintelligible sounds he said that it was probably the language that we're going to speak in heaven so that the gift in that case the miracle was one of both hearing and speaking and people spoke what they didn't know and people heard what they couldn't understand [01:20:40]

tongues speaking as expressed today is not language in the ordinary sense it is not language in the ordinary sense forget for a minute the stories that you heard about mr son so in the missionary thing and he was trying to explain john's gospel and all of a sudden he found himself speaking and the people started to listen to him because he was speaking in their language that is a separate issue for now we're talking about going to the average charismatic church where when you finish singing the song everybody keeps singing and then they start singing in glossolalia or in tongues okay that is not intelligible language [01:23:20]

it is a willed and welcomed vocal event in which in a context of attention to religious realities the tongue operates with one's mood but apart from one's mind in a way comparable to the fantasy languages of children the scat singing of the late louis armstrong yodling in the alps and warbling under the shower or in the bath now for those of you who believe that god has given you a private prayer language don't let that unsettle you in any way that is an explanation that's almost like a medical explanation a physiological explanation of what is happening when you do what you do no matter what the religious overtone or connotation we may put on it [01:25:18]

and once a person has given an utterance in an unintelligible language in a way that they themselves do not know what they're talking about then it is open it is up for grabs for somebody then to interpret that in the immediate aftermath of the utterance now here's the problem so long as what is said by way of interpretation is biblical it stands unchallengeable because it is uncheckable okay so if somebody says something that nobody knows what they're talking about and i immediately give you an interpretation which is true to the bible you can't challenge it because it's true to the bible and you can't check it [01:54:32]

when somebody does this and somebody interprets it may well bring blessing irrespective of the question of reality or not for this reason that let's suppose we've got a well-meaning person who has been led to the conviction that here is the way to really know god and this is the real expression of true spirituality and when you're able to do this by divine gifting then you're really close to god and if you do it in our little prayer meeting and you're quiet for a moment or two there'll be somebody else who will stand up and will interpret it for you when they stand up and interpret it and they give a word of god-given spiritual encouragement which is essentially from the bible you see without it necessarily being a god-given rendering of a god-given language it's still going to be encouraging because it's a god-given bible out of which it came [02:00:00]