The Gift of Tongues

Question 4049.

The gift of tongues has caused more heat and less light than almost any subject I deal with as a minister. In some circles it is treated as the badge that proves a person has truly received the Holy Spirit. In others it is written off entirely as a first century oddity that died with the apostles. I am persuaded that both of those positions struggle to survive a patient reading of the New Testament.

So let me set out, as carefully as I can, what the gift of tongues is, what it is not, and how a sober and biblical believer should think about it. I am a continuationist, but a cautious one, and I have seen enough disorder in the name of the Spirit to want every claim measured against the Word.

What the gift of tongues is

The gift of tongues is a Spirit-given ability to speak in a language the speaker has not learned. The Greek word is simply glōssa, meaning tongue or language. At Pentecost the disciples spoke and the gathered crowd each “heard them telling in his own tongue the mighty works of God,” according to Acts 2:11. Real languages were being spoken and understood.

When Paul writes to Corinth he describes a related but distinct use of the gift, where the one who speaks “utters mysteries in the Spirit” and addresses God rather than people, as 1 Corinthians 14:2 puts it. Whether we are dealing with known human languages or a Spirit-prompted prayer language, the gift of tongues is always genuine speech directed by the Spirit, never gibberish worked up by the flesh.

Scholars have long debated whether the tongues at Pentecost and the tongues at Corinth are exactly the same phenomenon. At Pentecost the hearers recognised their own native languages, while at Corinth interpretation was needed because no one understood. I am content to hold that the gift can take more than one form, sometimes a known human language, sometimes a Spirit-prompted utterance addressed to God, while remaining in every case a real work of the Spirit and not a trick of the emotions.

What matters most is the source and the purpose. The source is the Spirit, who “apportions to each one individually as he wills” in 1 Corinthians 12:11, which means tongues can never be manufactured by technique or worked up by crowd pressure. The purpose is always the glory of God and the good of His people, which is why Paul spends so much energy regulating how the gift of tongues is used when the church gathers. Hold those two anchors and most of the confusion clears.

Tongues is not the proof of Spirit baptism

Here is where I part company sharply with classical Pentecostalism. The gift of tongues is not the necessary evidence that someone has been baptised in the Spirit. Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 12:30, “Do all speak with tongues?” and the grammar of the question expects the answer no. If every believer were meant to speak in tongues, that question would make no sense.

Every believer is baptised in the Spirit at conversion. “In one Spirit we were all baptised into one body,” Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:13, and that “all” is the whole church, tongues-speakers and not. So I cannot teach anyone to chase the gift of tongues as proof that the Spirit has come. The Spirit already indwells every child of God. You can read my fuller treatment in what the baptism of the Holy Spirit means.

This matters pastorally more than it might first appear. I have met sincere believers who were told that until they spoke in tongues they had not really been filled or baptised in the Spirit, and who spent months striving, copying syllables and working themselves into a frenzy, convinced something was missing. That teaching wounded them, because it made an experience they did not have into the measure of a relationship with God they truly did have. The Bible lifts that burden clean off their shoulders.

The same chapter that lists the gift of tongues also asks, “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?” The expected answer to every question is no, and tongues is simply one more item on that list in 1 Corinthians 12:29-30. The Spirit deliberately distributes different gifts to different members so that the body needs one another. To single out one gift as the badge of the Spirit is to misread the whole design Paul is describing.

Tongues serves love, not display

Paul sandwiches his teaching on tongues between two chapters about love and order. The gift of tongues without love, he says, is “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” That is a strong rebuke to anyone who treats the gift as a spiritual status symbol. The Spirit gives gifts to build others up, not to put the gifted person on a pedestal.

This is why Paul actually limits the public use of tongues so firmly. He would “rather speak five words” with his mind to instruct others “than ten thousand words in a tongue,” according to 1 Corinthians 14:19. The measure of a gift in the assembly is whether the body is edified, not whether a believer feels stirred.

There is a striking honesty in the way Paul handles his own experience here. He says plainly, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you,” so he is no opponent of the gift. Yet in the very next breath he subordinates his private practice to the good of others when the church gathers. He will not let his own rich experience set the agenda for the meeting. That is a maturity I wish were more common, a man who valued a gift highly and still refused to let it become a performance.

Love, not display, is the whole point of the long chapter Paul places right in the middle of his teaching on gifts. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal,” he writes in 1 Corinthians 13:1. The gift of tongues exercised to impress is just noise. The same gift exercised in love, in its proper place, builds others up. The gift is not the problem, the heart behind it can be.

Why interpretation matters

In the gathered church the gift of tongues is bound to another gift, namely interpretation. “If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret,” Paul instructs in 1 Corinthians 14:27. Without interpretation the congregation gains nothing, because they cannot say “Amen” to what they do not understand.

So an uninterpreted tongue in public is, by Paul’s own rule, out of place. The Spirit who gives the gift of tongues also supplies the gift that makes it useful to others. I have written more on that companion gift in my article on the gift of interpretation of tongues.

The reasoning is simple kindness. Paul pictures an outsider wandering into a meeting where everyone is speaking in tongues at once, and asks whether they will not “say that you are out of your minds,” as 1 Corinthians 14:23 warns. The gathering exists to build people up and to make the truth plain, and an avalanche of uninterpreted utterance does the opposite. The rule about interpretation is really a rule about love for the person sitting next to you.

I take from this that order in the use of tongues is not a quenching of the Spirit but an honouring of Him, because “God is not a God of confusion but of peace,” as Paul concludes in 1 Corinthians 14:33. When a church keeps the gift of tongues within these gentle banks, two or three at most, each in turn, always with interpretation, it shows that it trusts the Spirit’s own instructions through the apostle rather than its own appetite for excitement.

Practices I cannot defend from Scripture

A great deal that travels under the banner of the gift of tongues has no biblical warrant at all. Mass uninterpreted tongues-speaking across a whole congregation, tongues taught as a technique to be learned by repeating syllables, and the claim that a Christian who does not speak in tongues is a second class believer, all of these run straight into Paul’s plain instructions in 1 Corinthians 14:23.

The same caution applies to phenomena like being slain in the Spirit, holy laughter, and other manifestations presented as evidence of the Spirit’s power. I deal with one such example in my article on being slain in the Spirit. The Spirit is not the author of confusion, and order is His signature, not chaos.

I want to be careful here, because in pointing out abuses I am not mocking sincere people. Many who have been swept up in these practices love the Lord and long for more of Him, and that longing is good. My concern is that the gift of tongues, and the Spirit’s work generally, gets bound up with experiences that Scripture nowhere commands or describes, until the experience itself becomes the goal. When that happens, people end up chasing feelings rather than walking with God, and they are left fragile when the feelings fade.

The test I keep coming back to is the one Jesus gave, “you will recognise them by their fruits,” in Matthew 7:16. A practice that produces lasting love, holiness, humility and a deeper love for Scripture commends itself. A practice that produces pride, division, instability and a hunger for ever greater sensations should be questioned no matter how spiritual it feels in the moment. The gift of tongues, rightly used, builds quiet maturity, not a craving for the next experience.

Should I seek the gift of tongues?

Paul does not forbid the gift. “Do not forbid speaking in tongues,” he says clearly in 1 Corinthians 14:39. If God has given you this gift, use it in private prayer and, where there is interpretation, for the good of the church. There is no shame in it and no need to hide it.

But I would not have anyone strive after the gift of tongues as if it were the summit of the Christian life or the gauge of their standing with God. The greater gifts Paul commends for the assembly are the ones that teach and build up. Seek the Giver, walk in step with the Spirit, and let Him distribute His gifts as He wills.

So, now what?

If you speak in tongues, give thanks, keep it ordered, and never use it to look down on a brother or sister who does not. If you do not, you are not missing the Spirit, for He already dwells in you and seals you. The pressing question for all of us is not whether we have this particular gift but whether we are loving the people around us and submitting to the Word.

Where do you find your sense of spiritual security? Is it resting on an experience you can point to, or on the finished work of Jesus and the indwelling presence of His Spirit? Build your confidence there, and the question of tongues will fall into its proper, modest place.

Now I want you all to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy. The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be built up.

ESV, 1 Corinthians 14:5