The Regulation Of Spiritual Gifts Part 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. To an outsider, hearing people speak in unknown languages may raise more questions than answers.

That's why Paul argued for clear teaching in known dialects. He tells us why the gift of tongues was given, referring to a prophecy in Isaiah chapter 28. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, today you'll wrap up your series on developing a passion for the church. I'm hoping you'll bring some closure to a topic which for some is difficult. Dave, I have to say that I believe very deeply that this message is going to be helpful to everyone who is listening. As a matter of fact, I would say there to the many people who do tune in to Running to Win, you might want to get on the phone, call somebody else, ask them to listen along with you, because I think that there is clarity in the Scriptures regarding the purpose of speaking with tongues, and once we understand that, many things will be put into perspective.

First Corinthians chapter 14. Let me ask you a question. Thousands upon thousands of people listen to the ministry of Running to Win, and I want to remind you that we are in more than 20 different countries because of the support that we receive from so many of you, and we're so grateful. Thank you for holding our hands so that together we can continue to make a difference.

Would you consider becoming an endurance partner? Someone who stands with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts. For more information, you can go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com.

Click on the endurance partner button or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now, if you have a Bible handy, open it up to 1 Corinthians chapter 14. At last, at last, we begin to understand the purpose.

But what's this business of in the law it is written? Good idea to go back to the actual quotation. You don't need to turn to it, but you know that your margin will tell you that it's a quotation of Isaiah chapter 28 verse 11. Now, Isaiah is the book of signs, gave a sign regarding the virgin birth.

Isaiah is also giving another sign here. He's predicting the dispersion of the Jews. They're going to be dispersed into many different countries and are going to learn different languages.

But he's also predicting the time when there is going to be a radical transformation. You see, the Jews were called by God. They were given the covenants and they were to be custodians of the covenants and they were to be missionaries to their neighbors telling them about the true God Jehovah. But they failed.

They disobeyed and you know they paid dearly for that disobedience. So Isaiah here is predicting a judgment. Now to us, this is no big deal, but to the Jewish people of the time, this was huge because Hebrew is such a beautiful language. I mean, it's a beautiful language and they thought to themselves, you know, God only speaks Hebrew basically just like some Spanish people today think that that's all that he speaks. Well, we know that he speaks English too, but Isaiah is predicting that the time is going to come when God is going to speak to his own people through the stammering guttural sounds of Gentile languages. That's actually what the Hebrew means here. For by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue, verse 28, the Lord will speak to this people to whom he has said, this is rest. Give rest to the weary and this is repose and yet they will not hear, says God.

Wow. So tongues are assigned to the nation Israel, to the Jewish people. Tongues are a sign that the era of the Gentiles has come in, that the gospel is now going to be proclaimed through the stammering lips of Gentiles. And when this happens, the Jewish people should know that the transition to the church is taking place and that God is going to save the Jewish people, but most of them are going to hear the gospel, not through Hebrew, but through the stammering lips of Gentiles. Your Bible is still open. I hope to 1 Corinthians chapter 14.

Now is the time to really look at this text carefully. Verse 21 in the law, it is written by people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners, I will speak to this people. What people?

The Jewish people. Isaiah 28 11. To this people, I will speak with foreign tongues and yet they will not listen to me, says the Lord. Verse 22, thus tongues are a sign not for believers, but for unbelievers. All right, now let's skip to verse 23. If therefore the whole church comes together and speak in tongues and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your minds?

Have you all been thinking in the last two minutes? Does Paul contradict himself? Verse 22, tongue is a sign for unbelievers. Verse 23, if the whole church comes together and there are foreigners and you're speaking in tongues, they're just going to think that you're crazy. There is a translation of the Bible that I will not mention. It was made by a man.

Very interesting. All of the translations are made by men, but usually a committee. This translation is made by a man on his own and it's a good translation, but there's a footnote in it which I read years ago which in effect says Paul apparently didn't realize that he's contradicting himself. If I could add a little color, we could say that he wrote verse 22 and then went for a sandwich and came back and wrote verse 23 and didn't realize what he had just written. Is that consistent with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?

I don't think so. What Paul is saying in verse 22 is that tongues are for a sign for unbelieving Jews that the era of the Gentiles has come in, but if the whole church is gathered together and there are lots of people there who are non-Jewish, they're foreigners and they're from every place under heaven and you speak in tongues in that context, it'll be meaningless and they'll just think that you are mad, that you're crazy. The only way to interpret this is to realize that it's a sign to the Jewish nation. Book of Acts, four times at least, speaking in tongues is recorded. Maybe it happened more than that, but every time it happened it is the gospel going to another segment of society. It's going to Samaria and they speak in tongues and then it goes to the Gentiles in chapter 11 and Peter goes there and he gets criticized for going to Gentiles and then he comes back and says, well, you know, they received the Holy Spirit just like us. You know, they were speaking in tongues and they say, oh really? Well then, wow, God is also granted to Gentiles the gift of life. As the gospel goes out through the Book of Acts and it goes and envelops other language groups, you have this phenomenal, unbelievable gift of tongues. And isn't it interesting how God's word is so true?

Let's look at 2000 years of history. Most Jewish people who've come to trust Christ as Messiah have heard the gospel, not through Hebrew, but through Gentile languages. You have, for example, German Jews who've heard the gospel in German. You have Russian Jews. They've heard the gospel in Russian.

You have many Jewish people in America. They have heard the gospel in English. And so the gospel comes through all these different Gentile languages and the gift of tongues, the gift of tongues was in those early century of the church as God was getting the church started to prove that the era of the Gentiles had now come. He gave this miraculous gift and maybe this explains why that gift faded after the first century and it never came back to the church again until the early 1900s in Topeka, Kansas in 1901 and then the famous Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1905 where the modern charismatic movement was born.

Isn't that interesting? Now there were fringe groups, of course, that maybe did, but mainstream Christianity did not have these gifts for all of those centuries because it no longer really applied. It was now established that the era of the Gentiles had come in. You say, well, Pastor Lutzer, what about today? Can the gift be exercised today and so forth? Is today what we see on television, the same kind of gift? The answer to that question is for the most part, no. What you see on television today is not actual dialects of languages being spoken.

Dozens of studies have been done. Linguists have taken tape recorders to these meetings. They have yet to find an actual language. They find the repetition of certain phrases and bowels and they find strange noises that maybe they can't identify, but there's no evidence that there's actually a language being spoken. Now, whenever I say that, I receive letters and the letters go like this. They say, you're just plain wrong because I was in a meeting. In fact, I received a letter like this some time ago. He says, I know this to be a fact that somebody who came from China wasn't able to speak a word of Chinese was in a meeting in a Christian meeting and was able to stand up and speak in English.

They were from China, knew only Chinese. Now they could speak in English and they brought this beautiful exposition of God's word. My friend, if that story is true, I say bravo for God.

That's wonderful. Let's not put God in a box and say, you know, God can't do this. My goodness, if he wants to give somebody the gift of speaking a language that they've never learned, let God be God and let's simply acknowledge the fact that God can do as he wills with his people. All that I know is this. I have a sister and a brother-in-law who were in Mexico 21 years with Wycliffe Bible Translators. They were at the Cuicotec Indian tribe, 265 miles south of Mexico City and I visited them there in Mexico. They began by breaking down a language that had never been recorded. They began and they were trained as linguists and they began to break it all down and it took years for them to understand it. It took years and years for them to make that translation of the New Testament. They would have given anything for the gift of tongues. To be able to walk in there and to, for all those years that they had to labor, to speed all that up and suddenly know the Cuicotec language. But for some reason, God didn't give them that gift.

They had to do it the hard way and I think most people in Wycliffe would agree it's got to be done the hard way. You say, well, Pastor Luther, what about the gift of interpretation? Is that different than it used to be?

And the answer to that is a resounding yes, I can assure you it is different than it used to be. The gift of interpretation today is not translation. So how do you know that? I became friends with a man who has the gift of interpretation who's very godly and remember we're talking here about our brothers and sisters. He's very godly. In fact, I'm sure that in the day of rewards, he will be rewarded much more than I will.

Good faithful hearted man and he has this gift. So one day I said to him, I said, you have the gift of interpretation? He said, yes. I said, when you interpret a message, do you actually understand the words that are being said? And he said, no. I said, well, that's interesting.

I said, how then do you know what to say? And he said, well, he said, the spirit impresses it upon me and then I take it from there. That's interesting. The spirit impresses. You don't understand those words any more than I understand them.

Yeah, that's right. Then I was watching TV and there was a man who was doing teaching along this line. He's not on TV anymore, but he was a very nice man. I had never met, but I was fascinated by his teaching because he actually dealt with all these issues. And then I was watching one day and he said this very interesting thing. He says, people think interpretation is difficult because they think it's translation, but he says it's not.

You discern the mood of the speaker and then you take it from there. If he seems to be exhorting God, then you exhort. If he seems to be praising God, then you praise.

If he seems to be praying, then you pray. Wow. There was an extensive study done and this is what is written. Two people who did some investigation into this gift in order to investigate the accuracy of these interpretations, we undertook to play a taped example of tongues speech privately for several different interpreters of tongues.

In no instance was there any similarity in any of the several interpretations. The following typifies our results. One interpreter said the tongue speaker was praying for the health of his children. Another, that the same tongue speech was an expression of gratitude to God for a recently successful church fundraising effort. When confronted with the disparity between their interpretations, the interpreters offered this explanation that God gave to one person, one interpretation of the speech and to another person, another interpretation. They showed no defensiveness about being cross-examined and generously upheld alternate interpretations as equally valid.

Boy, we ought to pause there for a while. A couple of months ago I was in Mexico. I had a wonderful interpreter, I think. I always tell my interpreters, I preach through interpreters many times, I've always said if I'm preaching a bad sermon, go ahead and make it better. Now let's suppose that I was preaching because I had this great burden, which I did have for the people of Mexico, that God laid on my heart. And then I discover later that he was saying something entirely different. So I get in a different interpreter, preach the same message, discover that he's saying something entirely different and no relationship to what the first interpreter said. Why am I even there for? Why even have the gift of tongues if you don't understand the words? Just discern mood and go with mood.

Don't even bother trying to connect it. Now let me bring this down. If there's anything clear in the scriptures about tongues, it is that interpretation was always translation. Paul would have insisted on it that if you're getting a special message from God, you had better interpret it correctly or else you are answerable to God taking his message and then going with your own mood or your own thing.

What we need to do is to realize that what's happening in most instances, and I know that I'll get letters about the exceptions, but in most instances it is nothing really to do with the New Testament. In the rest of the passage, the apostle Paul goes on and gives five different rules for tongue speaking. He mentions how that they should speak only two at a time or rather in order, but at the most two and at the most three actually. He says two and at the most three, how the other person has to wait for the other person because there's no such thing as, you know, the Spirit just came upon me and I just needed to speak. That's not found in the New Testament. That's found in other religions and other situations, but not in the New Testament because Paul says everything should be done decently and in order. He also gives the controversial thing that women should be silent in the church and people discuss what that means and is it universal?

Was it local? One of the reasons why it's such a problem to interpret that is because in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul says as long as a woman is veiled, she can prophesy in the church and she can pray in the church. So how do you reconcile the two? Well, I think I've probably scared up enough rabbits in this message without getting into that. But here's the take home today that I want you to get from this message. Notice what the apostle Paul says.

I love this. I pray this often for Moody Church. Yesterday I was here in the auditorium praying this for the church.

Paul says in verse 24, but if all prophesy an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all. He is called to account by all. The secrets of his heart are disclosed and so falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you. You say, how shall we pray for Moody Church?

Pray that verse. I pray that those of you who are in the balcony, though you're sitting far from the pulpit here and I cannot see your eyes, though I can see your faces. I hope that you know that where you are sitting, God is among you and where we are sitting that God is here. God is in the music. God is in the scripture reading. God is in the testimonies. God is in the offering that God may dwell here with his people.

That's the point that we want to see. And even here today there could be somebody, and God is using even this message, though it is of a different sort, to remind you that you were exposed before God. You know those sins that you hide, that you've tucked away, that you've rationalized? You're exposed before God.

It's very clear to him. And then the good news that Jesus died for sinners and that if you embrace Christ as Savior, you can be forgiven, you can be cleansed, and you can belong to the family of God forever. That's the good news that has been proclaimed from this pulpit ever since this church was founded and with God's grace is going to continue to be proclaimed with clarity, clarity, clarity in language. I hope that you can understand. May God and his blessed presence be with us.

Let's pray. Our Father, today we ask that the word of God as it has been proclaimed may be beneficial to help us to understand. And we want to thank you, Lord, for all of our brothers and sisters who differ with us. We know that they too are precious in your sight and that along with them we shall enjoy eternity forever. So we pray that this word of clarity may not cause further division but further understanding and an appreciation for what your holy word teaches. And now, Lord, our needs are so diverse and this message has been so pointed in a different direction. Would you even take these words and use them for your glory? In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, my friend, this is Pastor Lutzer and thank you so much for listening to Running to Win today. You know, we are living at a time when there is much confusion within the Church of Jesus Christ and these messages, I think, under God's good hand have been used to give clarity to spiritual gifts to the issue of speaking with tongues. Would you like to have these messages so that you can listen to them again and again?

For a gift of any amount, they can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com.

That's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now, let me share my heart with you. I want you to be sure to listen to Running to Win next time because I'm going to be having a discussion of my new book entitled Pandemics, Plagues, and Natural Disasters, What is God Saying to Us?

As a matter of fact, I'd like to suggest that you pick up the phone and call friends and make sure that they are listening. We're going to be dealing with some very hard issues regarding COVID, yes, but also earthquakes, other kinds of natural disasters. We'll be talking about God's relationship to these events. How shall we interpret them? Why was the Lisbon earthquake in Portugal in the 1700s?

Why did it divide Europe? How has the church handled plagues before? And most of all, how can we keep on trusting God no matter how bad it gets? It's also a great opportunity to invite skeptics to listen because I believe that there will be many that will receive answers even as we talk realistically about the Bible and about pandemics, plagues, and natural disasters. So, I'll see you here next time on Running to Win, and it will be a bit different. It'll be a discussion of these important topics.

You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 N. LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Lockdowns, economic chaos, thousands dying, COVID-19 has changed us all forever. Agendas are flying as the press and politicians maneuver for advantage. The ultimate question, what is God saying to us through a deadly pandemic? It's time to open our hearts and minds and find out. Next time on Running to Win, we begin a four-part look at pandemics, plagues, and natural disasters. What is God saying to us? Thanks for listening. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.