Apologies, due to some technical difficulties we don’t have a recording this week but the notes are below. I ran out of time this week so the sermon’s been split into two parts. There will be a recap of the first part in Part 2 in a few weeks time. Feel free to use the notes below in anyway you wish.
Sources: The Century of the Holy Spirit
Chasing the Dragon
Recommended: Speaking in Tongues: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives (Studies in Pentecostal and Charismatic Issues)
The Holy Spirit and Tongues
I did a small survey about Tongues in the church a few months ago. Thirty five people responded.
Out of 35:
11 had never spoken in tongues.
9 spoke in tongues occasionally.
15 spoke in tongues frequently, once per week or more.
What are Tongues?
Starting at the beginning: Luke 24:45-49 (Jesus promises the Holy Spirit)
Fulfilment at Pentecost: Acts 2:1-9 (The Holy Spirit comes, one of the results is tongues)
Two Examples of baptism in the HS in Acts:
Believers at Samaria: Acts 8:14-19 (Already Christian but had no baptism in the Spirit, no tongues).
Cornelius and his Household: Acts 10:39-46 (Holy Spirit at same time as believing and tongues).
The Holy Spirit Cannot be Formulised.
I want to resist applying a formula to the Holy Spirit that isn’t there. Sometimes the Holy Spirit comes when a person believes, sometimes he does not. Sometimes the result is speaking in tongues, sometimes it is not.
There are two different types of tongues:
Xenolalia: An actual earthly language (Brazilian, Italian etc) Acts 2.
Glossolalia: (more common) a non earthly language, some call it the language of angels. I don’t actually think there is a literal national dialect of the angels, I think we could more generally regard it as the language of the Spirit.
1 Corinthians 14:2 Paul says: “For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no-one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit“.
It has no rhythm or rhyme that can be subjected to the tests of modern lingusitic methodologies, in this sense it’s something completely different from an earthly language. Possibly because tongues isn’t really about the sound, it’s about the movement, the movement of the Spirit. In our earthly vessels this movement produces sound and God understands us. But the sound is secondary to the movement which creates it. Just as a groan of pain is secondary to the pain itself.
Now I Want to Talk About Crying.
I’m Not Crying Video (Flight of the Conchords)
“I’m not crying, It’s just been raining…..on my face.”
“I’m not weeping because you won’t be here to hold my hand. For your information there’s an inflammation in my tear gland.”
“I’m not upset because you left me this way. My eyes are just a little sweaty today.”
Why Crying?
Why do we cry? Not, what makes us cry? But what purpose does the body achieve by shedding tears or contorting the face?
The particular type of crying that the guys in the video were experiencing, it has a technical name “psychic crying”. It releases higher levels of hormones into the blood that relieve pain and stress. But why this outward expression? Why the tears? And the contorted face? In the academic world, this question is still open and when I studied psychology at college the function of crying was one of the things we studied. One of the explanations I like is that we cry when we cannot find the words to express our hurt or our happiness, so crying is the physical expression of our feelings.
Why Tongues?
Why do we speak in tongues?
We can answer this question for the first type of tongue, xenolalia, it’s a miracle. God is demonstrating His power by giving someone a language that has not been learned for the benefit of anyone listening who does know that language.
But why glossolalia? Why utter mysteries with our spirits that no one else understands? Why can’t we just say what we want to say to God in our own language? Nobody knows. We know what the benefits are but we don’t know why they happen. I like to think that just as crying gives us an expression when we are overwhelmed with emotion, tongues give us expression when we are overwhelmed with the Holy Spirit.
Tongues Disappeared.
Something happened to tongues in the early church, after 2nd Century AD it seems to have died out along with the other Charismata (meaning spiritual gifts).
There are lots of different explanations for this but I like John Wesley’s. Wesley claimed that tongues died out because “dry orthodox” men would “ridicule” those who spoke in tongues accusing them of “madness or imposture“.
The early church grew very rapidly and became very structured and what we would call very orthodox today (ritualistic a bit solemn - no fun). Particularly after it was tolerated by the Roman Empire (the Edict of Milan 313). Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, decided to hold a council to debate, among other things, a heresy that existed in the church at the time. This was less than three hundred years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. I had it in my mind that the Council of Nicea was just a small group of guys around a table. But Constantine invited 1600 Christian bishops of the east and west! Each bishop would have had oversight over hundreds and thousands of christians. The council of Nicea was a big event but the church had become very formal. It wanted to be taken seriously. So tongues and the charismata disappeared.
Cessationism in the Face of Continuationism
Centuries passed and although we have evidence of small outbursts of tongues and charismata in every century for the vast majority of christians there was nothing. And so theologians asked why? Where had the gifts gone? Martin Luther decided they had been withdrawn by God because they had been replaced by the primacy of scripture. John Calvin believed they had become disused as a result of lack of faith. But then toward the end of the 19th Century beginning of the 20th Century Christians started to believe in and expect the power of the Holy Spirit again. Pentecostalism was born and then Charismaticism and it is growing still today. Martin Luther’s view is what’s known as a cessationist view. Cessationists today tend to believe that the charismata were only given for the establishment of the early church. But the problem is these views came about as a way of trying to explain why the gifts were not practised, when they were not practised. Now that they are, I think they have a hard job pretending that they’re not. If Calvin or Luther were alive today, they would retract their views.
Tongues is Silly
The problem with formality and structure and becoming too civilised is that we are unwilling to look or sound silly. Tongues is silly! It sounds silly! We don’t want to look silly, we are afraid to. We sing “And I’ll become even more undignified than this” but we don’t mean it. But “Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.” (From Stephen Fry’s speech about the BBC). When we want to be taken too seriously, we are unwilling to be fools for God.
Example
I speak in tongues but don’t think I didn’t struggle with it. I was as cynical as the best of them and actually quite distressed about it all. But I’m going to cheat a little bit, I’m not going to tell you about my experience. I’m going to tell you about Jackie Pullinger’s experience. Chasing the Dragon page 50-51 and page 54. Are we willing to be fools for God’s sake? Jackie was and she had a really powerful ministry. She began speaking in tongues for 15 minutes per day and people started to believe what she told them about Jesus and her Chinese improved!
To Be Continued in Part 2……
