Speaking in Tongues and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit

The Pentecostal movement now numbers 200 million globally. To understand its phenomenal success amid great decline of mainline denominations, a good place to start is with the 3 YouTube videos posted below. The first 2 videos describe the astounding Welsh revival of 1904-1906 that spread worldwide and manifested in the USA in the famed Azuza Street revival of 1906ff. In Video (1), J. Edwin Orr graphically describes how a mentally and emotionally unstable prayer warrior, Evan Roberts ( a coal miner), was used by God to lead the most spectacular revival since the first-century Pentecostal outpouring (Acts 2). Video (2) is a documentary based on Evan Roberts's diary that reveals his inner journey, his spiritual doubts and experiences that molded him into the spearhead of this revival. Video (3) documents the life of the most spiritually effective African American Christian ever, William Seymour, whom God used in the Welsh revival spinoff, the famous Azuza Street Revival, which has spread over the decades so remarkably that there are now 200 million Pentecostals and Charismatic Christians.

Most Christians recognize that what our churches need the most now is a great awakening on a par with these earlier revivals. We commonly assume that we have met the conditions for such an awakening. But if you study the lives of men like Evan Roberts and William Seymour and the price they paid to secure revival, you'll realize the sad truth, namely that modern Christians are generally unwilling to pay the price needed to attract such a massive awakening. Please watch these 3 videos and see if you agree with my claims.

(1) Lecture by J. Edwin Orr on the famous Welsh Revival of 1905-1906:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?...EE1F161A7FC37C579266EE1F161A7FC37C5&FORM=VIRE

(2) Documentary on the Welsh Revival from the Perspective of Evan Roberts's Diary:
[Be patient with the initial historical section and recognize that the video's solos were treasured hymns in the Welsh Revival. although much of the singing was singing supernaturally composed in the Spirit.]

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?...BCE66E52072A470B2A62BCE66E52072A470&FORM=VIRE

(3) Documentary on the birth of Pentecostalism during the Azuza Street Revival of 1906 and the role of the most spiritually influential African American Christian of all time--William Seymour: (3) is the video that is directly relevant to the Pentecostal theme of this thread, but (1) and (2) are essential as background viewing.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?...D0FC2BFCB9A08F9FC090D0FC2BFCB9A08F9&FORM=VIRE

By far he most powerful and important turning point in my life was an experience of glossolalia at Manhattan Beach Camp in Manitoba. I was 16 at the time and felt I had lost my faith. I was determined to give it my best shot to find God real, but not to succumb to wishful thinking and emotionalism. That fateful, Tuesday, I went on a 7 mile walk towards Ninette, MB, pleading with God to make Himself real to me. That evening, I did something I'd never done before. I fasted for dinner and put my dinner money in the offering plate. After the service, I stayed at the altar and prayed to be filled with the Spirit as i had previously done in vain. After almost everyone (about 1,000) left the amphitheatre, my heart still felt like stone as I tarried in prayer. Then suddenly I felt a warm breeze, but it wasn't the wind from nearby Pelican Lake; it was the Holy Spirit first warming me and then possessing me. I was forced against my will to speak in tongues at the top of my voice. More importantly, wave after wave of liquid love surged through my being with ever increasing intensity until I feared it might kill me. My ego seemed on the verge of collapse into the divine presence.

A Lutheran pastor observed me, unseen, and quietly came and knelt beside me. He told me he was not Pentecostal and had only come to the camp meeting as an interested observer. He said he could tell God was doing a special work in me and he asked me to pray for him. The moment i touched his forehead, he exploded into tongues like me. Another lady was sitting in the now darkened amphtheatre and just staring at me. Self-conscious, I asked her why? She said, "Don't you know? Your face is glowing in the dark!"

When it was all over, I realized that God had said to me clearly: "Son, you long for answers to burning questions. But answers aren't good for you right now. They will make you live in your head, and i want you to live in your heart. I want you to live your questions until they lead you to the center of my heart." That message is the reason for my long educational pilgrimage from BA to MDiv to doctorate in NT, Cultural Backgrounds, and Intertestamental Judaism. Interestingly, the experience made me a much better student than I had ever been.

Classical Pentecostals believe that speaking in tongues is the unique initial evidence of Spirit baptism. This thread will initially focus on the often electrifying experience of speaking in tongues. Later, I will discuss the NT teaching about this gift. its relationship with Spirit baptism, and the danger of counterfeit gifts of the Spirit. I will also explain how you can have a genuine experience of speaking in tongues yourself. Just as marijuana is often considered a gateway drug for the use of hard drugs like cocaine, the tongues experience described above served as my gateway experience for other charisms, especially "the word of knowledge (1 Corinthians 12:8)." Shortly, I will start a thread entitled "The Spirituality of Premonitions" to document my many premonitions.

Hjartao,

I grew up Pentecostal, and became disillusioned with much of their theology, many of their charismatic manifestations, and even the authority of Scripture. I'd estimate that 98% of these manfestations are "of the flesh," but the 5% that is genuine is so astounding, so life-changing, so convincing as a means of direct access to God that it makes it more than worthwhile to learn to tolerate the rubbish in which the precious jewels lie buried! I specialize in Christian apologetics, but I doubt that I would even be a Christian today, were it not for the many self-authenticating experiences and gifts of the Spirit with which the Lord has blessed me.

This thread is intended to achieve 3 goals: (1) to demonstrate just how powerful and evangelistically effective a tool Spirit baptism is; (2) to develop a biblically sound theology of Spirit baptism and the ecstatic gifts (speaking in tongues and prophecy); (3) to discuss what to do and what not to do to receive authenntic Spirit baptism, including the gift of tongues. For now, I will focus on (1).

Hjartao, the western church is in decline, but worldwide the Pentecostal/ charismatic movement is experiencing spectacular growth. To understand why and to discover what we need to reverse our spiritual decline, please watch the 3 YouTube videos on revival that I posted in my initial post. No other online video has impacted me as powerfully as these 3.

During the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, spectators from all over the Roman empire hear Christian believers speak in their languages. In Caesarea (Acts 10) and Ephesus (Acts 19), the new believers again receive the Spirit and speak in tongues (= glossolalia), but apparently not in human languages as at Pentecost. In modern Pentecostalism, Christians sometimes speak in unfamiliar human languages that they have never learned, but this is very rare. In my next 3 posts, I will describe 3 such cases.

(1) When I was 19, I joined YWAM (Youth with a Mission), a Christian organization devoted to witnessing in the streets and door to door all over the world. It founder, Loren Cunningham, was driving our bus from Winnipeg to Toronto, when he told me this story. He was visiting an Amazon tribe, hoping to find a way to share his faith beyond the usual tracts. No interpreter was yet available. So he just spoke in tongues, and the natives were shocked to hear him witness to Jesus in their language. Just then a woman with cataracts approached him. Loren realized that she wanted him to pray for her. So he laid hands on her and her cataracts vanished! This miracle opened minds to the Gospel in a unique way. Loren's testimony illustrates the frequently close connection between speaking in tongues and divine healing.

(2) In his early 20s, Dennis Balcome was attending an independent Pentecostal church in Almonte outside Los Angeles, when the wife of the main preacher began delivering a mesage in tongues. A congregational member gave the interpretation aloud: the gist of it was that Dennis was going to be used in a great missionary work in Communist China. An American Jew who spoke Hebrew and just happened to be be present in the meeting confirmed that the message had been given in fluent Hebrew and that the interpretation (translation) was totally accurate.

But Dennis got derailed from his calling for a while. He was drafted and spent a year in Vietnam in 1969. During a week of R & R in Hong Kong, he attended a local Pentecostal church and someone prophesied that God was calling him to stay there after his military service. So he studied Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese there and then pioneered a Chinese church. He told his people to think of him as an egg--white on the outside and yellow on the inside!

Soon Dennis got permission to teach English in Communist China and used that privilege to bring in a hundred thousand Bibles there. Then in the 1980s, several Christian house church leaders wanted him to teach them about Spirit baptism and speaking in tongues. After a year of resistance, the Holy Spirit fell on many and they spoke in tongues. Dennis became the first white missionary in many decades to travel to inland China. It was dangeous work: sometimes he was moved in a coffin on a cart with wheels. Once the police interupted his meeting, but he hid in the coffin, and the cops never opened it. Other times he wore a face mask, a fur hat, and a thick, padded cotten coat. Other times still, he wore women's clothes.

There were regular dramatic healings, including many blind who received their sight. When Dennis laid his hands on people, they sometimes were so intoxicated with the Spirit that they couldn't sleep for days! Once filled with the Spirit, these new Christians couldn't stop themselves from boldly witnessing to others. Within a decade of his ministry there, one half to two thirds of the 80 million strong house church movement became Pentecostal or Charismatic!!! How crucial to Chinese church history was Dennis Balcombe's calling in a mesage in Hebrew tongues back in the late 1960s!

Source: David Aikman, "Jesus in Beijing," pp. 271-275

(3) A young female missionary in a remote village in Uganda became gravely ill, so ill that her parents in Saskatchewan, Canada, received a telegram that she was too sick to be moved the many miles of jungle trails to the nearest doctor and would likely die shortly. This need was brought before a prayer meeting at the parents' Pentecostal church in Saskatchewan. There was a message in tongues. A visiting African student stood up and proclaimed that the message was in Swahili, his native language. The message said that God had given the young woman a healing touch and she would soon be reunited with her parents. There was great rejoicing when this prophecy came true.

I have begun this thread with 4 of the most impressive cases known to me of speaking in tongues. But sadly I would estimate that 90% of such manifestations are counterfeit. Still, the 10% that is truly genuine is so precious, so powerful, so life-changing that in my view it is worth coping with the wildfire to get to the real thing.

I will now take up these issues through discussions of these 4 topics:
(1) What the NT teaches about speaking in tongues.
(2) What the NT teaches and does not teach about the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.
(3) The Danger of Counterfeit Speaking in Tongues
(4) How to Receive Geniune Spirit Baptism with the Sign of Speaking in Tongues

I will now approach this topic in small digestible sections.

(1) Is every believer meant to speak in tongues?
In 1 Corinthians, Paul identifies speaking in tongues as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit (12:10). But later he asks several rhetorical questions, including this one: "Do all speak in tongues?" The implicit answer is no, but not no in the sense that God never intends everyone to speak in tongues; rather, he is saying, "Look around you. Does everyone you see speak in tongues? Of course not." I say this for 2 reasons: (a) Paul says we should "earnestly strive for the greater gifts (12:31)" and he repeats this admonition in 14:1, where he makes it clear that he includes speaking in tongues and prophecy within the scope of this exhortation. Here is the point that gets lost: he makes it clear that tongues ranks just as high as prophecy, if the tongues are interpreted (14:5). Paul goes on to say, "I would like all of you to speak in tongues (14:5) and "I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you (14:18)." Of course, speaking in tongues loses its validity and spiritual value if it is not an expression of agape love, "the more excellent way (12:31; 13:1)."

My next planned post will discuss the purpose of speaking in tongues.

THE PURPOSE OF SPEAKING IN TONGUES (Glossolalia)
Speaking in tongues is prohibited in church services attended by outsiders. Otherwise, it serves various purposes: (1) edifying messages in tongues during corporate worship that need to be interpreted (1 Corinthians 14:12, 23); (2) an aid to praising God more spontaneously by speaking or singing in tongues (14:15).

But most Pentecostals seem unaware of the neglected vital intercessory role of praying in tongues explained in Romans 8:26:

"Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes on our behalf with groans without articulate words (Greek: stenagmoi alaletoi)."

This is a literal translation, but the Greek is often distorted by translations like "groans or sighs too deep for words." The Vulgate's Latin translation of stenagmoi alaletoi in Romans 8:26 parallels the Latin words used in Lucan, Civil War 5:16 (60
AD) to portray the glossolalia used by Delphic prophetess in Lucan Civil War 5:16, an incoherent message that a male prophet must then interpret in coherent speech. Thus, Romans 8:26b can be clarified by this paraphrase: " That very Spirit intercedes in our behalf through our speaking in tongues displayed in groans."

So how does this intercessory praying in tongues "edify" us or build us up? Most Christian praying launches endless petitions God's way without knowing whether our desires reflect God's will. Praying in tongues compensates for this ignorance by enabling us to so unite with the Spirit that the Spirit prays through us for what we really need and for what is truly God's will for others.

But you don't need to speak in tongues to pray in the Spirit:

"Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert and persevere in supplication for all the saints (Ephesians 5;18)."

Here praying in the Spirit refers to a special kind of prayer that develops through prolonged prayer vigils that require disciplined alertness and perseverance. When I was a late teenager, my doubts and emptiness drove me to the room up in our church steeple for several hours of fasting and prayer after the Sunday morning service. At first it was very hard to concentrate, but after about 30 minutes, I would feel a wonderful feeling of relief as the Holy Spirit took over my laboring thought patterns and prayed through me in what felt like spontaneous prayer in which I marveled at the worlds that came out of my mouth. Invariably, those prayer sessions yielded the most marvelous answers to prayer that I ever experienced. In my view prayer in tongues just facilitates such praying in the Spirit much sooner.

The question arises as to whether the classic Pentecostal doctrine of Spirit baptism
would have gained traction, were it not for the bogus ending of Mark in 16:9-20.
This ending was concocted by Aristo of Pella in the mid-2nd century. Pentecostals have traditionally offered Mark 16:17 as a justification for their belief in speaking in tongues as the required initial evidence for Spirit baptism:

"These signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them."

As part of Mark's Great Commission, this verse makes speaking in tongues a badge of the true believer. Many Appalachian Christians have died by misusing this text to justify handling deadly rattle snakes and drinking strychnine poison.

To theological conservatives, I ask, "If you have a high view of Scripture, why would you want to use a distorted version of God's Word?" The inferiority of the KJV and NKJC is almost universally accepted by conservative and liberal Bible scholars alike because of the gains achieved through the modern science of text criticism. For just some of the reasons for rejecting the KJV, please read this article:

http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/kjvdebat.html

Let me begin my discussion of the relationship between speaking in tongues and the baptism of the Holy Spirit by creating a dilemma for readers to solve. Consider Paul's reference to Spirit baptism in 1 Corinthians 12:13: "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body...and we were all made to drink of one Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13)." Here Spirit baptism immerses us in the Body of Christ. But we are saved by being "born of the Spirit (John 3:5)." Don't we enter the Body of Christ through our "new birth?" That would make the "new birth" an alternate expression for Spirit baptism, or would it? But Luke identifies speaking in tongues as the sign that the 120 believers were baptized in the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:5; 2:4). Surely this does not imply that speaking in tongues is a necessary condition for salvation. How can these texts be properly interpreted to evade this implication?

The Book of Acts establishes the pattern of tongues as the unique initial evidence of being baptized with the Holy Spirit. In 3 of the 5 descriptions in Acts of Spirit baptism, the initial evidence includes speaking in tongues: the Day of Pentecost (2:1-8), Cornelius's household (10:44-46), and the church at Ephesus (19:1-6). In the 4th case, Samaria (8:17-18), we are not told how the reception of the Spirit manifested itself, but Simon the magician is so impressed by this demonstration of the Spirit's bestowal that he offers Peter money for the power to impart the Spirit. It is logical to conclude that he too witnesses speaking in tongues.

In the fifth case, Ananias lays hands on the blinded Paul to bestow the Holy Spirit (9:17). Luke doesn't describe the experience. Was it accompanied by speaking in tongues? Paul's question "Do all speak in tongues (1 Corinthians 12:30)?" expects a negative reply because in fact some Corinthians have not yet received or sought this gift. But Paul's question does not imply that God never intended that everyone speak in tongues. On the contrary, in 1 Corinthians Paul says, "I want you all to speak in tongues" (14:5) and "I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all (14:18)." He considers ecstatic prophecy the best spiritual gift, but concedes that speaking in tongues equals prophecy as the greatest gift, if the tongues are interpreted (14:5). Who are we to trivialize by our apathy spiritual gifts that the Holy Spirit has given to build us up in the faith?

Contrary to the video posted early on this thread, the tongues don't need to express unknown human languages. That was the case on the Day of Pentecost, but not in the other cases in Acts. Peter equates the tongues in Cornelius's household with the tongues spoken at Pentecost: "The Holy Spirit fell upon them, just as it had upon us in the beginning (11:15)." Indeed, the tongues don't need to be human at all: "Though I speak in tongues of people and of angels (1 Corinthians 13:1)." The Jewish background of this angelic possibility is the Testament of Job (48-50), in which Job's daughters speak in an angelic dialect.

ARBITER01 said:

You seem to equating Spirit Baptism with Spirit filling,... they are not the same scripturally. The only dilemma present would be the one you created for yourself friend.

Click to expand...

You are putting words in my mouth. Post #17 makes no mention of being filled with the Spirit. I will explain the apparent dilemma again.

The 120 are "filled with the Spirit" on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:4), but being filled with the Spirit applies to more experiences than just Spirit baptism (4:8, 31; 13:9). One might initially assume that Spirit baptism means the same in Acts as it does in Paul and that assumption creates this dilemma: Either Spirit baptism is understood differently in Acts 1:5 than it is in 1 Corinthians 12:13 or the Spirit's work of conversion does not in itself make the new Christian a member of Christ's Body.

The Spirit baptism at Pentecost was not a conversion experience for the 120. They were already believers and the Risen Lord had already breathed the Holy Spirit into the 10 disciples (John 20:22-23). In 1 Corinthians 12:13, Spirit baptism "immerses" (Greek: "baptizo") believers into the Body of Christ, prompting the question whether true Spirit-induced conversion automatically installs one within Christ's body.