Hello. I was in AOG for eight years. Believe me there is something worse than not hearing words, tongues and interpretations. That's when people use them to act the goat. God Bless
Boy, I could tell you some stories!If the Holy Spirit is no longer obviously in operation in a church there are several alternatives as to what can be done. 1) Pray, repent and seek the Lord, preach the truth, humble ourselves. 2) Carry on regardless, keep the show on the road, entertain, talk 'positive', trying to replicate the work of the Holy Spirit in man's power using outgoing personalities and gimiks. After a while of 2 people realise that a structured meeting with a safe sermon and a decent social gathering is far safer and far more Godly than allowing charlatans and narcissists a free reign. God Bless
My first year in the church was good, had a lot of happy times and Spirit-filled prayer meetings there. But there was a new pastor and a lot of new faces came during my second year in the church. New ways of doing things. New insecurities. The new pastor was sixty and people were vying to be the appointed successor.
I think a key verse is Acts 2:4 'As the Spirit enabled them'. When we allow the Holy Spirit to enable and empower us The Lord can work. It's in his timing. When we try to do things in our own strength or our own timing it's bad. Eventually in the church people were trying to look spiritual by calling out 'prophecies' that ultimately contradicted the scriptures, themselves and each other. I remember an AOG meeting where someone gave a message in 'tongues' and another person 'translated' it with a clearly false prophecy.
On the other hand I was at a meeting (not AOG) where a gospel message was given in tongues and French, Bulgarian and Romanian persons were saved because it was a perfect rendition of their language. Better than a native speaker could do. I will never forget that night, it was amazing! I would now lean towards the opinion that the former is from the Lord, the latter seeming to be a dog and pony show, but I could be wrong. The former builds your faith, the latter makes you cynical.
In general I think Pente-Charis churches need to do more to reign in false prophets, false teachers and wolves in their midst. No need to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, a wolf in wolves clothing can fit in fine.
God Bless
Hello CharismaticLady. If the Holy Spirit enabled Peter to speak Parthian to a Parthian or Arabic to an Arab then there would be no need for interpretation. I think interpretation would come into a situation where someone speaks tongues in a church-group situation, for example someone would stand up and say 'I'm an Armenian, that guy was talking Armenian and here's what he said'- for the edification of the entire church. This is unusual, but it does happen. Like gold, you don't see it every day but it's of tremendous value.
I'm a bit sceptical about what I have seen in some churches, someone gives an excited utterance (which may or may not be valid). The utterance will not be empirically verifiable. No-one understands what was said in the conventional sense. Someone, usually a certain type of person, gives an 'interpretation', not understanding what was said but believing they may have a gift. Again, not verifiable. That's three stages where it could all be pear shaped. I have seen this several times where outlandish, dubious or admittedly contrived 'interpretations' are given. Like gravel, you see this frequently but it's of less value than gold. God's standard for communication is perfection. This process is not perfection. To me it goes under Jeremiah 14:14.
God Bless
i heard french woman once. i knew just few word, but clearly understood several minutes of speech and was wondering - how she knew Estonian?
