Sudsy wrote: ↑Sat Feb 04, 2023 4:06 pm
Ken wrote: ↑Sat Feb 04, 2023 2:30 pm
Outsider wrote: ↑Sat Feb 04, 2023 4:29 amHowever, the "jibberish" part, I take issue with. "Of men and Angels" - Paul says. Just because it isn't a human language doesn't mean it's without meaning. Who knows what tongue the Disciples were speaking in on Pentecost, wherein every man who heard them heard them in their native tongue. I wouldn't be so quick to judge that...
There are plenty of videos on YouTube taken in churches where people are supposedly speaking in tongues. Should we watch some and see if we can come to any conclusions?
No. Rather find a church where speaking in tongues is used according to scripture and discern if this is of God or not. I don't suggest YouTube as a good resource to observe speaking in tongues as the Holy Spirit gives utterance.
I agree, however I didn't have success in that search. After I was not allowed to return to the anti-tongues Bible Institute where I attended my first year, I transferred to a C&MA Bible College, where it was allowed. A couple of friends from the Bible Institute also ended up at the same school, also not allowed to return to the first school. (Neither of us knew where the other was going to go. In fact, I went back to the Bible Institute for registration, and asked if I could return. The conditions they gave made it impossible, so my folks drove me on up north to the C&MA school, and they accepted me. Well, actually, I wasn't officially accepted in that school until after the second semester started. I hadn't applied before I showed up there for the Fall semester, because I thought I could get back in the first school by making some concessions. My pastor was on a Summer mission trip to the Old Colony folks in Mexico, so I hadn't been able to consult with him again before I headed off to college. Later he told me that it would not have been right to make the concessions I had in mind.)
But as to finding a congregation that openly uses tongues publicly in their services, I didn't find one that followed Scripture, and this other couple got tired of asking me to come with them, because on the drive back to the school I *always" pointed out something where they had not followed Scripture. Usually it was either one person interrupting another who was already speaking, or even interrupting the pastor during the sermon, or giving utterance when there was no interpretation.) So what I found is that the best course (as it seemed to me) was to find a congregation where it was neither misused, nor spoken against, as being "of the devil". The one I enjoyed the most was one called "The New Testament Church". When you walked in, there were not groups here and there talking about the weather, their jobs, or how busy they were, etc. There were instead little groups of people praying together, or jumping up and down, as a dance before the Lord. But there were other areas where I thought they went too far, like waiting for a prophetic utterance before they could decide on the color of carpet to have installed. The worst was a prayer group back home in Tulsa, where there was just this strong creepiness that I noticed immediately when I walked in. I never went back, although another member of our MB congregation encouraged me to go with him again.
To sum this up, what I found was that there tended to be an "exclusiveness" about the congregations that put an emphasis on this gift, and that those that were simply open to it, especially in private or corporate prayer times - those settings were more 'joyful', in some deeper sense. (And, there was no pressure to "make it or fake it" in those settings. If you had that gift, you used it, if you had a different one, you used that one.)