The Meaning of the Gift of Tongues

“For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call,”—Acts ii. 39.

The passage: The promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far off, for as many as the Lord our God shall call.

These words have perplexed Christians in almost every age since they were spoken. Was the promise fulfilled on the day of Pentecost to the Apostles also fulfilled to those who heard them and to their children, and is it being fulfilled in Britain, North America, and Australia? No one questions that in all these countries men may ask for spiritual guidance and receive it, or seek sanctification and find it. Perhaps that blessing even goes beyond the one given at Pentecost. But are the two the same? Is there any necessary connection between them? That inward privilege might have been given without the rushing mighty wind and without the Apostles speaking with tongues. Did the holy men of the Old Testament not have it already? What would “holy men” mean if they did not? Why then are we taught to treat Whitsuntide not only as the memory of a past event but as the assurance of a present power? If that power is meant for the Church now, why has it been suspended? May we look for its restoration, or is it ours even now, if only a palsy over our hearts did not stop us using it? One answer to the first of these questions has always carried weight. The Apostles were told to wait in Jerusalem for a power that would qualify them for a certain work. They needed a pure heart for that work, but they would have needed a pure heart even if they had spent their lives as fishermen on the Lake of Galilee. What made them the Missionaries of the world, it is said, was a singular gift, expressly a gift of utterance that made them intelligible to people of different races and tongues. So the question takes a new form. May this Pentecostal endowment belong specially to the Christian Missionary? Can he work effectively without it? If Christian zeal for converting the heathen had not slackened, might the promise have been fulfilled to the latest ages as much as to the earliest?

I think, brethren, that we are more likely to settle this question rightly when it takes a practical shape and ties itself to a duty to be done. While we merely wish for a power to work wonders with, we are likely to mistake badly what we need. We blame God foolishly for not giving us what could not profit us, and at last we dream we have found a treasure that only puffs us up and proves worthless. But when we gird up our loins for a task we believe we are called to, and which cannot safely be left undone, the phantoms that looked fine or fearful from a distance vanish. Our needs become more real and pressing, and God’s promises are seen to meet them in a way quite different from what we had guessed. We find that those promises are not limited to the occasion that first made us feel their power, but apply to every condition and emergency of human life. Let us see whether this is so here.

1. A Missionary surveying the globe and hearing of its different dialects might at first think, “What a barrier language is! If we only had words these people could take in, what hope we would have of bringing them the message of life.” But more reflection, and still more experience, would change his estimate of this obstacle and of the power that must overcome it. If all he needed were a vocabulary, or several, his zeal would soon master the difficulty. At first he might grudge the time he must be silent; gradually he would welcome that silence as a golden opportunity, itself a divine gift. For he would see that words which express only animal wants, or serve only for barter, cannot serve his ends. His great desire would become to discover what deeper thoughts lie latent in their speech, unknown to those who use it or only dimly perceived by them; to recognize its affinities with the tongues of men who are conscious of human wants; to hear the cries of a spirit, as if from a dungeon-keep, in these imperfect and barely articulate sounds; to see in what swaddling-clothes of habit and tradition that spirit is wrapped, and how the deliverer’s voice might be heard through them. He would soon feel that the largest assortment of phrases would be like the staff Gehazi laid on the Shunamite’s dead child, and he would have to report as Gehazi did, “It is not awake.” He would learn that signs of life could come into that corpse only when, like the prophet, he put his lips to its lips and breathed his breath into it.

2. A Missionary does need to speak to men in the dialect they were born to, but that implies far more than we usually mean by the gift of tongues. It implies a living sympathy with the people he addresses: with all that is weak and strong in them, with them as individuals and as a race. It must let him see, beneath their outward customs, the particular constitution God has given the race, and feel how its special qualities connect with the common humanity he wants it to enter. Think how hard this is when he sees at every moment, in those he wants to convert, qualities he cannot and ought not sympathize with, and must hate: cruelty, malice, falsehood. He is sometimes tempted to call people who have the features of men mere brutes, sometimes almost devils. The confessions of earnest Missionaries tell us the struggle would have been impossible if they had not been shown that their own hearts had the same tendencies to become brutes and the same capacity of becoming devils.

3. That awful discovery may keep the teacher from refusing to see his pupils as having his own nature and needing the same grace. But it does not free him from another obstruction, which he feels more the more devoted he is. He was brought up in some town or village and belongs to a particular family. He has the habits, prejudices, and temperament of his nation, of the society that shaped his mind, and of the teachers he studied under. He has the feelings of a class, perhaps a narrow one. It would always have been dangerous and wrong to throw off the impressions and reverence of his childhood, and now, among strangers who seem to suffer from lacking his early associations, he clings to them more tenaciously than ever. Yet do they not in some sense make him stiff and unyielding, unable to be what the Apostle of the Gentiles felt a Missionary ought to be, all things to all men? How is this conquered? Surely not by a mere gift of speaking languages. And until it is conquered, he cannot hope to make idolaters actually hear the wonderful works of God in their own dialect.

4. The Missionary also has thoughts about idolatry itself, and at first they must be overwhelming. Do these different worships and conceptions of God not make the preacher’s labour endless? All are equally hostile to his message, and they make those who should hear it unintelligible to one another. They tend constantly to multiply, since every new appearance in Nature or event in men’s lives may call forth a new god. They tend constantly to deteriorate, as the Evil Spirit, the Destroyer, more and more supplants the Giver of Good, the Creator and Preserver.

This view of the world is appalling, but there is another. How is it that all these idolatries bear witness to some common source of good, some Deliverer or Reconciler, someone from whom life and not death must come? This fact is as indisputable as the other. Theorists may try to dismiss or explain away one of them, but the practical man must recognize both, as they press upon him separately and together. Somehow these men must be related to each other, despite their hostilities and their different worships, and that relation must rest on a common relation to the Living God.

You say the divided tongues of the earth witness to the separation of human beings. Is there not a secret affinity, revealed more and more to those who study them earnestly for high ends, which witnesses as mightily to their unity? You say all the religions of the earth testify that men cannot devise a common worship or agree on any conception of the Being they worship. True; but do these religions not also declare that there must be a common worship, and that, because men cannot arrive at a satisfactory notion of the One they feel after, He must come forth and tell them what He is, raise them above their paltry notions, and show what each of them has been pointing to?

5. A Missionary who through much experience and suffering has come to grasp these truths will, I think, see a way through some of these difficulties, and will find something very different in Whitsuntide from what we usually find. If he studies the Apostles’ acts and thoughts in St. Luke’s narrative or in their own letters, he will be startled by how little there is in favour of the opinion about the gift of tongues that has prevailed in the Church, and by how many passages directly oppose it. He would find in the record no hint that the gift to the Apostles was a stock of words they could use in teaching the nations. St. Paul seems seldom if ever to have used any medium, in speaking or writing, besides Greek, except when addressing the citizens of Jerusalem. The Fourteenth Chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians suggests that the gift, far from necessarily communicating understanding to others, might be intelligible only to the person who received it. On that ground St. Paul contrasts it with prophecy.

So we are driven to accept St. Paul’s own explanation, strictly to the letter. He describes the gift as a sign, a sign of something very important and precious, though not itself in any sense the important or precious thing.

6. What then is the significatum, the truth to which this gift was the index and pledge? Look at the narrative in the Second Chapter of Acts and see whether it does not tell us. A great Feast is held in Jerusalem, as it had been for centuries. It speaks of a blessing renewed each year. It commemorates the mystery of seeds hidden in the earth and springing up in a form unlike their own, to give bread to the eater and fresh seed to the sower, and it affirms that the Author of this strange life in nature is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This same Pentecost, we are told, reminded the Israelites that they lived under the Law given on the day the Lord God descended on Sinai amid thunder and lightning and declared that He had brought them out of bondage. So Jews from every province of the Empire, whether they had emigrated there or been born there, came up to keep it. It was the pledge that they belonged to one race, that the same Creator who fed their fathers with manna fed them with daily bread, and that the same King who gave their fathers law and covenant ruled over them. Besides all other ties they had that of a common language, though each Jew ordinarily spoke the dialect of the country where he lived.

Now came the events that were to turn the special feast into the universal one. On a set of poor men, trained to a manual trade, despised by their countrymen yet sharing their contempt for other nations, and noted for an uncouth dialect, there appeared cloven tongues as of fire. They had new powers of utterance. Men from the Parthian provinces as well as the Roman world heard them proclaim the wonderful works of God in the languages of the lands where they grew up. What does it mean? Is it drunken inspiration? Have the orgies of a Dionysiac feast been brought into the worship at Jerusalem? No, say the Galileans: we are the disciples and witnesses of One whom your rulers crucified and God raised from the dead. A great and terrible day of the Lord is at hand. To prepare you for it, and to show that He whom you rejected as your King is both Lord and Christ, this has been poured out which you see and hear. Repent, acknowledge your true King and Lord, be baptized in His name, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Ghost that we have received. For the promise is unto us and to our children, and to as many as the Lord our God shall call. Then three thousand are baptized. In the sect-ridden city of Jerusalem a Society arises, united in the name of the Son of David and the Son of God, the nucleus of a Society for all tribes and nations.

7. I will not stop to consider how the double meaning of Pentecost was fulfilled and translated by this revelation of God as the Giver of life, not to seeds but to men, writing in their hearts the laws He gave on the Mount. I want to fix your thoughts on the sign itself. The Missionary has felt the need of words that reach not the ears but the hearts of men, and of a power to carry those words to spirits needing life, a power that can speak to the common humanity latent beneath the customs and tongues of different tribes. He has felt the need of a power that lets the teacher bear with their sins, believe that Christ is with them as well as sin, and break through the fetters of his narrow education to become all things to all men. He has learned that the relations between men must rest on a common relation to God, has been sure that only God can reveal that relation, and has half perceived that such a revelation must in the highest sense be a revelation of God Himself as the ground and object of worship. Can he not interpret these signs? Do they not interpret themselves to him? Could any others tell him the things he longed to see? Could any others tell him how his stammering lips may be opened and he may speak plainly to all men the wonderful works of God?

8. If this is the simplest and most natural reading of the narrative, the question is settled whether the gift is for one age or for all. A particular instrument or machinery for converting the nations may be given and withdrawn. But how can a Law be established in one period and reversed in another? Can a discovery of God’s own working and eternal Nature be a discovery for the first century and not for the nineteenth? If St. Paul is right, the gift of the Spirit was the revelation of what had been hidden from ages and generations: the common fellowship of Gentile and Jew in Christ, and His glorification of our nature at God’s right hand. Is the Missionary to the Caffre and the Hindoo not as much bound as the Missionary to the Greeks of Corinth and Ephesus to say: “I have no power to speak a single word of life to any human creature. It is God’s Spirit alone who speaks that word. No schemes, doctrines, or systems of men can unite nations. God has united them in His Son and binds them together by His Spirit. Schemes and systems only build new barriers between men, because they set up new and conflicting conceptions of God. Only the Spirit of God, teaching of the Father and the Son and leading men out of their narrow notions, can guide them into all truth”?

Yes, brethren, the Missionary who seeks to do his work faithfully will be brought to this conclusion. He will confess that God’s words are not deceitful but proved in the fire, not words for one age but words that will last when heaven and earth pass away. And he will reach that discovery because it is the human and the divine discovery which each of us will make for himself if we are honest in our vocations. We too must confess that our words are not our own, and that they become mischievous and accursed if we treat them as our own. We too must learn that the Spirit of God unites us to each other, and that we would be forever at war if He did not. We too must own that the Spirit is not given to any of us for his own faith or virtues. It is God’s gift to Christ, the Head and Corner-Stone of a Society we enter when we abandon our separate selfish pretensions and are content to be heirs of a common blessing.

9. So we can resolve the two difficulties I raised at the beginning. Holy men spoke in old times as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. They could have no other mover if they said any right word or did any right act. But the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified. It had not yet been declared that He is moving at the heart of humanity and that all nations share a fellowship in Him. God had been revealed in His awful distinctness from man, and the idolatry that moulds gods out of human conceptions had been denounced. He had not yet been fully revealed in His union with men. The only begotten Son, though He had always declared the Father, had not yet taken man’s flesh, had not said in that flesh, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,” had not poured out His soul and body to death, risen from death, and ascended on high leading captivity captive as Priest and King of the universe. So the Holy Ghost could not yet claim men as His temples, or raise up a Church out of one nation as a witness to all. So the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the one God blessed for ever, could not yet be fully manifested as the ground of a fellowship for all tribes, peoples, and tongues.

The other difficulty was this. Has the gift of tongues, and so the gift it signified, not been practically withdrawn from us, despite God’s promise that all should inherit it? Yes, brethren, if Christian men love lies, or think lies may help forward their Christianity, the Spirit of Truth must seem to have left the Church. If they love parties and call them essential to Christianity, the Spirit of Unity must seem to have left it. The Spirit who spoke by the Prophets seemed utterly to have deserted the people of Jerusalem when they gave themselves to the falsehoods the Prophets lived and died testifying against. The Spirit who had kept Israelites at one seemed utterly to have forsaken the citizens of Jerusalem when they banded into parties. And it was no mistake; on the day of Pentecost the Apostles declared it awfully true that the lying, sectarian generation, having refused the One who alone could bind it together, would be left to the curse it had chosen. But by act and word they signified at the same time that the Spirit, far from having forsaken mankind, was giving such proofs of His presence as had never been known before.

So we must believe it will be with those who have inherited more than Jewish privileges. In so far as we choose lies and link ourselves to parties, we shall be left to the spirit of lies and division. But God’s oath will not fail, and the text will be established to its very letter. To us the Spirit speaks, though we grieve Him with our lies and hatred. He proves His presence by the misery, helplessness, and shame those lies and hatreds produce. We have sown the wind for our children, and we often predict that they will reap a whirlwind of superstition or infidelity. But through that whirlwind God will bring out the blessing we have refused. In the overthrow of sects and parties our children may be blessed with the revelation of one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, of whom the Spirit has testified through all ages. And those who are afar off, the serfs of our own soil, Jews, Turks, Hindoos, will become part of one fold under the One Shepherd whom the Father loves because He laid down His life for the sheep, that they might be endued, once and for ever, with His living Spirit.