Allow me to Think Abstractly for a Moment
 

Hebrews 11
By Faith We Understand
1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

We're all very familiar with this scripture.

So, with that said, why do we feel there has to be evidence or initial evidence of receiving the Holy Ghost?

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Because we're very self-centered. That way, we control who is in and out of the "kingdom".

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we think in terms of the concrete. If there isn't evidence to prove something, how can we believe it?

I do believe that tongues happen today. I do NOT believe that tongues are the only evidence of the infilling of the Holy Spirit in someone's life. I lean much more towards "by their fruit you will know them". I've known too many people who can talk in tongues at the drop of a hat, but they're as mean as a snake and no more filled with the love of Lord and concern for souls than the mean dog who lives down at the junkyard. Something doesn't jive with that scenario.

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There are about 20 records of people being converted in the Book of Acts. In some cases it is recorded that these conversions were accompanied with or followed by water baptism and/or Spirit Baptism. In the cases where it is recorded that people received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit (or the Spirit came upon them, or the Spirit fell upon them, or they "received" (made room for) the Holy Spirit, or they were filled with the Spirit) it mentions or infers that speaking with tongues accompanied or followed that experience. Based on these examples we have come up with the "initial physical evidence" doctrine. The "initial physical evidence" doctrine states that speaking with tongues is "the initial physical evidence" of receiving the Holy Ghost Baptism. Some Christians think that there is enough scriptural support for this doctrine and some do not. Most Apostolic/Charismatic/Pentecostal people believe in the "initial physical evidence" doctrine. Among those who believe in the "initial physical evidence" doctrine there is a small minority who believe that the Holy Ghost Baptism is the same as being born of the Spirit so these folks basically believe that unless a person has spoken with tongues, that person is not born of the Spirit or is not saved.

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Quite honestly: though I do not question that tongues can be a good thing, if we mean evidence as in absolute "proof" then the doctrine is faulty IMO.

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Because we were told that and taught that and also taught that anyone who didn't speak in tongues was going to hell! :D

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I used to feel that way, but now I don't.

In some ways, it can be a very reassuring part of a Christian convert's relationship with God.

"I know I'm saved-- I remember the day I spoke in tongues from Heaven above!"

Authentically speaking in tongues is such an awesome experience! Why wouldn't anyone not want to speak in tongues?

So let's help everyone out by telling them that they have to speak in tongues or they're not saved-- it will give them the impetus to seek a closer walk with God. The problem with this mindset is that it is unscriptural and actually can lead a person away from faith in Jesus Christ and His Word.


Still there is danger in seeking the reassurance of tongue-talking to soothe the Christian's mind when dealing with conviction from God over a sinful habit or when dealing with condemnation from satan.

Tongues can be mimicked-- with or without malintentions.

You can work yourself up into a tizzy and emotional high and it would be just you working yourself up while all the time you are thinking that you are getting "blessed from God."


Our confidence should never rest in speaking in tongues-- it should rest on the Word of God.


It takes a whole lot more faith to believe and follow God based solely on His Word when there aren't any signs and wonders.

Re: Allow me to Think Abstractly for a Moment
 

Just a note or two on the excellent posts made so far.

First, speaking in other languages, languages that are unknown to the speaker but not necessarily unknown to the hearers, is a sign not to the believers, but to the unbelievers. (1 Corinthians 14:22)

Second, speaking in other languages as it was manifested on the day of Pentecost, the language spoken by a believer who received the power of the Holy Ghost must be that of another human tongue, and not a special heavenly or a 'prayer' language. (Acts 2:6-12) That is considered babbling and a 'sign' that might well run a non-believer off. (1 Corinthians 14:23)

Third, the languages spoken were not 'unknown', as frequently translated into our English Bibles. The Greek words for 'unknown' are never associated with speaking with other tongues (languages). The English word, unknown', was added for clarification only, assuming that the languages spoken by the believers were 'unknown' to the speakers but not to those who heard them and/or identify the languages. So, we confuse the speaking in a prayer language with the sign gift of speaking in other human languages and even use the speaking in tongues as a sign to other believers that we are 'praying in the Spirit', while completely disregarding Paul's instruction on who, where, how, and why the "unknown tongues' are to be administered (1 Cor 14).

As a result, we have at least three modern-day apostolic doctrines that clearly differ from the historic apostolic records.

Re: Allow me to Think Abstractly for a Moment
 

This context uses the faith of "the elders" (or the OT patriarchs - see Hebrews 11:2) as examples of the things that we are to emulate. These "elders" are not "made perfect" or "complete" without our faith and the testimony of our lives added to theirs.

Hebrews 11:39-40 indicates that these "elders" did not receive something called "the promise" (whatever that is) that the NT believer receives.

So, "abstractly" we do appear to receive a "promise" (whatever that might be) that is received in a manner similar to the "elders'" experience (at least in type). That is, "the substance" and the evidence of this promise is not "seen" by the natural man. It is a matter of faith.

To this we must add that this "promise" (whatever it is) was "seen" in another sense - Hebrews 11:13 - but this is clearly not a visual nor an auditory sensation. "Seeing" this "promise" from afar off indicates that this too was a matter of faith and not something that is evidenced plainly for the natural man to evaluate.

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Just evaluating the testimony of those who have spoken "in tongues" and then later renounced their faith appears to indicate that this phenomena is not something that we can trust as being "proof" of someone's salvation.

The copious "speaking in tongues" observed in "gay" churches is just another example that confounds the "evidence of salvation" or "evidence of the baptism of the Holy Ghost that one must experience to be accepted as 'saved'" mantra of the Three Stepper crowd.

This agenda by the "Water & Spirit" or "Three Stepper" ("Acts 2:38 or hell!!!") crowd is clearly a failed program that only leads to the need for further deceptions and lies. Consider recent events in GA, for example.

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Excellent thoughts as always, youngster.

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I do like your point of 1 Corinthians 14:22. However, I have a question that may be off subject. When you read further down to 1 cor 14:23, it seems contradictory. So, why would he say that speaking in tongues is a sign for the unbelievers, however, they will think you are crazy? I am trying to understand it and can only get a few outcomes.

1) It is just a SIGN to the unbelievers, they can still think we are crazy if they hear it though. Which leaves me to wonder, what type of sign is he meaning?
2) He is talking about what happened in Acts 2. Some of the witnesses that were unbelievers of Christ thought the people speaking in other languages were drunk.
3) He is contradicting himself.

Ha. I feel like I am missing the big picture on this. What are your thoughts?

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:grampa I see your point! And, no, it is not 'off subject'.

You fell into the same trap that we all seem prone to find and step into. It is something I have to guard against continually, i.e. not reading the passage is written and in the context of the subject matter.

The verse 23 reads:If therefore the whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in [those that are] unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?

Within the context of chapter 14, Paul is making two points. The first is that everything is to be done in order and decency. The second point is that if everyone is speaking in a different language, with no interpretations, consider the noise and confusion that would ensue. Say a congregation of 25 people speaking in 5 to 25 different languages - all at the same time!

We can then see Paul's instructions in this light: Regardless of the language being spoken (known human language or a message from the Spirit in a 'heavenly' language). If presented one at a time, with interpretation, then God is glorified and the unbeliever, or the one who is unlearned [in spiritual matters], might be then convicted of the reality of Jesus Christ.

Did this help?

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I don't think tongues is the HG....it is evidence of the HG...The HG is Christ in us....

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Perfect sense to me. Yes, I knew I wasn't seeing something that was right in front of me. So yes, If "all" are speaking in tongues, that would go against what he is teaching in 27 of them speaking one at a time. Yes, someone as an unbeliever, would think they are all crazy, and therefore God would not be glofied! Thank you for showing me this!

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I was blessed this past week by attending the National Deaf Evangelism Conference in Indianapolis!

To hear Deaf saints speaking in tongues, speaking a language they did not know, was awesome.
92 Deaf were there, 6 Deaf preachers and 205 people with a burden for Deaf ministry. God is real, God is good!

On an aside, when I pray or praise the LORD, tongues comes upon me when words fail to express my heart. The Holy Ghost praying in groanings and tears that which He, knowing the heart, knows of what I should pray.

Tongues to me is awesome, and if you agree or disagree makes no difference to my testimony.

.

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You must have misunderstood - no one is saying tongues is not awesome.

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Because Acts 10:45-46 said there was.

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You are most welcome.

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Excellent!!!!! :thumbsup :thumbsup

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:thumbsup :thumbsup

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:grampa

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I'm currently reading "Lifetime for Gladys" by Nona Freeman. It is a biography of Gladys Robinson who was a UPC missionary to Liberia in the late nineteen forties. On pages 152 and 153 just yesterday I read this in one of Sis. Robinson's letters dated July 10 (don't know the year)

"Two adults received the Holy Ghost speaking distinct English in a village recently --definitely other tongues for them."

Re: Allow me to Think Abstractly for a Moment
 

Acts 10:45-46, says that the phenomena observed by Peter and those who had traveled to Caesarea with him was identical to the phenomena that had occurred in Acts 2 (See Acts 10:47). Nothing more is asserted in this passage concerning "speaking in tongues."

Nowhere in this passage does it say that Cornelius and his household "had to speak in tongues in order to be saved." Nowhere in this passage does it say that anyone else must "speak in tongues" in order to be saved.

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Yesterday I read this on pages 159 and 160. This is from a letter dated September 19, 1950

"Our weekend services were very good. Fred brought the young man who works for him from Monrovia --about 18 years old. He received the Holy Ghost speaking Arabic, Fred's own language. Fred interpreted to us as the boy worshiped in a language foreign to him!"

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Agreed. the phenomenon of speaking with other tongues is presented as something that happens at or after receiving an experience designated as "filled with the Holy Spirit" or "the Spirit coming upon" or "the Spirit falling upon" or a "baptism in the Spirit." This seems to happen after the initial conversion or salvation experience.

Re: Allow me to Think Abstractly for a Moment
 

In 1964 John and Elizabeth Sherrill wrote a book titled “They Speak With Other Tongues.” The book has gone through several printings and about 2.5 million copies have been sold worldwide. I read it about 40 years ago and was blessed by it. I guess there is no way to know how many people have been informed and influenced by it and how many have received the experience known as “the Pentecostal Experience” or “The Baptism in the Holy Spirit” because of that book.

Here is an excerpt from chapter 2, pages 23-27.

I first heard of Harald Bredesen through Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale, a coeditor, with her husband of “Guideposts.” We were holding a regular Monday night editorial meeting when she came in a little out of breath.

“I’m sorry to be late,” she said. Then, even before her coat was off, “...I’ve just had dinner with a young man who’s given me a real jolt --and a lot to think about.”

I had worked with Ruth Peale for ten years. Everyone on the staff valued her for a quality of balance and levelheaded good sense. She could always be counted on to bring us back to earth, should our thinking ever become too abstract or wishful. I make a point of this because of the strangeness of the story that Ruth told us that evening. It sounded so fanciful that if it had come from someone else, I might have dismissed it rather quickly.

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘speaking in tongues’?” she asked. Most of us had a vague recollection of the phrase. It came from the Bible, I thought.

“’Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels...’ That one?” I said.

“That’s one reference, “ Ruth said. “It’s mentioned in the gospels and Paul speaks of it several times, but most of the references are in the Book of Acts. Apparently, speaking in tongues was a big part of the life of the early Church. Far more than I’d realized.

“Well, my dinner guest said that he had had this experience himself. Not only he, but some of his friends too. Norman and I sat spellbound for two hours while he told us about people all over the country who are having this happen to them. Apparently, the ‘tongue’ sometimes turns out to be a real language, which someone listening will understand, although the speaker has never learned it and has no idea what he is saying. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But there’s something about this man....” She paused. “Well, I for one want to know more about it”

After the meeting I told Ruth that I would like to meet her speaker in tongues. I thought it might make a good story for the magazine. I did meet him. But the deeper I got into the subject, the more I realized that I had stumbled onto something too big for a single magazine article.

Harald Bredesen is an ordained minister, pastor of the First Reformed Church, Mount Vernon, New York. He is about my age, then in his late thirties. He had a clerical collar, a bald spot and an excitement that was contagious. Bredesen and I had lunch together in a restaurant near my office, and there, in a setting of coffee cups and sugar shakers, he told me a story that seemed to come from a different world.

A few years earlier, Harald Bredesen, although he’d been busily involved in the work of his church, had also been a dissatisfied young man. It seemed to him that his religious life had no vitality to it, especially when he compared his experiences with those of the earliest Christians.

“There was an excitement, a stirring of life in the young Church” Bredesen said. “The Church today; by and large, has lost this. You’ve felt it, I’m sure. Where are the changed lives? Where are the healings? Where is the belief that men will die for?”

At home in the evenings Bredesen had begun to read the biblical accounts of the early churches with these questions in mind, and almost instantly fell upon a clue. The more he read, the more he became convinced that first-century Christians received their vitality from the Holy Spirit, and more especially from an experience called, in the New Testament, the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Bredesen determined that he was going to have this experience for himself, and he went about it by taking a vacation. He headed for the Allegheny Mountains, ensconced himself in a mountain cabin and there began to pray around the clock. He made up his mind to stay in that cabin until he reached a new level of communication with God. Day after day he kept up his prayer vigil.

At last one morning while he was standing outside the cabin praying aloud, a stillness seemed to settle over the hills. Every fiber of Bredesen’s body tensed, as if his whole being were entering into a new plane of awareness. He stopped speaking for a moment. And when he began again, out of his mouth came, and here are his words as I wrote them down that day:

“...the most beautiful outpouring of vowels and consonants and also some strange, guttural syllables. I could not recognize any of it. It was as though I was listening to a foreign language, except that it was coming out of my own mouth.”

Amazed, curious and a bit frightened, Bredesen ran down the mountain, still talking aloud in this tongue. He came to the edge of a small community. On the stoop of a cabin sat an old man. Bredesen continued to speak in the tongue that was coming so easily and naturally from his lips. The man answered, talking rapidly in a language that Bredesen did not know. When it became obvious that they were not communicating, the old man spoke in English.

“How can you speak Polish but not understand it?” the man asked.

“I was speaking Polish?”

The man laughed, thinking that Bredesen was joking. “Of course it was Polish,” he said.

But Bredesen wasn’t joking. As far as he could recall, he had never before heard the language.

I was still drumming the tabletop over that one, when he told me of a second experience, this one in a lobby of a New York hotel. Bredesen was attending a breakfast meeting and had left his hat on a chair outside the dining room. When the time came to leave, he found the chair occupied not by his hat, but by a pretty young lady.

At the time Bredesen was a bachelor, and his male instincts prompted him to extend the conversation beyond a formal excuse-me-have-you-seen-my-hat? The girl noticed the clerical collar, and in a few minutes they were deep in a conversation on religion. After a while the young lady volunteered the information that her own religious life somehow left her dissatisfied. And soon Bredesen was telling her that he too had felt this lack but that he had found a new dimension in his devotional life through speaking in tongues.

“Through what?” asked the girl.

“Speaking in a language that God gives you,” Bredesen said, and went on to tell her a little about his experience. In the girl’s eyes he read disbelief and also something like apprehension.

“Can you speak in these tongues any time you want to?” she said, and he thought she edged imperceptibly to the far side of her chair.

“They’re given us for prayer.”

“Well, can you pray in tongues whenever you want to?”

“Yes. Would you like me to pray this way now?”

The girl looked around the lobby, outright alarm in her eyes this time.

“I won’t embarrass you” said Bredesen, and with that he bowed his head slightly and after a short silent prayer began speaking words that to him were unintelligible. The sounds were clipped and full of ps and ks. When he finished, he opened his eyes and saw that the girl’s face was ashen.

“Why ... why ... I understood you. You were praising God. You were speaking a very old form of Arabic.”

“How do you know?” asked Bredesen.

Then he learned that the girl was the daughter of an Egyptologist, that she herself spoke several modern Arabic dialects and had studied archaic Arabic.

“You pronounced the words perfectly,” she said. “Where on earth did you learn old Arabic?”

Harald Bredesen shook his head. “I didn’t” he said. “I didn’t even know there was such a language.”

My interview with Harald Bredesen left me more puzzled than enlightened. Surely there was a logical explanation for the tales he’d told me. Otherwise what he was claiming were out-and-out miracles, and this just didn’t jibe with anything I knew of the world today.

Re: Allow me to Think Abstractly for a Moment
 

We've all heard stories about people understanding what was said when a person spoke with tongues. I can't help but think that many of these stories are "urban legends." I have read of instances of people speaking in English by the Spirit in Bro. Drost's biography and Bro. Cole's biography and I think they are credible.

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AFF Rules...

That the Holy Ghost is for today and is received by faith
with the initial evidence of speaking in tongues.

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Every post contrary to this belief needs to be removed.

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Right.

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The thing that was asserted was that Peter knew that Cornelius and friends had received the gift of the Holy Ghost BECAUSE they spoke with other tongues. It implies that the baptism of the Spirit is accompanied by speaking with other tongues. It is the visible sign of being filled by an invisible God. Added to Acts 2 and Acts 8 and Acts 19, it is added weight to the doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the initial evidence of speaking with other tongues. It leaves no doubt in the mind of the believer because they know they have received the promise of the Father when they spoke with tongues the first time as they prayed.

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We can think abstractly all we want to, but truth still stands. I know how I received the Holy Ghost, and it was with the evidence of tongues.


Since He is no respecter of persons.....

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Yes. You have it right, sister. God bless your love for the truth!

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:bliss:bliss:bliss:bliss:bliss:bliss:bliss

Amen and amen.

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I got it just like they did in the Book of Acts. Just like Peter and the other apostles and Mary, the mother of our Lord. All of my children did, too. I'm so glad I don't have to try to explain why I think I've got it.

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It makes you wonder how the Peter would have known that they were filled with the Spirit if they had not spoken with other tongues.

And why in the world did Paul ask those disciples in Ephesus if they had received the Holy Spirit since they believed if the Holy Spirit was given at faith? Redundant question.

And how did Philip know the Samaritans hadn't yet received the Spirit when they had believed the gospel and were baptized?

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And I don't have to wonder if I have Christ in me because I received it like they did in the early church. I don't have to guess and wonder. I have been given an assurance by God. :)

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Well I am flabergasted at ya all. It's no wonder that I hear them preacher fellows on those real Apostolic forums say you are all apostate reprobate backsliders over here.

I shall brush the dust off my feet as I leave. TSK TSK TSK

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Because scripture clearly tells us to expect it?