In the last year, as I’ve grown in my relationship with the
Lord, He has continued to wreck the theology that I previously held.
This has happened time and time again, and continues to teach me how God
can’t be put in a box, or limited to rules/ laws. He is SO big. So
complex. So much deeper, kinder, more holy and perfect than we could
ever imagine.
One of the areas that God has wrecked my
theology on is speaking in tongues. I always found it something weird...
that “those” weird Christians did... you know, the Christians that are
made to look like fools on tv and in the media. I didn’t understand it,
and I was scared of it. It didn’t fit into my box of clean, comfortable
Christianity. The only thing I really knew about speaking in tongues was
that I was sure you had to have an interpreter present (1 Corinthians
14:27-28).
And then one day my husband came home, told
me about an encounter he had with the Lord, and how he (Jeremy) was now
speaking in tongues. To say I was weirded out is an understatement. I
really didn’t know what it meant, and I instantly felt spiritually
inferior and less gifted than Jeremy, and as a defense mechanism I
latched onto doubt.
After a few weeks, several
conversations with my hubby, and some processing time with the Lord I
became more and more curious. I thought about tongues a lot, and had a
lot of questions... was this gift for everyone, did I have this gift,
did an interpreter need to be present, is speaking in tongues an angelic
language/ speaking in an unknown (to me) language, or both?
Eventually,
I began to practice speaking in tongues in my personal time with the
Lord. The first few times were awkward... I would do it, write down the
words that I said, and then google them to find out if they were a
certain language or had a certain meaning. I was still viewing this from
my mind, in doubt, using the natural mind to try to understand
something that is spiritual in nature.
Over the period
of a few weeks I continued to speak in tongues, and found myself
continually torn wondering if I was forcing it/ making it up, or if it
was real and from the Lord. I continued to try to put rules around it
and cram it into a box. Finally one day Jeremy (really God through
Jeremy) said to me that I was being a spiritual gifts legalist... that I
was defining this gift by what is not to be done rather than what is to
be done. That hit the heart of it for me. I was looking for rules to
make it safe and comfortable, when God rarely operates in a safe and
comfortable way. After this breakthrough I found speaking in tongues to
be more peaceful and natural than anything I’ve ever done. It no longer
brought fear and doubt to me, but produced a peace and joy unparalleled
to anything else I’ve experienced. It began to be a way for me to escape
from my mind and thoughts, analyzing and trying to find all of the
perfect words for the prayers I was praying, and became a way for me to
grow in touch with the grumblings of the Spirit that are too deep for
words (Romans 8:26).
I don’t have all the answers on
tongues, how they should be used or when, on if it is a gift for
everyone, or reserved for a particular few. But quite frankly, I no
longer care. I know that the verse that had caused me the most concern
going into it was;
1 Corinthians 14:27-28 If anyone
speaks in a tongue, it should be by two or at the most three, and each
in turn, and one must interpret; but if there is no interpreter, he must
keep silent in the church; and let him speak to himself and to God.
I’ve also come to see (this is something the Lord revealed directly to me) that in this same book of 1 Corinthians exists;
1 Corinthians 11:5-6 But
every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying
disgraces her head, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head
is shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, let her also have her
hair cut off; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut
off or her head shaved, let her cover her head.
and
1 Corinthians 14:34 The
women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to
speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says.
I
have never attended a church that insists that womens heads must be
covered in church, or that they can’t speak in church... today most
denominations assume that these verses were cultural to the time they
were written, but most denominations still hold to 1 Corinthians
14:27-28 (having an interpreter) even though it is in the same book as
both of the aforementioned verses, and even in the same chapter as one
of them.
Shannon
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