VII. Interpretation and Prophecy of Speaking in Tongues
“Now I
would like all of you to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy. One who prophesies is greater than one who
speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be built
up” (1 Cor 14:5).
In 1 Corinthians,
Apostle Paul encourages the believers to speak in tongues but more so to
interpretation of tongues or prophecy.
According to Paul, speaking in tongues builds up an individual spiritual
relationship with God, but interpretation of tongues and prophecy help build up
the church.
Among spiritual gifts,
there are some gifts for individual benefits and other gifts for the benefit of
the whole church. The gifts listed in
Ephesians 4:11—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers—are all
for building up the church. The Lord
Jesus has focused more on edifying his church, though he cared deeply for
building up individuals, and the apostles devoted themselves to various ministries
with the sole purpose of building up God’s church (Mat 16:18, 28:19-20).
One reason for many
problems prevalent in today’s churches is due to the church’s ministry chiefly
focusing on programs for the individual salvation and growing the membership instead
of gearing towards spiritual gifts and works to build up the church. How then could we build up the church through
interpretation and prophecy of speaking in tongues?
As explained in 1
Corinthians 14, interpretation and prophecy of speaking in tongues should
encourage and comfort the individual believers (1 Cor 14:3) as well as be
reproved, judged and bow down before God as their sins are revealed (1 Cor
14:24-25).
That is, instead of
individual believers actively giving their opinions and claiming their rights
in the church, passively they will be led to be judged, reproved and humbly to
bow down before God, completely surrendering themselves to God. This radically shows the difference between
the work of the Holy Spirit and the teaching coming from the humans. Since the Holy Spirit is the spirit of
destroying the strongholds, it breaks down the individual human opinions and
thoughts. Moreover, this leads us to
surrender ourselves to the Christ (2 Cor 10:4).
“For the
weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to
destroy strongholds. We destroy
arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and
we take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:4-5).
However, the knowledge
without the work and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, even if it is the
knowledge of Bible, will only make men arrogant and cause them to show off
themselves, love to get into arguments for the sake of justifying themselves,
and will make them to attack others verbally (1 Cor 8:1; 1 Tim 1:5-6).
In the Bible Pharisees and scribes used to belong to this group of
people (Luk 11:52).
Even in today’s
churches, many conflicts are brought about by longtime seasoned church members
with lots of Scriptural knowledge and spiritual gifts. To deal with hardened spirits, arrogant and
lazy, the churches would need the spirit of repentance. After having committed adultery with Uriah’s
wife, without the words of Prophet Nathan David would not have knelt and
repented before God (2 Sam 12:7).
Like the trend in
today’s society, at that time of the church in Laodicea people were corrupt and
focused solely on their self-interests (Rev 3:17); thus, the churches would
need the spiritual gifts working in people, which will reprove and discipline
and lead them to repent (Rev 3:19-20).
Now I will share in detail of interpretation and prophecy of speaking in
tongues.
“Likewise
the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we
ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what
is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints
according to the will of God” (Rom 8:26-27).
Speaking in tongues is
the prayer the Holy Spirit prays for us, and it is the prayer or blessings the
Spirit offers according to the will of God.
Thus, interpretation of tongues is not to interpret the sound of people
speaking in tongues but the prayer of the Holy Spirit praying inside that
person. People ask, “Why is it that some
people pray in tongues by the same sound over and over again; yet, why
interpretation of tongues is offered in various ways?” For those asking such questions, following is
my explanation:
When speaking in
tongues continued, the thoughts of this world and of men dwelling in
us will begin to disappear. The reason
we do not hear the voice of the Holy Spirit immediately is because of the
thoughts of other people dwelling within us; consequently, they have confused
our minds, and as a result we do not understand the will of the Lord.
“In their
case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep
them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the
image of God” (2 Cor 4:4).
The devil confuses the
minds of people or tempts even believers.
Though Peter believed in the Lord, he was confused by Satan (Mat
16:23). That is why it is necessary for
us to stay alert and pray. At all times,
we would need to keep the bowl of our hearts clean. Then our minds would always be filled with the
thoughts of the Spirit, and we would be believers always evaluating things
through the mind of the Lord (1 Cor 2:16).
When you keep praying
in tongues experientially, after a while you would be able to interpret
tongues, as well. You would then
understand through your mind your prayers in tongues as well as that of
others. When we are alone, not too many
things come to our minds of other people; yet, when in conversation with
others, we can grasp the flow of our dialoguing with other people. Likewise, when we listen to other people
speaking in tongues, we do not understand in the human language, though we may
understand the thoughts processed during speaking of tongues. That is why the thoughts processed in our
minds while listening to tongues is reiterated into Korean (English).
How, then, can we know
whether that is how it genuinely has happened?
Since tongues is a prayer about oneself, he would readily know whether
that is true or not. Reflecting on the
author’s recollection of interpreting, not just one or two prayers offered in
tongues, but more than hundreds and even nearly thousands, interpretation of
tongues aided by the Spirit truly speak of people’s actual settings. The Lord stated that we can tell every good
tree from bad trees by its fruits (Mat 7:18-20).
Through interpretation
of speaking in tongues, if we build up the
From the author’s
experience of interpreting many tongues over the years, I have come to discover
one common spiritual principal. First of
all, the Spirit prays for one’s individual soul (mind). Moreover, each individual spirit begins to
repent of his sins (Rom 14:10-11). While listening to one’s prayer through
interpretation of speaking in tongues, we develop an understanding what we
would need to repent of. At the next
stage of interpretation, one is guided to pray acknowledging of receiving God’s
grace and spiritual gifts, giving credits to God for his many blessings (1 Cor 12:7).
Interpretation of
tongues further helps us know the kinds of spiritual gifts, powers along with
spiritual duties we have received from God (Act 13:2). As the next step, our prayers are then to
acknowledge God’s grace given to our families and situations and consequently,
giving thanks to God for all his blessings.
This agrees to God’s blessings mentioned in 1 John 3:2, where we receive
God’s blessings on our spiritual wellbeing and our all things plus our health.
As the concluding stage
of praying in tongues, the prayers are offered for the churches, their pastors
and the world missions, or the ministers pray the prayers of giving glory to
God. For the souls being spiritually
nurtured and matured, it is pointed out in the Bible that they are given the
spiritual duties of helping the churches and ministers (Eph 6:18-19).
Therefore, the spiritual duties for building up the churches are given
by the Holy Spirit to the spiritually mature believers (1 Cor 12:28), not given as artificial church positions to
anyone.
Many churches today
wrestle with much conflict stemming from carelessly setting up leaders in their
ministries for human reasons instead of evaluating their prospective spiritual
leaders based on their spiritual maturity or ecclesiastical duties. To avoid such conflicts, the churches should
pay attention to the spiritual guidance of God and establish the people God has
chosen. The believers with the call from
the Lord will bear many spiritual fruits on earth and be given the crown of
righteousness in heaven (2 Tim. 4:8).
Prophecy is given to
build up the church (1 Co. 14:4), upbuilding, encouraging and consoling the
others (1 Co. 14:3) as well as reproving, judging and revealing the secret sins
in one’s heart to lead them to repent before God (1 Co. 14:24). Based on Paul’s words encouraging the
believers to desire for the gift of prophecy, everyone could receive this
special gift of prophecy.
“Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts, and
especially that you may prophesy” (1 Co. 14:1).
In Scripture, Phillip
the evangelist is known to have four unmarried daughters with the gifts of
prophecy (Act 21:9), and the believers in the church at Ephesus were known to
have prophesied, as well (Act 19:7).
Moreover, Agabus, one of prophets in Jerusalem gave a prophecy of a
severe famine (Act 11:28), and in the church at Antioch, while worshipping and fasting,
the prophets heard the voice of the Spirit, and in response they laid their
hands on Paul and Barnabas and sent them out (Act 13:1).
Reflecting on the
aforementioned activities in the Bible, it can be safely assumed that the early
churches did not only do the teaching of the Word, but also evangelists and
other believers used the gift of prophecy in building up the churches. To the people in the church at Corinth,
apostle Paul said, “Brothers and sisters, if I come to you speaking in tongues,
how will I benefit you unless I speak to you in some revelation or knowledge or
prophecy or teaching?” (1 Cor 14:6)
Prophecy, certainly, is
not mixed up in teaching of the Word.
According to the words of Paul above, prophecy, revelation and teaching
are all distinctively different from one another. Furthermore, though apostle Paul gave a stern
warning of telling women to be silent in churches (1 Cor 14:34), he talked of women having to veil their
heads when they spoke in tongues (1 Cor 11:5). Phyllis’ daughters spoke in prophecy while
being unmarried, and clearly they were not given the positions of teaching in
churches.
As a step further,
prophecy was a gift everyone could do in churches, and people were instructed
that, if revelation was given to another person sitting nearby in the
gathering, the first person should keep silence, letting the next person to
prophesy. This process further points
out that prophecy was not part of the teaching program in churches. Therefore, along with teaching of the Word,
prophecy was a gift given to the churches and exercised by the believers to
build up the churches by comforting and reproving the believers as well as
judging and leading them to repentance before God. Today the gift of prophecy is treated almost
like a superstition, and the main cause for this misunderstanding stems from
the churches not following it biblically.
“Let two or
three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to someone else
sitting nearby, let the first person be silent” (1 Cor 14:29-30).
Nowadays, instead of building up the churches
prophecy is used like a fortune telling for the benefits of individual
persons. Regarding prophecy, Scripture
clearly states that prophecy should be done in the sense of plural forms, that
is, the whole congregants doing it, or two or three people prophesying with the
others weighing what is being said (1 Cor 14:29). For this reason, prophecy is only done in
part (1 Cor 13:9-10), and it can easily be misled due to human
weakness.
Thus, the Bible reminds
us of the following: “Do not despise the
words of prophets” (1 The 5:20) and “Test everything; hold fast to what is
good; abstain from every form of evil” (1 The 5:21-22). This is further to say that we should not
despise prophecy and carefully discern them through our faith by reflecting on
the words of God (Rom 12:3, 6).
The reason the gift of
prophecy has been tainted with that of fortune telling is because we do not
faithfully adhere to the words of God.
Furthermore, by ignoring and blindly criticizing the gift of prophecy,
today’s churches have been losing more than gaining. Since Bible studies in our churches focus
chiefly on knowledge-related Bible studies, we do not provide people with
opportunities where the individuals come to genuinely reflect or be judged on
their sins personally, have themselves be reproved and consequently repent for
their sins before God. As the churches
concentrate more on honoring individual views not to upset them, instead of
upholding the will of God they create more and more programs to appeal to the
contentment of the crowd and lose the order of the churches and spiritual
creativity in the end. Moreover, as the
churches do not nurture and raise up the potential spiritual leaders with their
spiritual gifts, they are forced to be driven out of their churches and stay
outside the churches as if they are “gangsters of spiritual gifts.”
Now it is a high time
to raise up the spiritual prophets who can help build up the churches of God
and guide the believers to repent and help them to return to God. The author will talk more in detail on this
topic in the near future.
The author now will
explain the difference on prophecy and interpretation of tongues. As explained in the previous pages,
interpretation of tongues is the praying inspiration of the Holy Spirit praying
directly to God through our spirits, and this spiritual gift is understood
through the consciousness (mind) of men.
Thus, interpretation of tongues is first to listen to speaking in
tongues, and then whatever is understood inwardly should be reiterated through
the lips of people doing the interpretation in the same manner a foreign
language is being interpreted. On the
other hand, prophecy lets out the decipherable words in the way speaking in
tongues occur. Words stem from our
minds. When we put the things of our
minds into words, we feel “relief” and “refreshed” inside.
The Bible tells us that
we have the mind of Jesus Christ (1 Cor 2:16). From this mind of Jesus Christ within us,
words are formulated, and these words in turn are delivered through our
tongues, and we refer this as “prophecy.”
Thus, as if God directly speaks to us, prophecy is spoken of in the
first singular form. When observing the
conversation between two people involved in prophesying and listening to its
prophecy, it may appear to be odd, because two sinful human beings dialogue
with one person, talking as if God is speaking at the moment, and the other
person, kneeling on his knees, listening to the words of the other as if
receiving the words of God at the same time.
However, when we prophesy in faith or accept the words as if directly
coming from the Lord, prophecy will lead people to repentance and console them. In the end, this obedient act will build up
the churches (Rom 12:6).
As mentioned
previously, prophecy should be done in the form of plural context with other
people involved through discernment or weighing the contextual situation. Thus, the safest way to receive the prophetic
prayer is to pray directly to God through the guidance of the Spirit and
receive the returned prophecy. Then ask
for two or three people with the gift of prophecy and reflect on their guidance
in comparison to the Bible and prayerfully evaluate and discern them. This procedure is at least one way trying to
be faithful to the Scriptural guidance (Rom 12:6; 1 Cor 14:24-25, 29-30; 1 The
5:20-22).
“But if all
prophesy, an unbeliever or outsider who enters is reproved by all and called to
account by all. After the secrets of the
unbeliever’s heart are disclosed, that person will bow down before God and
worship him, declaring, “God is really among you” (1 Cor 14:24-25).