Subject: speaking in tongues |
Bible Note: I cannot agree with what you have written about speaking in tonques for this sign has ceased today. No one is speaking in tongues in this age of Grace. If they are then I am sorry to tell you that they are fakes. There are many fakes in this world today. There was a period in Acts but Paul tells us about this in Scripture. No one was more charismatic than Paul, yet the Lord revealed to him that those sign gifts were going to cease: "whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away" (1 Cor. 13:8 KJV). Now we turn to the prison epistles, the four letters written shortly after the end of the Book of Acts, while Paul was a prisoner in Rome—Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon and Philippians...and we find that there is not one word about tongues, or the gift of healing. Even where we might have expected Paul to write of tongues in the passage about being "filled with the Spirit" in Ephesians 5:17, he has nothing to say about tongues. And as for the gift of healing, we read of a co-worker of Paul's, Epaphroditus, who fell seriously ill during this time (Phil. 2:25-30) and Paul no longer had the gift of healing, and was no longer able to heal as he did only a few years earlier in Acts 28:9. The sign gifts were no longer operating at the time that Paul wrote the Prison Epistles. |