#248 Pentecost – Power Of Tongues

#248 Pentecost — Power Of Tongues
By: Pastor Karl Thomas

Acts 1:4 “And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me;…”  

Acts 2:1-4 “When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.  And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting …… Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

PENTECOST:– Fifty, compound word, a combination of the #5 and, add a zero. 50
Fifty Days after the feast of Passover.

Acts 2:39 “…and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off,(not distance but time) as many as the Lord our God will call.” This was fulfilled and ongoing.
Acts 8, 9, 10, 19 And my experience …..

Mark 16:17-18 “And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; …they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” 

Acts 3:6-13 “But what I do have that I give to you.” vs. 6
What did Peter have that he was willing to give away?
Possession with the intent do distribute. Peter carrying something new

Acts 4:13 “…saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled.” Untrained:– idiotes (id-ee-o’-tace) idiot, ignoramus.

Three Major Feasts
1. Passover — Delivered From Egypt (1st Month)
2. Pentecost — The Giving Of The Law (3rd Month)
3. Tabernacles — Harvest (7th Trumpets and Atonement)

The very day that Jews from around the world gather in Jerusalem to reaffirm their commitment to the Law of Moses, the Holy Spirit descends on them offering the Gospel, the promise of new life to all who will believe in Jesus.
The Law was skin deep but the Gospel of Grace goes to – core.

Contrast First Pentecost with Acts 2 Pentecost: Exodus 19-32
1. 50 Days.
2. Flames and mountain shaking.
3. Law given (10 Com) tablets of stone. How to live.
4. Drunken party takes place.
5. 3000 people died.

Acts 2 Pentecost:
1. 50 Days.
2. Flames and a violent wind.
3. Spirit comes – Law on our heart – Power to live.
4. Drunken party takes place.
5. 3000 people made alive.

“When your baptized in the Holy Ghost, He takes over! All the preaching, counselling and Bible reading you can absorb will be dead to you unless you have the Holy Ghost living in you! He makes you to understand and know it is God speaking!” David Wilkerson

Tongues are important here and now!!!

ON JANUARY 1, 1901, a young woman named Agnes Ozman was baptized in the Holy Spirit at a small Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. Ozman received a startling manifestation of the gift of tongues and became the first Pentecostal of the 20th century.
Her former Methodist pastor and holiness teacher Charles Fox Parham recalls how he simply laid his hands upon her and prayed scarcely three dozen sentences when a glory fell upon her, a halo surround her head and face, and she began speaking the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.” Ozman’s experience was the “touch felt ’round the world.” However, it wasn’t until April 18, 1906, that Pentecostalism achieved worldwide attention. This came through the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, led by Pastor William Joseph Seymour. As the nation celebrated the new century, few people could have imagined that this humble event would trigger the worldwide Pentecostal charismatic movement, one of the mightiest revivals and missionary movements in the history of the church.

On the morning of April 19, 1906, readers of the Los Angeles Times were shocked to read the banner headline news of the San Francisco earthquake. At 5:18 a.m. the most powerful earthquake in American history, 8.3 on the Richter scale, had destroyed 514 city blocks in the heart of the city. More than 700 people died from the tremor and the firestorm that followed.

The day before, on April 18, readers of the same paper had seen a curious first-page story of a spiritual earthquake that had hit Los Angeles in a little mission church on Azusa Street the night before. The headlines read: Weird Babble of Tongues>New Sect of Fanatics Is Breaking Loose >Wild Scene Last Night on Azusa Street > Gurgle of Wordless Talk by a Sister. This is how the world first heard of the Azusa Street revival that was to shake the spiritual world much as the San Francisco earthquake had shaken northern California. Little did the readers know that the aftershocks of the Los Angeles event in a small black holiness church would continue to shake the world with ever greater force throughout the century? A few days earlier a handful of African-American washerwomen and domestic servants had followed the black preacher William J. Seymour as he opened services in an old abandoned African Methodist Episcopal church on Azusa Street. Seymour had arrived a few weeks earlier with a stunning message concerning a “baptism in the Holy Spirit” with the “Bible evidence” of speaking in tongues as the Spirit gave utterance. What happened there on Azusa Street was to change the course of Christian church history forever.

Praying in tongues is not an optional practice for believers.
Praying in tongues cause us to engage the rhythms of heaven.
Praying in tongues keeps us under and open heaven.
Praying in tongues causes us to develop spiritual acuteness.

Charles Carrin
“Tongues is the only spiritual gift deliberately designed to attack man’s ego and pride; it exposes insincerity, self-centeredness, falsity, and other negative traits in believers.”

“Because of its unique attack on the human intellect, tongues remains the eternal “watch guard” at the gate. In a very calculated way this gift protects the other gifts from exploitation. The Holy Spirit will not allow us to choose one charisma and reject another.” 

New York Times
November 7, 2006
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania under Dr Andrew B. Newberg took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.

It’s “fas­ci­nat­ing be­cause these sub­jects tru­ly be­lieve that the spir­it of God is mov­ing through them and con­trol­ling them to speak,” said the uni­ver­si­ty’s An­drew New­berg, one of the re­search­ers.

The “re­search shows us that these sub­jects are not in con­t­rol of the usu­al lan­guage cen­ters dur­ing this ac­ti­v­i­ty, which is con­sis­t­ent with their de­s­c­rip­tion of a lack of in­ten­tio­n­al con­t­rol.”

The study ap­pears in the No­vem­ber is­sue of the jour­nal Psy­chi­a­try Re­search: Neu­ro­im­ag­ing.

The in­ves­ti­ga­tion com­pared the brains of those speak­ing in tongues to people sing­ing gos­pel mu­sic. “We no­ticed a num­ber of changes,” New­berg said, in­clud­ing in re­gions tied to emo­tions and the sense of self.

“These find­ings could be in­ter­preted as the sub­ject’s sense of self be­ing tak­en over by some­thing else. We, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, as­sume it’s be­ing tak­en over by an­oth­er part of the brain. But we could­n’t see, in this im­ag­ing stu­dy, where this took place.”

Contrary to what may be a common perception, studies suggest that people who speak in tongues rarely suffer from mental problems. A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not.

The mysteries spoken through the Spirit are truths beyond the capacity of human intellect. Hear this point carefully: The mind has only five natural sources of information. These are the physical senses of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Wonderful as they are, none are spiritual; if a believer’s Christian life is confined to sensory-knowledge only, he is not as well equipped for survival as are animals.

Let me explain: A dog’s sense of smell is 100 times more powerful than a human’s. Peregrine falcons have “fast vision”–which, if our sight were as good as their’s–we could read print on a moving airplane blade. Many wild creatures know of impending earthquakes hours before seismographs record the tremor.

But that is with a purpose: God created us with lessor sensory ability to force us to rely on our greater spiritual nature. Instead of doing that, we refuse God’s miraculous resources in preference for our own inadequate choices. By rejecting spiritual gifts, much of today’s Church is trapped in “Christianized” religion and is missing this dimension of spirituality.

The year 367 was chosen as the terminal date for spiritual gifts because that year the canon of Scripture was declared to be complete. The argument is based on this verse: “Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.” I Corinthians 13:8-10. The assumption is made that the expression “that which is perfect” refers to the completed Bible.

A Believers 3-Fold Ministry In Tongues
1. Ministry To God “…speaks to God.” 1 Cor 14:2
2. Ministry To Your Self “…edifieth himself…” 1 Cor 14:4
3. Ministry To Others “…let one interpret.” 1 Cor 14:27

1 Corinthians 14:15  “…I will pray with my spirit [by the Holy Spirit that is within me], but I will also pray [intelligently] with my mind and understanding;…”
We pray to communicate with God. We expect to receive!  Prayer is not for God’s benefit.

1 Corinthians 14:2
“For he who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God, for no one understands him; however, in the spirit he speaks mysteries.”
Whenever you pray in tongues you are in the Spirit! You are speaking mysteries.

Mysteries:– (mystērion) hidden thing, secret, mystery
1. generally mysteries, religious secrets, confided only to the initiated and not to ordinary mortals
2. a hidden or secret thing, not obvious to the understanding
3. a hidden purpose or counsel

Vine Expository Dictionary
Mysteries:– that which, being outside the range of unassisted natural apprehension, can be made known only by divine revelation, and is made known … to those only who are illumined by the Spirit.

2 Peter 3:15-16
“…as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand,…”

1 Corinthians 14:18
“I thank God that I speak in tongues more than any of you.”
Is there a purpose to speak in tongues more? How did this affect Paul’s ministry?

1 Corinthians 4:1
“Let a man so consider us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards that one be found faithful.”

1 Corinthians 2:6-16
“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory,… But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.”

Hebrews 8:10-11
“I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them.”

Praying in tongues is not an optional practice for believers.
Praying in tongues cause us to engage the rhythms of heaven.
Praying in tongues keeps us under and open heaven.
Praying in tongues causes us to develop spiritual acuteness.

248 Pentecost – Power of Tongues, PowerPoint Slides

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