December 1, 2002 1 Corinthians 14:6-20
“I recognize that!”
INTRODUCTION
Our family did not go anywhere over the Thanksgiving holiday this year. In the past, we would drive however long it took to get us to either my family’s house or Tammy’s family’s house. In my case, it would take around 11 hours. Tammy’s was considerably closer at around 6 hours. But both trips were a great distance especially to the two young children riding in the back seat constantly asking how much farther it is. Eventually we would get so tired of them asking that we promised to tell them when we were getting close if they would just be quiet and not ask that annoying question anymore. When we were no more than 30 minutes away from our destination, we would tell them that we were getting close. And the most amazing thing would begin to happen, especially when the kids were younger. They would look out the windows and say, “I recognize that!” What made it so amazing was what they were pointing to when they began to recognize things. They weren’t pointing to buildings that were brightly painted and would naturally catch a child’s eye and be remembered. They weren’t pointing to a statue or unmistakable landmark. They were pointing at a tree 30 miles outside of Atlanta and saying, “I recognize that tree!” Or they might point to a cow in a field 15 miles outside Lynchburg, VA, and say, “I recognize that cow!” They might even point to a car speeding past us on the other side of the highway and think that they recognized that! The more that they recognized these things, the more excited they became. For them, recognizing these things meant that they soon would be with people that they recognized. Recognition carries meaning and significance with it.
That is Paul’s main message in the passage that we are going to meditate on this morning. Recognition brings meaning not only when you are traveling to the homes of relatives, but also when you are trying to communicate a message from God to people. If people do not recognize – do not understand the words that you are using, then your words will have no meaning to them. All of your speaking will be worthless. And Paul says that that was what was going on as people at the church of Corinth were exercising the gift of tongues in an improper way resulting in division rather than unity and growth.
Last week, we began a study on 1 Corinthians 14 and the gift of tongues. This is really part of a larger study on 1 Corinthians 12-14 in which we are trying to discover what makes a healthy church. In the first 5 verses of this chapter, we saw that the gift of prophecy – the ability to communicate a message from God in understandable and direct terms, is more useful than the gift of tongues within the context of the church worship service. Whenever you interpret this chapter, it is important that you remember that every directive that Paul gives in this chapter in regard to tongues relates only to what happens when the church meets together for worship. For that reason, we are not going to get into whether or not the gift of tongues is ever expressed as a personal private prayer-language between the individual and God. The gift of tongues is, as we said last week, the ability to speak a language that you did not learn whether that language is a language spoken among men or a language that only God recognizes.
As we look at vs. 6-20 this morning, I have two goals for us. The first is that we will be as brief as possible so that my words will not get in the way of what the Holy Spirit wants to say to us. The second is that my words will be so clear and touch so close to home that you will not be able to escape what the Holy Spirit wants to say and do in your life today. Listen carefully. See if you recognize the Spirit’s voice speaking to your heart.
1. Without recognition, there can be no profit. (vs. 6)
There are two clear teachings in this verse that all of us should be able to agree on. The first is that tongues alone has absolutely no profit for the gathered church. There are two possible ways that you could read this verse. “…if I come to …unless [in addition] I bring you…” With that reading, the real profit is in the teaching or the prophecy, not in the tongues. Or, “…if I come…unless [through it] I bring you…” Even if that is the real gist of what Paul is saying, for teaching or prophecy or knowledge or revelation to come through tongues, there has to be an interpretation. That’s what verse 5 taught us. There has to be an interpreter for tongues to have any profit for the church as a whole. Either of these interpretations could be the correct one. But both of them teach basically the same thing. If I or anyone else came up to this microphone and began speaking to you in a different language, because you can’t recognize what is being said through tongues, there is no way for you to profit from those words. It’s kind of like buying a bike that needs assembling. It may be the greatest bike that a kid has ever gotten, but he can’t ride it until it’s put together.
The second clear teaching from this verse is that Paul’s greatest concern was for the good of the people that he spoke to. He didn’t really care how spiritual he looked or sounded. He didn’t really care if they liked what he was telling them. He didn’t really care about receiving some kind of self-satisfaction out of the exercise of his spiritual gifts. He was concerned about people! Why? Because he loved them. He believed that the words that he had to say really would profit them if they understood them and if they obeyed them. He believed that people could profit from his words because these words were from God not from his own little brain.
I echo this same motivation of Paul’s. I come to you this morning not to try to look all spiritual, not because I think that I am better than you or that I have it all together more than you do. I don’t come before you because I like standing in front of people or even because I think that you enjoy listening to me. I come to you because I love you and because, in faith, I believe that the words of the Bible, when understood and obeyed will change your life. The Bible says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” So I declare those words in order that God might build faith in you.
2. Without recognition, there can be no response. (vs. 7-9)
Over the next several weeks or even this past week at Thanksgiving, you will probably get together with some portion of your family. As a kid, I used to “love” these kinds of gatherings because there would always be someone there who recognized me but I had no idea who they were. Ma would tell me to go say “hi” or to give a hug to this long lost aunt, cousin or great uncle, and I would do so out of a fear of making ma mad not because there was any joy welling up in my heart over seeing this person. The reaction is totally different when I come home from a trip to my family. I respond to them with love and affection because I recognize them and because they are an important part of my life. Recognition always produces a response both in feelings and in actions.
Paul talks about a couple of situations that bring a response. In verse 7, he speaks of music that brings a response. How many of you had a special song that was “your song” when you were dating? When you hear that song today, does it still provoke strong emotion within you today? Of course it does! This time of year, we hear lots of Christmas music. Listening to this music provokes a response in you. It causes you to remember Christmases gone by. Some of those are good memories; some of them are not. The music provokes a response so long as it is being played in such a way that you can recognize it. Benjamin right now is learning to play the trumpet. He is doing well so far with the amount of training that he has had. But if I stuck in front of him the music to that song that provokes such strong emotions and asked him to play it, I dare say that fuzzy feelings and good memories would not be the emotions that overwhelm you. Why? Because you cannot recognize the tune of the song.
The same is true of a bugle’s call to battle. The bugler had certain notes and arrangements of those notes to play depending upon what orders were being given. When played properly, the bugler’s tune was to excite the men to action and gather them to join in the battle. But if the bugler was not clear in the notes that he played, the soldiers would not know what they were supposed to do. An unrecognizable, unclear call would be ignored. No one would get ready for battle. Without recognition, there would be no response.
Just as with these two examples, in the message that I or any other speaker bring to you, unless you recognize what the Holy Spirit is trying to say to you, you will not respond in the way that He desires. I might as well just be “speaking into the air” as Paul says in verse 9. The greatest fulfillment for anyone who speaks a message is for them to see a response in those who hear. But tongues, when spoken without an interpreter in the worship service cannot produce any response in the hearers except confusion and misinterpretation. That is exactly what happened to the people that were in Jerusalem when they heard the gift of tongues exercised for the first time. They were confused by it and assumed that the speakers were drunk.
The point of communication is to get a response – to change attitudes, to call people to action, to correct bad thinking, to see people changed. The point of me getting up here each and every Sunday morning is not just for me to blow off steam or because I like hearing the sound of my own voice. I want to see a change in you and a change in me. And that is God’s desire too. It is tempting to think that you have pleased God if you come here each Sunday morning and listen to me go on and on. But it is not listening that pleases God. It is responding in obedience to what you hear that pleases God. You may have heard lots and lots of sermons over the course of your life. But have you ever allowed one of those sermons to change you? Have you ever responded in the way that God wanted? If not, then it might as well have been that all those speakers were speaking a foreign language. The fact is though that all of them spoke in English, and there have been times that God’s Spirit spoke clearly to your heart calling you to respond. But you refused. You closed the door. How are you going to answer to God one day when he asks you why you constantly closed your ears to what He was saying so that you would not have to respond to the action that He was calling you to do?
3. Without recognition, there can be no relationship. (vs. 10-12)
The purpose of language and communication is to bring people into relationship with each other and to cause them to grow in their enjoyment of that relationship. But sometimes, the language that we use can be more of a hindrance than a help if we do not understand the language that the other person is using. You don’t have to go to a foreign country to hear a different language. Husbands and wives often speak a different language. For you wives and wives to be out there, I’m going to give you a little help in your understanding of guys. When a man says: "IT’S A GUY THING," he means: "There is no rational thought pattern connected with this, and you have no chance at all of making it logical." When a man says, "CAN I HELP WITH DINNER" He means: "Why isn’t it already on the table?" When a man says ’’IT WOULD TAKE TOO LONG TO EXPLAIN," he means: "I have no idea how it works." When a man says, "TAKE A BREAK, HONEY. YOU ARE WORKING TOO HARD,’’ he means: "I can’t hear the Thanksgiving Day football game over the vacuum cleaner."
Accents can sometimes get in the way of communication too and can cause a misunderstanding about information that is passed on. There was an art contest held in a local school one Christmas season a few years ago in East Texas. One of the prize winners was a picture drawn by a nine year old boy showing three men, offering gifts to the baby Jesus in his manger. What made the picture unique is how the three gift presenters arrived – there was a fire truck on the side of the picture. The principal asked the boy about his decision to draw the truck, and the boy, in his heavy East -Texas accent, was quick to reply: “Well, the Bible says the wise men came from a-far.”
In verses 10 –12 of this passage, Paul talks about the role of language in building relationships between people. He says that there are all kinds of languages in the world and that all of those languages have meaning to the people that understand them. Someone from East Texas would have no problem understanding that southern drawl spoken by another resident of that part of the country. Men attach great meaning to the language that other men use even though women can’t make out a word that they say. When a man goes into Lowe’s and starts talking about a [give specifics of a really hot tool that any man would want for Christmas]. Those tool specifics might not mean a thing to most of the women sitting out there, but I bet there were a lot of men sitting out there that that communicates with. I was speaking your kind of language. When Ben was younger and couldn’t speak clearly, Victoria would often interpret for us and tell us what he was trying to say. For those who understand the language, it has meaning, and there can be a relationship there.
Though that language is meaningful to someone, it will not be meaningful to me if I do not understand it. Language that is not understood by the hearer has no value for the hearer. And rather than building a bridge of friendship between two people, it actually puts up a barrier between them. Language is intended to break down barriers, not build them. Have you ever heard the expression, “Better to let someone think you are a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”? In that same train of thought, better to let someone think that there is a possibility of a relationship between you and them than to start to speak and let them see that you speak a totally different language. By using language that someone does not understand, I actually push them further away than if I had just kept my big mouth shut. As Paul says, I become a foreigner to them, and they become a foreigner to me.
A couple of weeks ago, we participated in a missions conference. We had missionaries from the United States and around the world speak at most of the churches in our association. I had the responsibility of transporting one of those missionaries to the church where he was going to speak on Monday and Tuesday night of that conference. I was nervous about it. I was getting ready to be in a car for six hours over two days with someone that I did not know. What were we going to talk about? I picked him up at his hotel at 5:00 on Monday, and we began our journey to Terra Alta, 1½ hours away. Almost immediately, we began to talk. He asked me to tell about how I had come to faith in Jesus Christ. I told him. Then I asked him about his story. I don’t have time to tell you all of it, but he told of how his wife began attending a church that taught the truth in a clear uncompromising way. He didn’t want to go at first because he was afraid of what might happen to him. He was afraid that he might see a need for a change in his own life. Eventually, he gave in to his wife’s love and the change that he saw in her life. He went. He gave his life to Jesus, and he entered into a relationship with Him because He began to understand the voice of God calling out to Him in love. Over the rest of those hours that Jack and I spend together, I don’t think that there was 5 minutes that we weren’t talking with each other. You see, once we learned that we both had a relationship with Jesus, we had a huge foundation on which to build a relationship with each other. We found out that we spoke the same language because we had been born into the same family.
God’s great desire is for us to be in a relationship – a relationship with Him and a relationship with other believers in the church. Paul Harvey tells the story of the Christmas birds. One Christmas Eve, mom and the children went to the local church to participate in the service. Despite her pleadings, the husband refused to go. He just couldn’t understand all this stuff about God coming down to earth to be born as a baby. Why would God do that? So they went, and he stayed. A few minutes after they left, the man heard a sudden pound at the window. He thought some local kids were throwing snowballs and ignored it. But then it came again, so he got up to investigate. When he opened the door, he discovered a flock of birds walking in the snow that was quickly getting deep. The sound he had heard was of the birds banging against the window glass trying to get to the light and heat inside. The man’s heart went out to the birds. He knew that if they didn’t find shelter soon, they would freeze. He decided to try and lead them to the barn where they could find shelter from the wind and some heat. He tried putting out pieces of corn, but they would not follow. He tried flapping his arms to shew them into the barn, but they only scattered. He was running out of ideas. He thought, “If only I could speak their language, I could tell them about the safety of the barn. If only I could become one of them, then they would be able to understand me and know that I meant them no harm.” And then, all of the sudden, he understood the whole point of Jesus being born as a human being. It was so that Jesus could communicate the truth of God to us in language that we could understand so that we could come into the safety of a relationship with Him. And there, in the snow, he knelt down and asked Jesus Christ to forgive him of his sins and become his savior.
The purpose of God communicating with us is to bring us who were once a far off into an everlasting relationship with Him. God desires this so much that He came down to earth and was born as a baby so that we would be able to understand the language that He spoke and not be frightened of Him anymore.
4. Without recognition, there can be no wholeness. (vs. 13-15)
5. Without recognition, there can be no agreement. (vs. 16-17)
6. Without recognition, there can be no maturing. (vs. 18-20)
When I was in high school, I took two years of Spanish. I don’t remember much of what I learned over those two years, but a few things stuck in my head. I learned that there are some very important phrases that no one should be without when they go to a Spanish-speaking country. The first is the question: “Como se llame?” to which the correct reply is “Me llamo es Chris Talton.” And the second, perhaps even more important is: “Donde es bano?” which means where is the bathroom? They are not long complicated phrases, but they communicate a great deal of meaning.
You don’t have to say a lot to evoke a lot of emotion in people’s hearts and a lot of meaning in their minds. Let me try out a few short English phrases on you, and you see how much meaning they have for you.
“Will you marry me?”
“It’s a girl!”
“You have cancer.”
Not many words, but so much meaning.
From what Paul has to say here in verses 18-20, I get the idea that the people at Corinth were having a contest, real or implied, to see who talked the most in tongues. I guess they thought that the one who spoke the most in tongues was the most spiritual. In our day, I guess we could have that same contest. We could even broaden to find out who shared their faith the most, or who delivered the most Sunday School lessons, or who spoke the most sermons or whose sermons were the longest. You think my sermons are long? The longest sermon on record was over 48 hours long! I guess that means that whoever spoke that sermon was the most spiritual of all! Paul would say, “NO!” Much speaking doesn’t make you spiritual, especially when you’re speaking something that no one can understand. He says, “If you’re going to have a contest about who speaks the most in tongues, I’ve got you all beat hands down!” He goes on to say though that he would rather speak 5 words that everyone can understand than speak an inexhaustible number of words in a language that they could not profit from.
If Paul was here this morning, and I asked him to get up and share a message that had meaning with us, but he only had 5 words or less to do it in, I imagine that he might say something like this:
“God loves you.”
“You are a sinner.”
“You can be forgiven.”
“Jesus is coming back.”
CONCLUSION
Have you understood what I have shared with you this morning? If so, then you need to respond to what God is calling you to do. I don’t know what that might be. Maybe you and your wife have not been communicating lately, and you need to ask for forgiveness. There are no more powerful words than “Will you forgive me?” except maybe the corresponding answer of “Yes, I forgive you.” Maybe you have not been speaking one another’s language, and you need to ask God to help you understand one another so that you can have a relationship together once again. Or maybe you need the relationship between you and your kids is falling apart, and you need to learn to speak a language that they understand. You need God’s help for that. You’ve spoken a lot of words, but the response you wanted hasn’t happened because they haven’t understood the language that you’ve been using. Are you willing to learn a new language? Maybe some of what I’ve said here hasn’t been real clear to you, but God’s Spirit is clearly saying that something is not right in your life, and you feel like that if you don’t get it settled right now, you’re going to explode. Come and talk to Him at this altar right now. Whatever language you use, God will understand the cry of your heart.
