On behalf of Pastor Mark and Grace Driscoll, we want to thank you for listening to this series based on the book of First Corinthians titled Good News for Bad Christians.

In this series from 2007, Pastor Mark is taking us on a 33-week journey through First Corinthians verse by verse.

For all of the sermon audio and transcripts in this series, as well as other sermon series, please visit markedriskel.org.

Markdriscoll.org is the official place for new and archived Bible teaching from Pastor Mark and Grace Driscoll.

There you will find free Bible teaching in the form of sermons, blog posts, Bible studies and free e-books.

Additionally, you can also sign up to stay connected and up to date through the weekly newsletter and to receive it's all about Jesus, Daily Devotions with Mark Driscoll.

If you are already a supporter of this ministry, we especially want to thank you for helping us to continue to bring new and archived Bible teachings online and available for free at markedriskel.org.

If you would like to partner with us in sharing this Bible teaching with others, we ask that you would consider giving a one-time or recurring tax deductible gift of any amount at markedriskel.org slash give.

Thank you again and enjoy this message from First Corinthians.

Father God, as we open our time together, we get ready to study your word. We're coming to do some investigative work today on the issues of tongues and prophecy, very highly debatable, very controversial, lots of interpretations, lots of teams, lots of confusion, sometimes lots of debate and sadly tragically, sometimes lots of division.

And so as we study, we pray that you would give us the truth of Scripture but also the humility of Jesus and the love of the Holy Spirit so that we might have difference but not division, that we might be unified around the fact that you love us and we love you and we love each other and that might be even in spite of some of our differences.

And so God, as we study today, we ask for wisdom, we ask that we would understand this issue well so that we would be biblically informed as a people and for that to happen, we ask that you would send the Holy Spirit to inform our understanding and we ask that at the end of our time together, our eyes would be focused on Jesus and our hearts would be inclined to love as He has loved us and it's in His good name that we ask these things. Amen.

As we get into it, it's going to be a lot of teaching, I'm going to move super quick, cover lots of issues and I'll start by explaining to you what the gifts of tongues and prophecy are.

We've been doing this series on spiritual gifts and those are supernatural endowments that God enables Christians to have so that we can do ministry for and like Jesus on the earth.

So today we'll deal with the two issues of speaking in tongues and the issue of being a prophet or prophesying and so I'll need to start by defining for you what these even are because part of the debate is over what is even meant by these terms in your Bible.

So we'll start with tongues and when your Bible uses the word tongues, it means literally languages, the Greek word, I won't get into all of the different Greek words that I'll be using tonight.

But this Greek word that's translated tongues in the English translation actually means languages and so there are various languages, right?

If you go to Mexico, people speak Spanish, if you go to Korea, people speak Korean.

If you go to Quebec, they're speaking French. If you go to Texas, they're speaking redneck. If you go to South Central, they're speaking snoop schizel.

If you go to heaven, there's apparently as well a heavenly language that God and the angels used to communicate and there's a heavenly language there as well.

And so when we're speaking of tongues, we're speaking of languages, various earthly languages as well as the heavenly language spoken by God and the angels.

And when it comes to the gift of tongues, the first thing I want to say is that we reject two extreme positions.

...