What Are You Afraid of?

Acts 2:4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Most of us fear what we don’t know. The unknown, the shadow in the closet or under the bed, the doorbell at the odd moment, the “official” letter from the IRS, the flashing blue lights you see in your rear view mirror. And we even fear things that should be feared!

Fear can be a strange emotion. It can drive us to act in unexpected ways at unexpected moments. But it doesn’t always tell us the truth about a situation. It reacts to many unknown factors before you have the chance to engage your thinking. Your heart rate rises before you can tell yourself, “It’s just my pants hanging on the back of the chair.”

I think we even have reactions to Scripture. We read something and our first reaction is to run the tape we have learned to help us with our uncomfortable feelings. Let me give you an example.

We read about the battles in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the thousands killed, and we tell ourselves, “That was a primitive culture of warlords and chieftains. They didn’t know any better.” And in the process, we miss the positive takeaways from the text.

I think our text for today is also one of those passages. The idea that people would spontaneously speak in languages that they hadn’t learned to people who knew those languages seems out of control. How are we supposed to do things “decently and in order” if this kind of thing is allowed to happen!

And yet this kind of thing happened on several occasions that are recorded in the book of Acts. It seems at every juncture in the progress of the Gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, people reacted to the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives by speaking in languages that they had not learned. And there was nothing that could be done to stop these eruptions of the eternal into the temporal.

And again, the filtered narrative comes into some minds. “The speaking in other languages at each of these points was just for that time, but not for our time. They signaled the fulfillment of Jesus’ words about the spread of the Gospel to all nations, but it was not meant to be normative for the church throughout time.”

I’m not proposing a solution to the issue of tongues in the church today. I am suggesting that we all have filters that we apply to the Scriptures that prevent us from hearing clearly the message of the Scriptures themselves. And those filters get applied without much thought, just like the fear filters.

It takes a conscious effort to not apply the filters as we read in order to hear more fully what the Scriptures have to say to us. We try to listen within their culture, language and place in history. We try to hear what they understood from what they heard.

And then we try to apply the lessons to our lives. What are the filters you use as you read Scripture? Do they help you more fully understand, or do they get in the way of your understanding?