MY FIRST EXPERIENCE OF SPEAKING IN TONGUES
THERE IS NOTHING in my early life that might suggest I would be a good candidate for speaking in tongues. In fact, precisely the opposite is true. Although I was raised in a godly home where both my parents were fervent Christians and my only sibling, a sister four years my senior, was likewise born again, our lives were far removed from anything remotely Charismatic. Before I entered the University of Oklahoma in 1969, my family had attended a Southern Baptist church in whatever city in which we lived. While in college in Oklahoma City I was quite active in an independent Baptist church whose entire pastoral staff was comprised of graduates of Dallas Theological Seminary, an institution I would later attend that is widely known for its dispensational and cessationist theology.
Southern Baptists up to that point in time were rarely known to be involved in what had come to be known as the Charismatic Renewal. 1 We all believed in the Holy Spirit, but little was said of Him or His ministry aside from His work in producing what is known as the new birth. If our Pentecostal and Charismatic brethren were ever mentioned, and it was quite rare for them even to be noted in polite conversation, they were held up for ridicule and disdain. They were known as “gibberers” in my house, those who regularly spoke in mindless and meaningless gibberish.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1970, following my freshman year at the University of Oklahoma, that I had my first encounter with Charismatic Christians. Although he wasn’t enthusiastic about it, my father granted me permission to participate in a summer evangelistic project in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, sponsored by what was then known as Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru). Most of the thirty-five or so who were present worked a job during the day and engaged in either a Bible study or street and beach evangelism at night. I worked the entire summer at a Shell gas station across the street from the place where all of us lived. There wasn’t much excitement in that, except for Fridays, when the motorcycle gangs from Sacramento and San Francisco would descend upon that resort city. Their first stop upon entering the outskirts of Tahoe was to fill up at my service station. I thank God for the courage and opportunity to share the gospel with a few of them before the summer ended.
My perspective on the church and Christians as a whole was profoundly shaken that summer. This was due, in no small measure, to a visit I made to the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. You must remember that this was the late spring, early summer of 1970. It was a time of hippies, the Vietnam War and its protestors, the Kent State shootings, hallucinogenic drugs, and the emergence of what came to be known as the Jesus movement. While in Berkeley, I spent a couple of days with those who called themselves the Christian World Liberation Front, or CWLF. Let me assure you that nothing in my nineteen years as a Southern Baptist from Oklahoma prepared me for the radical, off beat approach to Christianity I encountered there! Although my exposure to the CWLF was brief, I was challenged in a positive way to be a bit more open and tolerant of those who worshipped and lived out their life in Jesus in ways that differed from my own. 2
My spiritual life was deeply impacted at the close of my summer in Tahoe when I attended a meeting at which Lutheran pastor Harald Bredesen was scheduled to speak. I had never heard of him before that night but soon learned he was one of the early leaders of the Charismatic movement. In the course of the evening he mentioned a book by John Sherrill titled They Speak With Other Tongues. The story Bredesen told of Sherrill’s experience wasn’t even remotely similar to my life in God. But he had my attention. I stayed after the Bible study was over and spoke with Bredesen for a few minutes. He gave me a copy of Sherrill’s book, and I read it immediately.
In almost complete defiance of my spiritual experience at that point in time, the issue of speaking in tongues immediately became an obsession with me. As my time of ministry in the beautiful Sierra Nevadas concluded, I returned to the University of Oklahoma to continue my studies as a sophomore. My plans at that time were to join the staff of Crusade following graduation. Little did I realize that Crusade’s “unofficial official” policy regarding Charismatic experience was quite negative. Speaking in tongues, as I would soon discover, was off-limits.
For the first two months of my sophomore year I followed the same routine every night, Monday through Sunday. At ten o’clock each night I would walk two blocks from my fraternity house to the playground of the McKinley elementary school, where I would spend anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour praying earnestly that if the gift were real, God would give it to me. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was praying for. Nevertheless, for several weeks I spent each night pleading with God for some indication of His will for me concerning this gift.
I can’t say that I ever expected anything to happen. My skepticism toward spiritual gifts like tongues was deep-seated and pervasive. As already noted, my education and experience in Christianity, at least to this point, was decidedly cessationist. One thing is certain: I was not “primed,” so to speak, either psychologically or spiritually, for what eventually happened.
HIJACKED BY THE SPIRIT
One night in October of 1970, as I sat at the foot of a large tree in that school playground (the tree, by the way, is still there!), quite without warning my normal, somewhat-routine prayer was radically interrupted. It’s important for you to understand that I didn’t experiment with speaking in tongues. I made no attempt to pray “banana” backward over and over again. Often people instruct those without the gift simply to start speaking whatever syllables or words pop into their minds. That may well be good advice, but I did nothing of the sort. I made no conscious effort to alter my speech patterns.
It was as if my normal English prayers were hijacked by the Spirit. I suddenly began speaking forth words of uncertain sound and form. Once again, I didn’t start out by consciously muttering a few senseless syllables that then gave way to a more coherent linguistic experience. It was more like a spiritual invasion in which the Spirit intruded on my life, interrupted my speech patterns, and “gave . . . utterance” (Acts 2:4).
There was a profound and utterly unexpected intensification of my sense of God’s nearness and power. I distinctly remember feeling a somewhat detached sensation, as if I were separate from the one speaking. I had never experienced anything remotely similar to that in all my life. While this linguistic flood continued to pour forth, I carried on a separate dialogue within my own mind: “Sam, what are you saying? Are you speaking in tongues?” It was the first time I had ever experienced the sensation of thinking in one language while speaking in another.
I realize how odd this may sound. It will strike some of you as delusion. Trust me when I say I completely understand that reaction. The closest way I can come to describing what happened is that it felt as though the veil between my life on earth and the realities of heaven had been removed. The sense of the supernatural invading the natural was virtually tangible. Nearly half a century has passed since that October evening, and nothing I’ve seen, sensed, or felt during that time can remotely compare with what I experienced on the playground of that elementary school.
My initial reaction to something so unfamiliar and new was a strange mixture of both fear and exhilaration. I don’t recall precisely how long it lasted, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. I was confused, but at the same time I felt closer to God than ever before. At the time, I didn’t have theological categories to describe what happened. My Pentecostal friends would probably insist that this was my baptism in the Holy Spirit and that my speaking in tongues was the “initial physical evidence” that this event had actually occurred. After all, I had been born again a decade earlier, when I was around the age of nine.
As you will discover later in this book, I believe Spirit baptism is simultaneous with conversion. In other words, I believe the New Testament teaches that all believers are baptized in the Spirit at the first moment they turn in faith to Jesus Christ. I have no desire to quarrel with (much less divide from) those who differ with me on this point. I honestly don’t think it’s that big of a deal. What’s important is whether our post-conversion encounters with the Spirit are real. Does the New Testament give us reason to believe we can experience a greater and more powerful outpouring of the Spirit than what we received when we first believed in Jesus? In my opinion, yes. Whether we call this event “Spirit baptism” or “Spirit filling” or “Spirit anointing” is entirely secondary to the more pressing question of whether the Holy Spirit is actually doing something in us or on our behalf beyond what happened at conversion.
As I reflect on that October evening, I’m more inclined to view it as a powerful filling of the Holy Spirit rather than Spirit baptism (although, as you can tell, I’m open to being convinced otherwise). Having said that, I must confess that when I look for words to describe it, the only thing that comes to mind is immersion and saturation, a sense of being inundated or flooded with the presence of God.
Those who have had a similar experience know why I struggle to describe what happened. My relationship with God to that point had been largely, if not entirely, intellectual. I’m not questioning the reality of my salvation. I’m simply saying that aside from a few emotional moments in church as a young boy, and the miraculous healing of a migraine headache when I was eleven years old, I had no tangible awareness of a dimension of reality beyond what I could encounter through the five senses. But on the night in question it was as though the barrier that separated my being from the being of God was lifted. My spirit was engulfed by the Spirit of God. Neither before nor since that day have I felt so directly, empirically, and undeniably in touch with the realm of the supernatural.
Although the onset of tongues was unexpected, I consciously chose to stop speaking. I jumped to my feet, returned to my fraternity house filled with excitement, and called a friend who was on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ. I didn’t tell him what had happened, only that I needed to speak with him immediately. Thirty minutes later I sat down in his car and said, “You’ll never guess what happened tonight.”
“You spoke in tongues, didn’t you?” he asked, almost deadpan.
“Yes! How did you know? It was great. But I don’t understand what it means.”
This man cared deeply for me and had no intention of offending me or obstructing my Christian growth. But what he said next affected me for years to come.
“Sam, you do realize, don’t you, that you will have to resign your position as student leader and give up any hope of joining staff when you graduate. Campus Crusade doesn’t permit people who speak in tongues to hold positions of authority. Of course, if you don’t do it again, there’s no need for us to tell anyone. Everything can be the same as it was before.”
I was crushed and profoundly confused. I remember feebly and fearfully trying to speak in tongues the next night, but nothing happened. Not wanting to forfeit my position in the ministry on campus, I concluded that it must have been something other than the Holy Spirit. I never thought it was demonic, although many of my friends did. I explained it away as a momentary emotional outburst that I’d be better off forgetting. I rarely spoke of the incident in the years following, fearful of the disdain of my friends who looked with suspicion on anyone remotely associated with or showing interest in the gift of tongues. Needless to say, I didn’t speak in tongues again for twenty years!
I think it’s important to point out that deep within my heart I always knew the experience was a genuine encounter with the Spirit of God. My agreement with those who explained it (away) by appealing to psychological factors was prompted less by conviction than by my fear of incurring their ridicule or, worse still, losing their friendship. I also believe that my attempt to write it off as a momentary, one-time phenomenon better left in the past was offensive to God and a clear instance of quenching the Holy Spirit.
Following graduation in May of 1973, my wife and I immediately moved to Dallas to begin my study at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in preparation for ministry. I loved my time at DTS. The fact that my theological trajectory has taken a different turn from what I was taught at Dallas does not in any way diminish the respect I had then and have today for the education in God’s Word DTS provided. But the entire faculty was committed to the belief that certain spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongues, were restricted to the first century of the early church. 3 I was taught in virtually every class that once the first generation of apostles died out, so too did the gift of tongues. Out of respect for my instructors I embraced this perspective and taught it faithfully throughout the first fifteen years of my public ministry. But all the while my personal experience from several years earlier was lingering in the back of my mind and haunting me with the reminder of what God had done.
I have written elsewhere of my transition from a cessationist who regularly mocked Charismatic practices to a continuationist who not only believes in but regularly pursues and practices the full range of spiritual gifts. 4 Here I would only point out that my theological transition from an evangelical cessationist to an evangelical continuationist or Charismatic began sometime in late 1987 with my reading of D. A. Carson’s book Showing the Spirit: A Theological Exposition of 1 Corinthians 12–14. But I digress.
Slightly more than twenty years subsequent to that October experience in the McKinley School playground, in November of 1990, I attended the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in New Orleans. While there I spent time with Jack Deere, a close friend and former classmate at DTS. Jack is the author of Surprised by the Power of the Spirit and Surprised by the Voice of God, both excellent biblical refutations of cessationism. Jack taught Old Testament and Hebrew at DTS for twelve years before being dismissed because of his embrace of continuationism. At the time of our visit in New Orleans he was serving as an associate of John Wimber’s at the Anaheim Vineyard in California.
At dinner one night I shared with him my journey and told him about what had happened back in the fall of 1970, hoping to gain additional insight into the nature of my experience and what God’s will for me might be. He then reminded me of something the apostle Paul said to young Timothy: “For this reason I remind you to fan into flame [“kindle afresh” in the NASB] the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands” (2 Tim. 1:6). Jack then laid hands on me and asked the Lord to kindle afresh in me this gift He had bestowed so many years before.
This verse in 2 Timothy is important. It tells us that one may receive a spiritual gift only to neglect and ignore it. The imagery Paul uses is helpful. He describes a spiritual gift in terms of a flame that needs to be continually fanned. If it is not understood, nurtured, and utilized in the way God intended, the once brightly burning flame can be reduced to a smoldering ember. He says in essence, “Take whatever steps you must: study, pray, seek God’s face, put it into practice, but by all means stoke the fire until that gift returns to its original intensity.” 5
I took Paul’s advice to Timothy and applied it to my own case. Every day, if only for a few minutes, I prayed that God would renew what He had given but I had quenched. I prayed that if it was His will, I would once more be able to pray in the Spirit, to speak the heavenly language that would praise and thank and bless Him. (See 1 Corinthians 14:2, 16, 17.) Unlike my first experience with tongues, I didn’t wait for some sort of divine seizure but in faith began simply to speak forth the syllables and words the Spirit of God brought to mind.
Nearly thirty years have passed now since God renewed His precious gift in my life. Praying in the Spirit is by no means the most important gift. Neither is it a sign of a spirituality or maturity greater than that of those who don’t have this particular gift. On the other hand, no gift of God is to be despised, ridiculed, or suppressed. If no less a man than the apostle Paul can say, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you” (1 Cor. 14:18), who are we to despise this blessed gift of God?
As I said in the introduction, this book is built around the asking and answering of what I believe are the thirty most crucial questions regarding speaking in tongues. So let’s begin.