6 Now, brothers and sisters, if I come to you and speak in tongues, what good will I be to you, unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or word of instruction?

7 Even in the case of lifeless things that make sounds, such as the pipe or harp, how will anyone know what tune is being played unless there is a distinction in the notes?

8 Again, if the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?

9 So it is with you. Unless you speak intelligible words with your tongue, how will anyone know what you are saying? You will just be speaking into the air.

10 Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning.

11 If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker is a foreigner to me.

12 So it is with you. Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the church.

13 For this reason the one who speaks in a tongue should pray that they may interpret what they say.

14 For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.

15 So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my understanding; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my understanding.

16 Otherwise when you are praising God in the Spirit, how can someone else, who is now put in the position of an inquirer, say "Amen" to your thanksgiving, since they do not know what you are saying?

17 You are giving thanks well enough, but no one else is edified.

18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you.

19 But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.

Corinth was a gifted church. That is worth saying first, because it is easy to read this chapter as Paul scolding people for having too much of the Spirit. He is not. The problem in Corinth was never a shortage. It was that the gifts had become a way of ranking each other, and the most spectacular gift had drifted to the top of the list.

So Paul asks a question that cuts underneath the whole argument.

"What good will I be to you?"

Notice what he does not ask. He does not ask whether the gift is real. He does not ask whether the experience is genuine or whether the person praying is sincere. He grants all of that. He simply changes the measure. The question is no longer what this does in me. The question is what it does for the person sitting next to me.

That is a harder standard, and it applies to far more than tongues.

Then he reaches for music, and he does it three times.

A pipe. A harp. A trumpet. All of them make sound. None of them communicates unless the sound has shape. "How will anyone know what tune is being played unless there is a distinction in the notes?" A flute that plays every note at once is not playing music. It is making noise.

The trumpet is the sharpest of the three, because a trumpet in that world had a job. It told an army what to do. Advance. Hold. Retreat. If the trumpet does not sound a clear call, nobody gets ready for battle. The failure is not that the trumpet was quiet. It may have been very loud. The failure is that no one could act on it.

Paul is not against sound. He is against sound you cannot act on.

Then he brings it home with a phrase I keep turning over.

"You will just be speaking into the air."

There is something lonely in that. The words are real. The speaker means them. And they land on nothing. Nobody is changed, nobody is helped, nobody is even given the chance to disagree, because nobody could tell what was said.

I do not think this stops at the Corinthian problem. We can speak into the air with perfectly ordinary English. We do it when we answer someone's real question with a phrase we have heard in church a hundred times. We do it when we use shorthand that means a great deal to us and nothing to the person in front of us. The words are true. They still land on nothing, because they were never aimed at that person.

Verse 10 is generous here. All sorts of languages exist, and none of them is without meaning. Paul is not saying other people's speech is empty. He is saying meaning has to arrive somewhere to be meaning at all.

Verse 11 names the cost, and it is not an informational cost. It is a relational one.

"I am a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker is a foreigner to me."

The Greek word behind foreigner is barbaros, which is where we get barbarian. It was not originally an insult about culture. It was a word about sound. To Greek ears, other languages ran together as bar-bar-bar, noise without sense, and the person making that noise was a barbaros.

So look at what unintelligible speech does in a room full of believers. Two people who belong to the same Lord, sitting in the same gathering, made strangers to each other by words nobody shared. That is the real damage. Not that the worship was less impressive, but that it built a wall down the middle of a family.

And notice that Paul makes the estrangement mutual. Not just I am a foreigner to him. He is a foreigner to me. Both people lose.

Verses 14 and 15 are where I most often see people flinch, and I think they flinch too fast.

Paul admits something honest about himself. When he prays in a tongue, his spirit prays, but his mind is unfruitful. He does not call that fake. He does not call it wrong. He calls it partial.

Then he refuses the choice we usually make here.

"I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my understanding."

Both. Not head instead of heart, and not heart instead of head. We are forever trying to pick one. Some of us distrust anything we cannot explain, so we shrink faith down to what fits in an argument. Others distrust anything that feels dry, so we chase the moments that move us and quietly stop thinking. Paul will not take either deal. He wants his mind fruitful and his spirit engaged, in the same prayer.

And then verse 18 removes any excuse to dismiss him. "I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you." He is not the outsider criticising a gift he does not have. He has more of it than anyone in the room. He is ranking his own strongest card below the good of the people in front of him. That is what makes the next verse land.

"I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue."

Sit with the arithmetic for a moment. Five against ten thousand. That is a ratio of one to two thousand. Paul is saying that a tiny amount of understandable help is worth two thousand times more than an enormous amount of impressive sound.

What makes the five worth more is not that they are wiser or better phrased. It is the four words attached to them: to instruct others. Their value is entirely in where they land.

One more detail matters, or we will over-read this. He says "in the church." He is ordering public worship, not private prayer. He is not telling anyone their prayer closet is wasted. He is saying that when the body gathers, the standard is whether the person beside you can say Amen and mean it, because they understood what they were agreeing with.

That is a strange and beautiful measure of a gathering. Not how moved people were. Whether they could say Amen.

I find this chapter uncomfortable in a good way, because it will not let me measure my faith by how it feels to me alone.

The question Paul hands us is not whether we are sincere. He assumes we are. The question is whether what comes out of us can be received by anyone else. That reaches into how we pray out loud, how we talk about God with people who do not share our vocabulary, how we answer a friend who is struggling, even how we write.

So two honest questions to carry today.

When you last talked about your faith with someone, were you speaking to them, or were you speaking into the air? There is a difference, and usually we can feel it afterwards.

And where are you settling for ten thousand words when five would actually help someone? Sometimes the most loving thing is not the fullest thing we could say. It is the smallest true thing the other person can carry away.

Five words that build somebody up are worth more than a flood of words that leave them standing outside. That is Paul's whole point, and he says it as a man who could have chosen the flood.

All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍

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