Sunday Sermon: Speak to Be Understood (1 Corinthians 14:6-19)

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book. On Thursday is a study in the Old Testament and then we answer questions from the listeners on Friday.

Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series. Here's Pastor Gabe.

Speaking in Tongues and Prophesying in 1 Corinthians 14

First Corinthians 14. It did not get as far last week as I wanted. I was trying to get all the way through verse 19. We spent most of our time talking about or understanding what is being meant here by speaking in tongues and what is being meant by prophesying.

And I'll summarize those definitions for you here in just a moment. But let's come back to that passage again, that same section. First Corinthians 14. We made it through verse 5 last week. So I'm going to start reading here in verse 6 and we'll go through verse 19.

So the Apostle Paul writing to the church in Corinth says the following, beginning in verse 6. Now, brothers, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I bring you some kind of revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching?

If even lifeless instruments such as the flute or the harp do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played? And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? So with yourselves, if with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said?

For you will be speaking into the air. There are doubtless many different kinds of languages in the world, and none is without meaning. But if I do not know the meaning of the language, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker will be a foreigner to me.

So with yourselves, since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church. Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.

What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also. I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say amen to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying?

For you may be giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not being built up. I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. Nevertheless, in church, I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others than 10 ,000 words in a tongue.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we come back again to this section where we've been reading about order and worship, chapters 11 through 14, and even the proper use of spiritual gifts as we're reading about here in this section.

I pray that you guide us in your truth, that we understand the calling here to consider others. It's not about showing ourselves off or building our own platform in whatever our ministry is or anything like that.

The gift that we have been given is for the benefit of building up the church. So how may we do that? How can we be of service to each other, striving, as Paul says, to build up the church? May that be what stirs in our hearts as we consider these things.

Of course, we have different opinions about the use of gifts, the definitions of these gifts, whether some of these gifts are still at work in the world today. But most of all, we come to an agreement that the purpose of the gifts is to build each other up.

And so let us do that to the glory of your name. It's in Jesus' name that we pray, amen. So once again, as I had said last week, as we understand this gift of prophecy, or prophesying is the way that Paul gives it, and this gift of speaking in tongues, what do we mean by these particular terms?

Well, the gift of prophesying is simply revealing what God's will is. And we understand what God's will is according to His word. Now that doesn't mean that prophesying is synonymous with preaching necessarily.

Otherwise, when Paul instructed Timothy in 2 Timothy 4 to preach the word, he would have just said that. He would have said prophesy instead of preach the word. So the words are not exactly synonymous.

But preaching may entail prophesying, or prophesying may entail preaching rather. In fact, what Paul says in verse 6 is a pretty good summary of what prophesying may consist of. So again, in verse 6 he says, now brothers, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching?

So that's what we expect to have happen when someone is prophesying. That they would be revealing something. They would be giving knowledge of God's will according to His word. They would even consist of prophecy, or revealing those things of the future that have not yet come to pass.

And then even teaching, helping us to understand what these things mean, applying it, and living according to these things. So that all may be entailed in prophesying. Again, not synonymous with preaching, but preaching would be included in it.

How about speaking in tongues? What do we mean by speaking in tongues? Now none of what we're teaching from chapter 14 is with regards to a private prayer language. You're not going to hear me condemn that nor endorse that as we are teaching through chapter 14.

That's not what Paul is getting at here. So let's just set that aside. That being a discussion for another time, or something maybe you want to approach with me privately. Specifically what Paul is talking about here is speaking another language that everybody else doesn't know.

And it's not gibberish. It wouldn't be an unknown language. It's known to somebody, but it wouldn't be known to the congregation. Every time we see that reference to speaking in tongues in the New Testament, it is always in reference to a known human foreign language.

It is not just speaking, you know, otherworldly nonsense. And as I had said last week, I kind of started in on this, but I think I got distracted by something and I didn't finish the thought. But at the beginning of chapter 13, Paul says, if I speak in the tongue of men and of angels, but I have not love, if I have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Remember that? So some will take that to mean that since there are tongues of angels, then when we speak or when we pray in what might be perceived by others to be gibberish nonsense, we're actually speaking some other language that could be a heavenly language as spoken by angels.

But that wasn't the point that Paul was making there in chapter 13. He's speaking really hyperbolically. If I could, not that I do, but if I could, if I could speak a language that only angels know, because I don't know about you, have you ever wondered like, what are they speaking in heaven?

What are we going to speak when we get there? Like what language will it be? Have you ever thought about that? Is Hebrew the pure language and we'll all be speaking pure Hebrew when we get to heaven? I don't know.

That's a mystery to me as well as to you. Even, even John talked about things that he heard that he couldn't repeat. The apostle Paul in 2nd Corinthians chapter 12, being taken up into the third heaven and hearing things that he could not tell other people.

Does that mean that he was not allowed to tell those things or he didn't even understand those things and tell us what it was that he heard? We'll find that out together someday, I suppose. So if there are heavenly languages, if there were languages that we could perceive of and know and even speak, if I could speak those tongues, but I have not loved, what would the point be?

Not be beneficial to anybody? I don't even gain from it. I'm nothing but a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. So Paul's speaking hyperbolically there. He's not saying by chapter 13 .1 that there can be other languages spoken by angels that we can therefore pray and we're only known between us and God.

That's not what Paul was getting at. So when we read about speaking in tongues, we are reading about speaking a foreign language that is a known human language because that is the exercise of the gift as we saw it in the book of Acts, which really when you go to Acts and you read about speaking in tongues, it only comes up like three or four times.

It's not very often. I think we kind of have this idea of like speaking in tongues was just this thing that was always happening there in the first century after the Holy Spirit was given and man, everybody's just, you know, tongues left and right.

All kinds of languages are going all over the place, but really it was not seen even that many times in the book of Acts. Nonetheless, it's a very showy gift, right? If you can speak another foreign language, then how impressive would that be to the people around you?

I hear some preachers preaching such high lofty language using theological terms that nobody else knows, they may as well be speaking in tongues, amen, somebody, right? And it's almost like he's showing off, you know, look at all this terminology that I know from all the theological study that I've done for years and years and years.

I remember, I think it was Billy Graham told this story about a young man who had come to faith and had started attending, he came to faith at a Billy Graham crusade, so he started attending a local church and he was so discouraged by it because he's listening to this young preacher, a guy that's barely 30, and just everything he said you couldn't understand it.

It was just this huge, like systematic theology sermon that he was giving. And so he spoke to somebody like the counselor that he had at the Billy Graham crusade and he said, well I found a local church like you told me to, but I can't understand what this preacher is saying.

And the counselor just simply told him, well go tell him that. Go tell the preacher you can't understand it. Can you like dumb it down a little bit so that I can get what it is that you're saying? And you know, then the two of them can learn together, the preacher can learn to speak in terms that everybody understands and the man recognizes, hey, I know that I need to learn these terms as well.

So we need to be able to speak in a way that is edifying, that is encouraging to one another. Some people in the church were speaking in tongues in such a way as so to show off. So this is how we recognize these two gifts and this is what we spent most of our time on last week and I've already eaten up several minutes talking about that here again today.

But that was just the first section, verses one through five. The next section, verses six through 12, remember Paul gives some examples here. He gives some analogies, but once again concluding in verse 12 with this statement, strive to excel in building up the church.

We keep seeing that over and over again. At the end of verse five, may the church be built up. The end of verse 12, strive to excel in building up the church. And then that last section, verses 13 to 19, he gives instructions on the proper uses of these particular gifts.

So we come back to verse six again and I had already given verse six to you that explains speaking in tongues and also what prophesying may entail. Now again with regards to prophesying, notice that Paul says, how will I benefit you unless I give you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching?

Now prophecy, there was a certain sense of prophesying in this time in which Paul is writing that is not prophesying as we would see it exercised today. Because prophesying today is not going to include new revelation.

But prophesying at this time, when you would have an elder in the church or somebody who would be given a revelation and later on in chapter 14, Paul kind of gives the regulations on if you are going to prophesy, do it like this.

If you are going to speak in tongues, do it like this. So he gives kind of regulations on it a little bit later on. But if somebody receives a revelation, it's probably going to be one of the elders of the church, somebody that they know and have recognized a gift of prophecy has been given to them.

They are going to stand up and they are going to give that revelation. And if one of the elders receives, another elder receives another revelation, then the one who is giving his revelation is supposed to finish up his time, sit down, and the spirit now speaks to the next guy who stands up and gives prophecy.

Now why was this going on in Corinth but it's not going on today? Remember what we said last week? Yeah, the canon is closed today. We don't need new revelation. And I had shared with you a quote that came from J .I. Packer summarizing something that John Owen said, if there are new revelations that disagree with Scripture, they are false.

And if there are new revelations that agree with Scripture, they are not needed. So we have the canon, it's complete, it's closed. May there not be anybody who stands up in church and starts spouting off new things.

Deuteronomy 13 and 18 actually gives us some tools that we can use to gauge whether that person is truly speaking from the Lord. I think it should go without saying, we don't need to even have to test that because we recognize that Scripture is sufficient.

We don't need any new revelation. But say somebody comes in here and says, God has given me a word, he's told me to say it to you, and here is that word. What does Deuteronomy 13 and 18 say that we can do to test this guy and whether or not what he's saying is actually from God?

If what he says comes to pass, then maybe it was from the Lord. But if what he says doesn't come to pass, he's a false teacher and you can take him out to the parking lot and stone him. Hey, I'm just telling you what the law says, okay?

No, we can't do that. But we know he's a false teacher, so don't listen to that man. And Deuteronomy does say that. Don't fear him. Don't listen to him. God did not give him this word that he came proclaiming.

I remember a friend of mine who was a pastor in Abilene, Kansas, was about to do the Lord's Supper coming up on that Sunday and he received a strange phone call on like Thursday or Friday of that week before he was going to partake in the Lord's Supper with his congregation.

And it was a woman from in the community, wasn't a member of his church, but she had been to his church before. And she said, pastor, it had been laid upon me this week, a word from the Lord that you're supposed to give to your congregation when you partake of the Lord's Supper this Sunday.

And at first, when he was telling this story to me, he was like, at first it was kind of curious because it was like, I was just thinking about that. I was just meditating on the scripture. I was just thinking about, okay, what am I going to say this week as we come to the Lord's table?

And here I get this phone call from this woman who is telling me, I've got something for you. The Lord has given to me that you're supposed to share with your congregation. So I'm intrigued. Okay. We're both thinking about the same thing at the same time.

Let me hear what it is that you have to say. I don't remember what she said, but it was so thoroughly unbiblical. It could not possibly have come from God. And he's just sitting there and he, as he's telling me the story, he's thinking to himself, okay, now I get it.

So it wasn't that the Lord gave her a word, Satan gave her a word to call me and discourage me. That's what it was. And so he tries to tell the woman, ma 'am, what you're saying is not in the Bible. I can't tell my congregation what you're saying that I should say.

I would be going against what scripture says. And she tried to push back on him by saying, well, if you don't, then you're disobeying God because God gave it to me. There are many, many preachers today who will insist that they have received a word from the Lord.

I do believe though I can attest to it because I haven't listened to everyone, but Stephen Furtick begins every sermon this way. God told me to tell you today. And then what he tells you is not in line with the scripture passage that he uses to try to justify whatever it is that he proclaims.

Beth Moore even does this to a certain degree. She'll say that the Lord gave me a word and like she'll build her whole, whether it's a single message or, or like the whole week's worth of seminars that she's doing or whatever, she'll build all of it on that word that she claims God gave to her.

There'll be lots of scripture and it will sound biblical, but all of it is based on a word that she claimed God gave her. So it's not built up from God's word. It's built up from her own thoughts. Yes, brother.

A lot of people that do that, they close with and send me a check. That's right. And finish up with send me a check. It's in the mail. And if you send me a check, God will bless you abundantly. Right.

Exactly. Usually there's all that attached to it as well. Now again, as we talk about these things, I'm not saying that God doesn't do miraculous things. Yes, there are still miracles that happen in the world.

I would say matter of factly though, he is not revealing new truth to anybody, period. So we do still see miracles happen as God wills it. He will do a miracle. We should pray for a miracle. I prayed for a miracle this morning.

I won't say what it was. But what was nonetheless praying that God would intervene in somebody's life, that something miraculous would happen. So we should pray for those things and expect that God will do them if it be in his will.

But he's not giving new revelation. Justin Peters said the following. He shared this just a couple of weeks ago. I affirm that God still works miracles today. I deny that there are any miracle workers today.

He said, I affirm God miraculously heals people today. I deny that there are any miraculous healers today. And if I could add to Justin's quote, I would say, I affirm that the prophetic word has been fully given today.

I deny that there are any new prophets giving any new word today. So we understand these things in their proper context. At this time with the Corinthians, Canon is not closed. They don't have the whole New Testament.

Paul's even writing it to them. So they do need those prophetic gifts of the Holy Spirit to know what God wills and what he would desire for his church. And those things were exercised, but in a proper manner, as we see laid out for us as we go through chapter 14.

So let's continue on verse seven. If even lifeless instruments. So now Paul goes into some examples and he's basically referencing from what we might term natural generation, or that God's truth can be revealed even in things that are around us, even in the, in life that we live.

Okay. So that's, that's what we glean from here by these examples. Verse seven, if even lifeless instruments such as the flute or the harp do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played?

And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? Let me stop there. Now this is one of those places where I love the ESV better than the legacy standard translation because the ESV uses the word bugle.

Anybody have a legacy Bible? What, what's it say there instead of bugle trumpet, it says trumpet instead of bugle. What's the difference between a bugle and a trumpet? Yeah. Trumpet. Trumpet has key. Well, in this case, it's just the long, you know, trumpet blasted.

They wouldn't have the, they wouldn't have valves back then on it. Yeah. Say again. That's correct. Yeah. Bugles used for battle. In what way? Like, like how is a bugle used for battle? Sorry. You're speaking in tongues.

I didn't get all that. Say again, brother. Just signals. Yeah. Giving signals. Right. So like formations or now we're doing this or the enemy's doing that or say, you know, you can't get communication to everybody.

We're not all wearing ear pieces in our ears. So you have a bugler that'll sound something, either the charge or the retreat or this formation or that formation. So that's what the bugle does in the course of battle.

It's really quite awesome that Paul would use these two examples because he uses the flute and the harp and then he uses the bugle. So what would be the difference between those two? If even lifeless instruments such as the flute and the harp do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played?

What would the flute and the harp be used for? Say again. Entertainment. Sure. It can be that. What else? Praise. Yeah. That's our accompaniment while we're singing songs. Anybody else? Anybody else got something else for flute and harp?

I mean, these are very melodic instruments. Have you ever listened to just an incredible instrumental piece and have felt goosebumps? You know, felt so moved by it. Have you ever heard a piece of music so moving?

No words to it, but just music and it moves you to tears. How amazing that is, right? So there's distinct notes and even a steadiness to those notes. There's even crescendo and decrescendo. There's dynamics to those notes.

All the different ways that a song has been crafted to elicit that particular emotion out of us. But how do we get to that emotion if the notes are not distinct? How do we know what songs to sing if we can't tell the music that our band is up here playing?

How do we know what to sing along with? What song is this if they're not playing distinct notes? So you have these instruments used for entertainment. They're used for accompaniment for us as well. And we know what we're singing.

We know how we are to feel, how the music moves us because of the distinct notes that are played. If you don't hear distinct notes, it's just going to be a muddled, it's going to sound like a middle school band.

That's what it's going to sound like. Verse eight, and if the bugle does not give a distinct sound, then who will get ready for battle? So again, it's masterful that he uses these two instruments or these two examples, the flute and the harp and then the bugle because the bugle is something else entirely.

It's not for accompaniment. It's rather giving order. It is giving direction. And so for one, we have like a call to praise or even a stirring of the emotions. And with the other, we have an instrument that's an example of exhortation of an imperative.

Do this. And if the bugle doesn't give that specific distinct sound that goes with this particular order, how will anyone know to get ready for battle? Verse nine, Paul says, so with yourselves, if with your tongue, you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said?

For you will be speaking into the air. Now that even kind of comes back to chapter 13 verse one. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Now remember to have love in the exercise of this means that you want to benefit someone else. But if you're speaking a language nobody else knows, yeah, then how do you benefit? How can you really truly have that desire to benefit another if you're not speaking something that they understand?

So, it's the same kind of statement that Paul makes here. Otherwise you're just speaking into the air. Verse 10, there are doubtless many different languages in the world and none is without meaning and that verse right there in the context of chapter 14 really is the one that gives us the understanding that the tongues that he's talking about are known human languages.

So again, private prayer language, different discussion for a different time. But in the context of chapter 14, what Paul is saying here is there's many different languages in the world and they all have meaning.

Verse 11, but if I do not know the meaning of the language, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker will be a foreigner to me. Quite literally, I will be a barbarian to the speaker and the speaker will be a barbarian to me.

Because what is the dominant language in the world at this time? Greek. Koine Greek is specifically the term for that kind of universal Greek and it was Alexander the Great that implemented it. So hundreds of years before this, Alexander the Great says, yeah, Alexander says all the world we're going to speak the same language.

So his empire is spreading and he's forcing everybody to speak Koine Greek. So that even when the Greeks are conquered by the Romans, the Romans recognize if we're going to be as great an empire as Alexander's was and even a greater empire than that, we're going to have to continue to do what he had started in this part of the world.

Let's continue with the Greek. And so the Romans had both Latin and Greek. But the thing that the Romans wanted everybody to do was speak the same language so that we could have an empire. It was almost like they were trying to go back to Babel, right?

Let's all be Babel again so we can build our huge empire. Skip all this foreign language stuff, let's all be speaking the same language. But that was by the providence of God that it worked out that way since we have the whole New Testament written in that language and it was able to spread in the world the way that it did because by God's providence there was one language that people understood.

Now if anybody didn't know Greek, like if you had those nations and those peoples, they're purists, they're like, no, we're not following along with your Hellenistic ways, we're going to stick with our own language.

They were called barbarians. So just like we use the term Jew and Greek or Jew and Gentile, a Gentile is simply a non-Jew, right? So it was with Greek and barbarian. A barbarian was a non-Greek speaker.

We tend to think of barbarians as like the cavemen of those days, but no, that's not who they were. They could have been a completely civilized, completely smart people, but they just were not Greek speakers.

And so Paul says, if I don't understand the language, and this surely is an example that all the Corinthians could relate to, if I don't understand the language, you're a barbarian and I'd be a barbarian to you.

So he goes on in verse 12, so with yourselves, since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church. Whatever gift of the Spirit you would desire to have, may it be for the benefit of the church.

Now before going on to that next point, the paragraph that goes from verses 13 to 19, keep in mind once again that the reason why tongues are being abused here in the church in Corinth is because it's the really showy gift.

So it's the one that I can look like I've got the gift of the Spirit, and I can speak things that nobody else understands, look at how smart I am. So that was the way that this was being exercised here.

Now there was one theory that I heard proposed, I don't know that this is true or not, but just to kind of pass off the theory, John Gill was one that had repeated it, and there was another commentary that had the same theory, and I think that both John Gill and this other guy were drawn from the same source.

So it was somebody else that presented this theory. But the idea is that possibly what was going on is that there were, because you know it's interesting to kind of think about why is Paul confronting this with this church, but you never see this confrontation with any of the other churches that Paul writes to.

So the possibility is this, the church was primarily Greek. If you remember the story of Paul going into Corinth, he went to the synagogue but the Jews refused him, so he went to the Gentiles. There were a few Jews that came to faith, but this church is largely Gentile converts.

However, since there are a few Hebrews in that church, one, two, or three of them are standing up and proclaiming the Word of God in Hebrew, and no one understands what they're saying, because there's only like three guys here that understand that language.

And so it could be the sort of thing like the Catholic church used to do with Latin. Like no one can understand what the Bible says unless you learn Latin, and I don't know why they decided that Latin was the pure language.

That's one area where I thought the Greek Orthodox have something up on the Catholics. At least the Greek Orthodox chose Greek. I don't know why the Catholics stuck with Latin. But the Catholics were always doing their church services in Latin, nobody understood what was said.

And so when you had guys like Martin Luther and John Wycliffe who were coming up with English translations of the Bible, and then that was an offense to the Catholic church because they didn't really want anybody to understand the Bible.

Now they don't have control of the Word of God anymore, now anybody can understand it. And so the Catholics were just sticking with the Latin, you know, and so I kind of wonder if it was the same thing with these one, two, or three guys in the Corinthian church who are standing up and speaking Hebrew.

Hebrew is the pure language. Hebrew is the language that the Old Testament was written in. So if you really want to understand the law and be obedient to God, then you'll know it in Hebrew. And so you had these guys that were standing up in the Corinthian church, and they're speaking the Old Testament in Hebrew, and no one understands what's being said.

Now again, that's just a theory, we don't know that for sure because nothing in the text really says explicitly that that's what's going on. But perhaps that's what was happening, regardless we know that there were people who were showing off with this ability to speak another language, and no one else knew what was saying.

Corinth was a hodgepodge of different languages anyway, since it was a port city. Yes ma 'am? Aramaic was like a portion of Jeremiah's written in Aramaic. Yeah, the Hebrews would have spoken Aramaic, yeah.

In fact, it was probably more dominant than Hebrew, just because, like even at this time many of the Hebrews didn't know Hebrew. And it was because of the spreading of Greek. It was the requirement that they had to learn Greek.

And also because the Hebrews were spread out in so many different parts of the world. So remember at Pentecost, in Acts 2, when the apostles go out into Jerusalem and they're preaching the gospel to the people in different tongues, they're speaking 12 different languages.

So 12 apostles speaking 12 languages, just to the Jews that are there. And the Jews respond, we understand what they're saying and we can hear it in our own language. So because the Jews had been so spread out around the world, they were speaking the tongues of the areas in which they settled.

And Hebrew was, it wasn't a dead language, but it was not as common among the Hebrews as it was like 400 years before, or a little bit before that. Does that make sense? So that, and that really, that digression of an understanding of Hebrew really started in, at the time of the exile.

So about 600 BC was when that began, and then it just kind of diminished. I mean, even to this very day, there's Hebrew things we don't understand what they mean. And there are scholars that will study the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic, since those are the two languages the Old Testament is written in, and they don't understand what it means.

And they'll talk to rabbis, they'll talk to Jewish rabbis and say, help us understand this. And the Jewish rabbis don't even fully understand what it means. So it just kind of shows you kind of how much language can change or how certain meanings can be lost.

All right, so going on in that next section, then verses 13 to 19. So this is the last section here, and we'll close with this. Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret.

Now these instructions are going to seem like Paul is saying, well, speak in tongues, but just pray that you're going to be able to interpret. But by the regulations that he puts on it, and some more regulations that we'll even read next week, it would actually discourage the practice.

It wouldn't encourage the speaking of tongues. It would, it would diminish it because the people would go, well, I can't, I can interpret. So maybe I should just sit there and be quiet. You know, that's how that would play out.

So one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, Paul says, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also.

I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. Now this is one of those passages that some have taken to use, we'll see Paul is talking about a private prayer language here, but again, this is all in the corporate assembly.

And he's already said earlier, like going back to chapter 11, he said, he's talked about praying or prophesying in the presence of the congregation. And so we're talking about things here that are going on in corporate worship, not in privacy, not like while he's at home praying to himself.

So if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. He's talking about praying in such a way that everybody else can hear. But if he's praying in another language, nobody else can benefit from that.

They can't pray along with him because they don't know what he's praying. So he says, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. Later on where he makes the comment that I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others.

So this statement about speaking with the mind is not talking about speaking privately to himself. He is talking about saying something out loud, giving knowledge that other people can hear and understand.