What is the gift of tongues and is it for today?

Few topics divide sincere Christians as sharply as tongues. Some churches treat it as central evidence of the Spirit’s presence; others believe it ended with the apostolic age and rarely discuss it at all. Both convictions are usually held by people who love Scripture and want to honor God, which is a good reason to look carefully at what the text actually says before taking a side.

Acts 2:4-11 describes the first outpouring of this gift: the apostles “began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance,” and a crowd of Jews “from every nation under heaven” heard them speaking, each “in his own language.” The text specifies these were real, existing human languages the disciples had never learned, functioning as a sign that the gospel was now going out to all nations, reversing the scattering of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). This event was tied to a unique, unrepeatable moment: the birth of the church and the giving of the Spirit in a new way (Acts 2:16-21).

Two further outpourings recorded in Acts reinforce this sign function. When the Gentile household of Cornelius believed, they spoke in tongues, convincing the watching Jewish believers that “God has granted repentance that leads to life” even to Gentiles (Acts 10:44-46; 11:18). When disciples of John the Baptist in Ephesus received the Spirit, they too spoke in tongues and prophesied (Acts 19:6). In each case, the gift accompanies a pivotal, boundary-crossing moment in redemptive history — Jews, then Gentiles, then a transitional group — rather than functioning as a routine, expected experience for every individual believer at conversion.

By the time Paul writes to Corinth, tongues appears somewhat differently: a gift exercised in worship gatherings that, without interpretation, edifies only the speaker and confuses everyone else (1 Corinthians 14:2-5, 16-17). Paul does not forbid it — “I want you all to speak in tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:5) — but he ranks it below prophecy for corporate worship unless interpreted, limits how many may speak in a service, and insists someone interpret or the speaker stay silent in the assembly (1 Corinthians 14:27-28). Whatever this gift precisely was in Corinth, Paul treats it as real, Spirit-given, but tightly regulated for the good of the whole church.

Paul adds a further nuance often overlooked: tongues, he says, function as “a sign not for believers but for unbelievers,” while prophecy chiefly serves believers already gathered (1 Corinthians 14:22). Yet he immediately warns that if the whole church speaks in tongues at once and an outsider walks in, “will they not say that you are out of your mind?” (1 Corinthians 14:23). The gift, in other words, was never meant to showcase spiritual intensity to onlookers; used without wisdom, it could actually repel people rather than draw them toward Christ. This is part of why Paul spends more energy regulating tongues than simply praising it — not because the gift was illegitimate, but because Corinth was exercising a genuine gift in a self-focused, disorderly way.

Even within his regulations, Paul allows for a more private use of the gift: someone who speaks in a tongue without an interpreter present “speaks not to men but to God,” addressing mysteries in the Spirit, and may still exercise it personally, between himself and the Lord, rather than in the public assembly (1 Corinthians 14:2, 28). This suggests the gift, where genuinely present, need not be entirely suppressed simply because a given service lacks an interpreter — it can still function as private prayer, provided it is never paraded publicly without interpretation. Believers who wonder whether they have received this gift should seek wise, humble counsel from their elders rather than deciding alone, and should measure any experience against Paul’s actual instructions rather than against another believer’s testimony or a conference’s atmosphere.

Cessationists argue that tongues, along with certain other sign gifts, served to authenticate the apostles and the initial spread of the gospel before the New Testament was complete (Hebrews 2:3-4; 2 Corinthians 12:12), and that with Scripture now finished, such sign gifts have ceased or become exceedingly rare. Continuationists point out that 1 Corinthians 13:8-10 ties the end of certain gifts to “the perfect” — which they read as Christ’s return rather than the closing of the canon — and argue nothing in Scripture explicitly announces tongues has stopped. Both camps include careful, gospel-centered theologians, and this remains a secondary matter on which churches can differ charitably while agreeing on the gospel itself.

It is also worth noting a related debate within continuationist circles about whether modern tongues-speaking always matches the known-language pattern of Acts 2, or whether it can take the form of a private prayer language not tied to any earthly language, drawing on passages like Romans 8:26 and 1 Corinthians 14:2, 14. This adds a further layer of nuance many congregations navigate pastorally rather than dogmatically, recognizing that sincere, Bible-loving believers land in different places on the precise nature of the gift as much as on whether it continues.

Regardless of where you land, Paul’s guardrails still apply: tongues without love is “a noisy gong” (1 Corinthians 13:1), tongues in public worship require interpretation and order (1 Corinthians 14:27-33), and no gift, however dramatic, is proof of superior spirituality. If your church practices tongues, it should be orderly, interpreted, and never a badge of status. If your church does not, it should not mock those who hold a continuationist view in good conscience. What unites every camp is Christ crucified and risen — hold fast to that, and extend grace on this.