Who Do You Like To Talk To?

“And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance. Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. And when this sound occurred, the crowd came together, and were bewildered because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language.” (Acts 2:4-6)

I have always thought that this passage of scripture has a meaning that we often miss. Yes, the obvious meaning is that God miraculously enabled the disciples of Jesus gathered on the day of Pentecost to speak the various languages of those in the city who had gathered for the festival, in order to communicate the Gospel to the nations.
(Notice that God did not enable those who had gathered for the Feast to miraculously speak Hebrew. Instead, it was the other way around.) In the same way, we are all surrounded by ‘gathered’ people in our daily lives. These people each speak their own ‘language’, depending on the group with which they identify. In other words, some are bikers, some are mothers of preschoolers, some are businessman etc. For this reason, I say that this scripture applies to us today, as follows: If you if are a biker yourself, then
you ‘speak biker’. I.e., you are someone who can “speak their language”. If you are you a businessman you speak that language. And so on.

I work as a chaplain at Fox Run Retirement Community in Novi, MI. Part of my responsibility is to lead a Grief Support Group, for those who have recently lost a spouse. One of the ways that I encourage them, is to tell them that they have just been given a new language that not everyone else can speak. A language only understood by those who have experienced the loss of a spouse. No one else knows what that feels like, but they do. No one naturally speaks that language, except for those who know the meaning of that ‘language’ by experience. I encourage them by saying that God in His wisdom has given them a Pentecost language, out of their grief. Now it’s up
to them to use it. The promise I give them, is that, if they do, they will be happier for having done so. They will make new friends. They will meet new people that they genuine like to talk to, because they can now relate to them on a very deep level.

Who do you like to speak to? It just might be that your answer to that question is a “Pentecost gift”. If we are to be sent out as planters in this day and age, we must be ‘different kinds of communicators, speaking to different kinds of people’. We must think about the answer to that question, and see that answer as the Pentecost language that each of us has been given!