Let me say at the outset what I hope you’ll carry all the way through: speaking in tongues is in the Bible, and so are firm instructions about it. Any position that ignores the first fact, or the second, will hurt somebody. I have known believers wounded by churches that demanded tongues of them, and believers wounded by churches that mocked what they held precious. Scripture makes room for neither wound.
Pentecost: where it began
The gift first appears on the day of Pentecost, when the risen Christ poured out the Holy Spirit on His waiting church:
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Acts 2:4
Notice what these tongues were: real human languages the speakers had never learned. Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims from across the known world, and each heard unschooled Galileans declaring God’s praise in his own mother tongue — “we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:11). The miracle served the mission. At Babel, God scattered proud humanity by confusing its language; at Pentecost, He began gathering a people from every language on earth. The sign said, in effect: this gospel is for everyone. (For the larger story of who the Spirit is and what He does, see Who Is the Holy Spirit?)
Corinth: the gift and the correction
The other major passage is 1 Corinthians 12–14, and the context matters: Paul is correcting a church that had turned tongues into a status symbol and its services into chaos. He does not forbid the gift — he ranks it, regulates it, and reframes it. Tongues-speech directed to God, he says, is real communion: “For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries” (1 Corinthians 14:2). But in the gathered church, he insists on intelligibility, because the goal of a church service is that everyone be built up:
Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue. 1 Corinthians 14:19
Five understood words outweigh ten thousand mysterious ones — that is the apostle’s arithmetic. So he limits public tongues to two or three speakers, one at a time, and only when someone can interpret; otherwise, keep silence and speak to God privately. None of this is hostility to the gift. It is love for the congregation, from the same pen that wrote, “I would that ye all spake with tongues, but rather that ye prophesied.”
Must every Christian speak in tongues?
Here is the question that has caused the most pain, and Paul answers it in a single line of rhetorical questions, each expecting the answer no:
Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret? 1 Corinthians 12:30
Do all speak with tongues? No — no more than all are apostles or all work miracles. Paul’s whole argument in chapter 12 is that the Spirit distributes different gifts to different members “as he will,” the way a body needs hands and eyes and feet. That means the absence of tongues is not the absence of the Spirit. Scripture’s test of the Spirit’s presence is not a particular gift but His fruit — love, joy, peace, longsuffering — and the confession that Jesus is Lord. If you have trusted Christ and never spoken in a tongue, nothing is missing from your salvation. And if God has given you that gift for your private prayer, no one has the right to despise it: “forbid not to speak with tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:39). (To discover how the Spirit has equipped you, start with What Are Spiritual Gifts?)
Do tongues continue today?
Honest Christians divide here, and I’ll set out both views fairly. Some — often called cessationists — believe tongues and the other sign-gifts belonged to the founding era of the church, authenticating the apostles until the New Testament was complete; they point to 1 Corinthians 13:8, “whether there be tongues, they shall cease.” Others — continuationists, including hundreds of millions of Pentecostal and charismatic believers — hold that the gifts continue until Christ returns, since that same passage says tongues cease when “that which is perfect is come,” which they take to mean the Lord’s return, not the Bible’s completion. Both camps love Scripture; both can be found among people I’d trust with my life. My counsel is the one Billy Graham modeled for half a century: do not let this question divide what Christ has joined. Neither seek the gift as a badge of rank, nor scorn it as fanaticism. Test everything by Scripture, and remember that the devil would far rather have Christians fighting about tongues than praying in any language at all.
The more excellent way
It is no accident that the Bible’s great chapter on love sits exactly between the two chapters on spiritual gifts. Paul planted it there on purpose, and its opening line names our subject:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 1 Corinthians 13:1
You can have the most spectacular gift in the room and be nothing but noise. Love is the measure of every gift — tongues, teaching, giving, all of them — because gifts are tools for loving the body, not trophies for the shelf. So Paul closes the discussion with a rule broad enough for every church and every era: “Let all things be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40).
So where does this leave you? If you speak in tongues: thank God for it, use it to pray and praise, keep it orderly in public, and let love govern it. If you don’t: you lack nothing, for the same Spirit dwells in you and has gifted you another way — find that way and pour it out for the church. If you’re unsure what to make of it all: stay humble, stay biblical, and refuse to break fellowship over it. The gift of tongues, where God gives it, is a way of praying; and prayer — in English, in Aramaic, or in a tongue only God understands — was always the point. (If your prayer life needs rekindling in any language, begin with How to Pray and What Is Worship?) The Spirit was not poured out at Pentecost to give us something to argue about. He was poured out so that every tongue on earth might learn to say: Jesus Christ is Lord.