Counterfeit baptism with the Holy Spirit, interpretation of tongues and prophecy

Brothers in the Lord, I exhort you to flee any counterfeit in the spiritual field, because just as the Italian law punishes those who counterfeit banknotes and circulate counterfeit banknotes, so God punishes those who counterfeit and urge to counterfeit the spiritual things.

Concerning the baptism with the Holy Spirit, I exhort you, if you have not yet received it, to desire it earnestly; pray God continually that He may give you the Holy Spirit, and fast as well, if you perceive that God leads you to fast, in order to receive the Holy Spirit. But while you wait for the baptism with the Holy Spirit do not lean on your own understanding nor act as some advise you to do, whether directly or indirectly with their words or behaviour. In other words, do not invent strange words to utter them in order to make others believe that you have received the Holy Spirit, because such a behaviour would profit you nothing and besides deceiving yourselves you would deceive the other people. Know this, that when the Holy Spirit comes upon a believer, it is the Holy Spirit who moves the believer to speak in other tongues, and He does this in an irresistible way for He seizes the mouth and the tongue of the believer and causes the tongue to speak the tongue (or the tongues) He wants the believer to speak. Luke confirms this when he says that on the day of Pentecost “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4). Therefore, do not worry, saying, ‘How will we be able to speak in an unknown tongue never learned at school?’ because this is something that the Spirit of God will work in you in a glorious and inscrutable way. When He comes upon you, you will be forced to speak in other tongues, and you will realize that you have not invented anything of what you have spoken in another tongue but that you have acted in that way because the Spirit of God moved you to speak in other tongues. And then you will feel just as the Scripture says, that is, “filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4), thus you will see that when you speak in other tongues rivers of living waters will flow out of your heart. In addition to this, you will perceive that you have been clothed with power from on high, that is, that you have received something you did not have upon you before; this will help you realize that you have received the baptism with the Holy Spirit.

Once you are filled with the Holy Spirit and you speak in other tongues, of course, Satan will not stop tempting you, because he will continue to try by his craftiness to deceive you. One of the things he will try to induce you to do is this: he will try to induce you to interpret falsely what you or others have spoken in other tongues. How? He will try to deceive you into thinking that those words spoken in other tongues are addressed to His people according to some particular need existing in the Church or that even though you do not understand those words spoken in other tongues and you don’t have the gift of interpretation of tongues you can ‘interpret’ it anyway provided that the interpretation ‘does not oppose the sound doctrine’. Take heed to yourselves and do not deceive yourselves and the others either. Let it be known to you that just as speaking in tongues is supernatural, so is supernatural interpreting tongues; that is to say, it is through the Holy Spirit that you can interpret tongues and not by intuition nor by your own ability. Therefore if the Holy Spirit enables you to interpret tongues, you will understand them as you understand the English language and so you will be able, without understanding how you can do such a thing, to interpret tongues for the Church. But this will happen by the Spirit; it is something that is beyond our understanding, it is something that proceeds from the Spirit of God. Finally, I remind you that since he who speaks in other tongues speaks to God and not to men (1 Corinthians 14:2), the interpretation is directed toward God, but you have no need that I should write to you about this because when the Holy Spirit enables you to interpret you will realize it personally.

The devil will try also to induce you to think that by repeating some passages of the Bible, one after another, you are manifesting the gift of prophecy. Take heed to yourselves and do not fall into this diabolical trap. When the Holy Spirit comes upon a believer and moves him to prophesy he does not begin to recite some biblical passages learnt by heart, not at all, because the message comes from the Spirit of God and thus it is extemporary and unpredictable. It is always something you did not prepare beforehand and you did not intend to say. The reason is because the gift of prophecy is not a human ability but a supernatural ability.

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