Somebody Told Me It Was Just My Upbringing

Ioane got told, by a man he respects, that this is only where he is from.

It was said kindly. It was said in the middle of a long good conversation, by somebody with no unkindness in him at all, and it was said as an observation rather than an attack.

You do that because of the room you were raised in. If you had been raised in a different room you would not.

He has not been able to put it down for eleven months.

Because he cannot prove it wrong. He was raised in that room. His grandmother did this, and his aunties did this, and it was in the house before he could walk, and he received it himself at nineteen in a hall with a lino floor and about forty people in it, most of whom were related to him.

If you set out to design a case for learned behavior, you could not do better than his childhood.

He is forty-six. He still prays this way most days. And every time he does, some part of him now stands slightly to the side and takes notes, and the notes all say the same thing: you are doing what the room did.

He has not told the man. He has not told anybody. There is nobody he could raise it with who would not either dismiss it too fast or agree with it too fast, and he does not want either of those.

You may know that side-standing.

Maybe somebody kind said something reasonable to you once. Maybe you cannot refute it. And maybe you have been quietly watching yourself ever since.

Which direction God moved

There is a detail in the first recorded instance of this that the argument never accounts for, and it is not hidden. It is the thing the crowd itself said.

And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?Acts 2:8

Wherein we were born.

That is the miracle they are describing. Not that a new universal language arrived and everybody had to learn it. The opposite. Each man heard in the specific tongue of the specific place he came from, and Luke then lists the places, one after another, fifteen of them, by name, because the particularity is the point and he will not summarize it.

God did not move toward the general. He moved toward every man's own room. That is the direction the first Pentecost travels in, from the beginning, in the text.

Which means being formed by a place is not evidence against God's involvement. The very first thing He did with this was go deliberately into the place each person was formed by and speak there.

And the room you came from is where He goes rather than what disqualifies you. The written word has the crowd naming their own birth tongues as the astonishment, and Luke listing fifteen regions rather than one, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has stood to the side of himself for eleven months.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word puts the manifestation of the Spirit in every one of them, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than auditing where you were standing when it started.

What the argument would do to everything else

Now the shape of the claim, because once you see the shape you will notice it cannot stop where it was aimed.

You do this because of where you were raised.

Apply that evenly. You speak your language because of where you were raised. You love the food you love, sing the way you sing, grieve the way you grieve, and would kneel or not kneel by the same accident.

The man who said it to you also believes what he believes in a form supplied by his own room, and if formation invalidates a thing then it invalidates his position and the sentence eats itself.

Nothing you have is unmediated. There is no version of you that was assembled outside a place. God has never once dealt with such a person, because such a person does not exist, and the whole record from Abraham forward is Him meeting people inside their particular families, in their particular countries, with their particular accents left on.

Formation is not contamination. It is the only channel available, and He has never asked for a different one.

And nothing you carry is disqualified for having arrived through a house. The word says faith comes by hearing, which is a description of a thing arriving through other people, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than suspicious.

And nothing about you is under review for a hall with a lino floor. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has been taking notes on himself since last year.

And I am not answering him for you

Let me be plain about what this is not, because you have been braced for a rebuttal to hand back.

I am not going to tell you the man is wrong about the influence. He is not wrong about the influence. Your grandmother did this in front of you and that is a real cause and it stays a real cause.

What is wrong is only the word just. That word is doing all of the work and it is the one part of the sentence he did not examine.

And nothing here says you must have this, or that a person without it received less, or came later, or is missing anything at all, because the chapter that lists these asks do all speak with tongues in a form that expects the answer no. And nothing here settles what a gathering should do with it, which is a real argument among serious people and it is not being resolved on this page.

The only thing on offer is that a thing can be genuinely inherited and genuinely yours, and that those have never been alternatives.

And you are permitted to keep what came to you through your own people. The word records God arriving in fifteen named birth tongues at once, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a debate you have to win eleven months late.