Answers · Baptism & Salvation
Must a person speak in tongues?
The teaching carried on this site is plain: the baptism of the Holy Ghost is the birth of the Spirit (John 3:5), and those who receive it speak with other tongues — as the apostles did at Pentecost, and as believers did throughout the book of Acts. In Acts the experience is never described as a later, optional stage added to a completed conversion; it is the initiating experience of the new covenant, and tongues are its consistent, audible sign. At Pentecost the hundred and twenty "were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." At Ephesus, years later and a world away, the same thing happened to men who had only known John's baptism.
"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 (KJV)
"And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Ghost came on them; and they spake with tongues, and prophesied."
— Acts 19:6 (KJV)
So the answer is not that God requires a performance from us. It is that the gift itself, when it comes as it came in Acts, is known the way it was known then: at Cornelius's house the Jewish believers "were astonished" precisely because they heard the Gentiles "speak with tongues, and magnify God" (Acts 10:45–46) — that hearing was their evidence the gift had been given. Paul, who regulated the gift's use in the assembly, closed his instruction with "forbid to speak with tongues" — not (1 Corinthians 14:39).