1 Corinthians 14:1-2

"Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit."

Remembering that the desire for and the use of spiritual gifts should be motivated by selfless love, Paul draws the attention of the Corinthian believers to consider the use of the most coveted gift and most abused gift in that congregation.

Everyone wanted to speak in tongues. Admittedly, it's a pretty cool gift. I'd like to just head over to Romania and start proclaiming God's love in Romanian right away without any study, and when I meet a Hungarian, immediately be able to give him the gospel in Hungarian (the language my wife believes sounds like alien—as in little green men from Mars --alien). That would be a wonderful gift. But verse two indicates that the gift of tongues wasn't always used in a way that God intended the gift to be used.

Verse two is where most cessationists (those who believe that the gift of tongues was a temporary gift for specific miraculous time) believe that Paul is talking about something other than the true gift of tongues. Here tongues seems to be not a human language but a mystical-heavenly language.

This differs from the way the gift of tongues seems to be defined in Acts. In that book, tongues was the ability to speak an unlearned language to communicate God's message to people of a language other than one's native tongue. Whether verse 2 is speaking of a different type of the gift of tongues or of a perversion of the true gift, at the very least, the gift was being misused.

Later in this chapter we will see that the presence of at least an interpreter is still required by scripture even if the gift of tongues is a heavenly language at times. Either way, the gift of tongues was not for a speaker's own benefit but for the benefit of the church. So if the Corinthian tongues speakers were speaking to God alone and no one understood them, they were not exercising the gift as it was intended.