"In the Law it is written, 'By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.' Thus tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is a sign not for unbelievers but for believers."
The gift of tongues is a sign for unbelievers that works two ways. In Acts, the gift helped lead many to salvation (see Acts 2). However, tongues is not a sign that universally leads unbelievers to repentance. Sadly, it is most often a sign of judgment. Despite the privilege of seeing this miraculous sign from God, most still chose to not believe.
The primary intent of the gift of tongues was never to encourage believers or to help them pray to God in a secret prayer language. The gift of tongues is a gift for the merciful condemnation of unbelievers. I say merciful because the sign ought to have lead to their conversion (and sometimes did), but it was a condemnation because most rejected the sign.
The sign of prophecy (forth-telling and foretelling), on the other hand, was a gift for believers. Believers are called to maturity of understanding. To gain that maturity, God has ordained the sharing of His truth. In the first century, prophecy (the sharing of truth from God) involved the expositing (thoroughly explaining the text in light of itself) of the Old Testament, the expositing of the ever growing New Testament, and direct revelation from God. Today, now that the Bible is complete, direct revelation is no longer necessary for our growth and maturity, but the gift of prophecy continues to be a sign for believers as they continue to learn from the exposition of the Old and New Testaments.
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