I believe very much in the practice of praying in tongues, even getting messages in tongues from God is something I am open to (as long as they are interpreted). The blessings of God that come when we pray much in the Holy Spirit are real and very valuable. You can see what I believe about the Baptism in the Holy Spirit here.

But I believe it must be said that speaking in tongues in itself is certainly no guarantee that a person is not in deception. Its not at all a guarantee.

Every warning in the New Testament was written to people who WERE baptized in the Spirit and as far as I am concerned they did speak in tongues also, most of them, though not as a gift to the church but as a private prayer language to God (see Mark 16:17; Jude 20; Ephesians 6:18; 1 Corinthians 14:14,15). The Book of Acts shows that speaking in tongues was normative for believers baptized in the Holy Spirit, but to show this further is not the purpose of this post.

What I am saying is that these believers in the early church DID speak in tongues and YET they WERE vulnerable to false teachers, false prophets and those who would creep in amongst the believers and bring in destructive heresies.

You don't need to be walking with God in order to speak in tongues, and just because you speak in tongues does not mean that you cannot be deceived. Otherwise, the warnings given to the the apostles themselves and to the New Testament believers would have been unnecessary.

I will give two examples of these warnings in the New Testament, and we will see how the very things being warned against are believed by a huge portion of the professing evangelical/pentecostal church today.

1. "Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day [of Christ] will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition" (2 Thessalonians 2:3)..

There it is, in black and white, we are warned not to be
deceived about this, and yet, in contradiction to Paul, huge numbers of Christians believe that Christ WILL return before the antichrist comes. Why on earth would Paul say this to these early C

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