You don’t hear about dream interpreters much anymore. We generally feel that everything has a scientific explanation. So when we have a dream, we assume it’s our mind trying to make sense out of some nonsense in our day. Likewise, since most people who speak in “tongues” are considered a little loony, you don’t hear about people interpreting tongues. Understandable, yet that probably wasn’t God’s intention.

The Apostle Paul talked about the gift of interpretation when mentioning other spiritual offices and gifts.

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But earnestly desire the higher gifts” (1 Corinthians 12:27–31 ESV).

I’m concerned about the lack of interpretation in our churches. We seem to take most things on face value. And our version of face value is skewed in the direction of rationalism. I believe in reason, but I don’t believe everything can be reasoned away. It’s reason that convicts me and convinces me that the spiritual is essential.

Most of us place the spiritual in a box, only looking for it in spiritual services. Yet it’s all around us. Just like everything has some form of electrical charge (electrons), so the whole world has some sort of spiritual charge. And because the world is this way, interpretation is needed. We have to perceive how God is working—what He is doing.

Interpreters are few and far between today because those who recognize God’s constant interaction with us are few and far between.

Spiritual depravity travels. It works in us, on us, and slowly dwindles down our desire to follow Christ. It is not as if we have immunity to the forces around us.

I’m not sure when the gift of interpretation will become prevalent again. I would like to be hopeful, but I cannot be hopeful until I see us awake to the Spirit again. It’s not that the Spirit has stopped working; it’s that we have stopped acknowledging it.

The spiritual gift of interpretation isn’t prevalent anymore because the other gifts aren’t prevalent anymore. Or better put, they’re generally not acknowledged or identified anymore (at least not properly). Given, there are many who are interpreting the Bible well. There are many great biblical commentators. I’m grateful for these people, but their work alone is not enough. It’s one step among many that must take place. We need people on the ground, in our churches, in our communities, interpreting regularly.

So let’s listen this week. Let’s be intent on hearing Christ. Maybe we can turn this negative into a positive. What can you do to enable interpretation in your community?

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Wikipedia—and it army of public scholars—is a nifty tool for those moments when you just need some quick clarification of your now-faded high school education. Who again was that Pascal dude? How do you spell DNA’s full name? How many Brady Bunch kids took drugs? But as many of us know, Wikipedia is not the best source for precise truth. Too many engineers have been tinkering with the steel beams, if you know what I mean—which is fine if you’re just taking pictures of the stadium, but not so good if you’re planning on sitting on the top row during an earthquake.

Long before Wikipedia sprang from the public’s loins in 2001, Christians have been treating the Bible like open-source software.  My grandmother didn’t need a mouse to make her King James interpretations available, nor did the many churches I attended. At Bible studies and youth meetings, spontaneous chats and dorm-room discussions, the American public eschewed the experts and weighed in on their interpretations of scripture. Interpretation-by-public-opinion, at least for me, became the way I absorbed the truth about the Bible in my early years.

Some girl in the fifth grade yesterday called my ten-year-old son hot.

Yup. Hot.

Okay, so I think the word hot means, like, sexy and attractive and all that. So when I, his mother, hear that a little vixen uses that word to describe my baby-faced son, I’m ready to sign up for recess duty. I might need to check this out.

And then I realize that fifth-grade hotness is really something else entirely. It really means, from what the locals tell me, that she called him crush-worthy, a boy with some perceived value, a boy who won’t pull her ponytail. This is, in fact, a very good thing. It’s really not about being hot after all.

As his mother, I am caught in the unenviable position of interpreting an elementary school lexicon, which I can access only from a distance. I hear a word, a phrase, in solitary confinement and I botch the interpretation. Such linguistic investigation is teaching me a lesson, namely that unless I hang out on your playground and speak your language, I’d best not try to interpret it. It will only make me look foolish.