Barbarians!

1 Corinthians 14:10-11 There are doubtless many different languages in the world, and none is without meaning, but if I do not know the meaning of the language, I will be a barbarian to the speaker and the speaker a barbarian to me.
We tend to think of barbarians like they are presented in movies and comics, guys in furry vests with horns on their helmets, primitive and violent, (and speaking English like a Schwarzenegger) but the word itself has a slightly more high class origin.
“Bar-bar-bar”. That’s the source of the term “barbarian”. Greeks thought it funny to mock non-Greeks by saying that that’s what their native tongues sounded like, and to them, anyone who wasn’t Greek was a “bar-bar-bar-barian”, no matter how they dressed. Most of us are familiar with similar thinking today. Not long ago, a news service got into trouble by reporting that the pilot of a crashed Asiana airplane was named “Sum Ting Wong” (bad pidgin for “Some Thing Wrong”), along with crew members “Wi Tu Low” (we too low), and “Bang Din Ow” (you figure it out). They broadcast the report before anyone noticed someone had been pulling their leg. Making bad jokes out of unusual accents and unknown languages has been around for a long time.
Genesis 11:9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
Language is primarily about the exchange of information. Ever since Babel, there have been misunderstandings between people - some catastrophic - because of breakdowns of language. If you are at the beach in Cancun and suddenly people are screaming “tiburon”, if might take you a very important minute to discover you should get out of the water now, since the "Jaws" theme music is about to start playing! (You could make a case that their should be some universal across-every-language words that are the same everywhere, and “shark” is one of them!)
Most of us are actually multi-lingual in some measure. We speak Japanese: “Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki”, Cooking: “2 tsps. salt, 4 lbs. flour, microwave on high”, Religious: “Rapture, Saved, Baptize”, Music: “Rap, Rock, Folk, DJ”, and many others, with varying levels of fluency.
I heard recently that one way to stave off senility was to keep learning, and learning language was touted as one of the better ways to do that. Let me suggest that one of the best languages we can spend our time learning is the language of Heaven.
I’m going to set your mind at ease, I’m not talking about Greek or Hebrew, or any other human tongue. I’m talking about a way of communicating that we can practice on Earth that will be essential in Heaven, as it will be the only one in use: Love. I could (and often do) talk about the various Greek words and what they mean, but the bottom line is that it is THE language that distinguishes God’s people from the World’s people.
John 13:35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Put your energy into learning this, and you’ll be ready for Heaven when you get there!