Interactions with God #84
I do pray in tongues a bunch, though very few know that. I pray in tongues while I drive, take a shower, wash dishes or anytime I am generally putting around. I even pray like that when doing simple tasks at work. To avoid freaking people out, I usually speak in tongues under my breath so no one can hear. Though at home I do it out loud. My kids have grown up hearing me pray like that. Yes, I do it a lot.
Why? Well, as I have said previously, praying to God is nothing more than talking to God. However the problem remains that I am pretty much clueless on what to pray for. I don’t know what is best for myself, let alone anyone else. I opt to praying in the Spirit, because it is God’s Spirit who is actually doing the prayer. And from my experience with the following Interaction with God, I know that type of prayer is also something more. It is very powerful and I would rather pray in power than not.
On one of the home group nights in 2000, just after my teaching time, I looked at John’s wife, Jessica, and suddenly had a strong feeling that God had a prophetic word for her.
As I have said before, a prophetic message from God is nothing more than God telling you something and you repeating it to someone else. It is really not a big deal, other than the fact that it is something God speaks. The source He uses is not important, other than their reliability. Actually, giving a word like this is relatively easy in our culture today. Why? Well because unlike the way it was done in the Old Testament, no one throws rocks at you when you are wrong. And yes, they didn’t stop throwing rocks until the unreliable prophet stopped breathing. Sadly, reliability is rarely questioned anymore…
So, I had a message for Jessica that I believed was from God. Now, I don’t like to “speak for God” and have it not be from God. Whether or not I get stoned to death, saying something is a “word from God” but it is not, is seriously wrong! So, I don’t say anything without a REALLY strong impression. I had one. Yet, I didn’t know the time frame of it. “Jessica, I believe God has a word for you. He is going to give you the Gift of Interpretation of Tongues.’ I figured that this would happen in a few months or years. I was wrong.
The gift of Interpretation of Tongues is one of the Gifts of the Spirit listed in the book of 1 Corinthians. To explain it simply, a person with the Gift of Interpretation is able to hear someone speaking in tongues and offer an interpretation - in their native language. When someone speaks in tongues, according to scripture, they are speaking in a language that they do not know. The tongue itself is not to be spoken aloud in the church service, UNLESS there is someone who is gifted with the ability to interpret said tongue. The interpreter is also another, who does not know the language spoken. However since the Spirit of God does, He gives the person with the Gift of Interpretation the translated message. Make sense? Well if not, you can read what Paul the Apostle wrote about it in the book of 1 Corinthians.
Many years before, I had seen someone who supposedly had this gift. It was at the Church I attended in NH. Though, even then, I had my doubts that it really was the gift. Why? Well, every so often a woman would get up to speak in tongues from the microphone. She would say, phonetically, “Soodei, Cominidi, cumida Comini Chee” and then repeat that phrase maybe 5 or 6 times. As I said earlier, the tongue, according to the bible, is a LANGUAGE. Though it may sound like meaningless babel to those who don’t know that particular language, it is still a language. If that phrase was really a spoken language, then wouldn’t it be translated as a short phrase repeating itself? However, when another member of this woman’s family would get up to “interpret” the message, what he delivered was much longer than the combined repeated phrases and not repeated at all. This never made sense to me. Also, every time the woman offered up a publicly spoken tongue, it was the EXACT same phrase (which is why I remember it so well), yet the “interpreted” message was always different. Yes, I had my doubts, but after Jessica, I was positive that the man in NH did not have the gift. No, not at all.
Fully expecting nothing more to be said about it, we moved into prayer time. Jessica was sitting next to another home group member. Alex, I believe. Alex spoke in tongues quietly, but loud enough for Jessica to hear, as we prayed for another person. She suddenly freaked out. Jessica excitedly told us all that she could hear what Alex was saying…in English, almost as if it was dubbed over the tongue. This was only minutes after the word from God came out of my mouth.
Well, I wish I could say that we handled this in a mature, biblical manner. We didn’t. No, we all got just as excited and acted like a bunch of kids. That night and several weeks to follow we would drive Jessica crazy by speaking in tongues out loud, just so we could hear what the Spirit of God was saying. Ok, it was really cool. Though eventually, I had to put a lid on much of it as Jessica was getting tired of becoming a sideshow.
Afterward, she used the gift only in times of prayer or when Jessica realized the words she heard were for meant for the entire group. Her gift became a powerful ministry addition to our home group meetings.
Aside from the awesomeness of hearing God speak in the very real gift of Interpretation of Tongues, came the realization that when Jessica told you what the Spirit of God said, it almost always lined up to what our hearts were feeling as we spoke the tongue. This is when I understood that speaking in tongues isn’t just the Holy Spirit speaking through us, but something much, much more. It is a marriage of God’s heart with our own. It is a perfect prayer. Yes, this is why I do it - a lot.