3. THE GIFT OF TONGUES

     As Paul tells us in Corinthians, the gift of tongues is pretty worthless unless there’s an interpreter available, it’s good for edifying the person praying but not the church.  Prophesy edifies the church.  Tongue praying is a more personal thing. 

     I knew a man of God in the small mountain community where I raised my sons who had this gift and it was fascinating to watch.  He was a grizzled looking mountain man with a salt and pepper beard, stood about 6’3,” would come to church in his paint stained clothes from his sign painting business.  He had a bit of a paunch, was a bit intimidating looking but was as sweet and kind a man as I’ve known. 

     We had both left the small rural church we’d help build because our pastor was using deceptive means to do what many thought was a squandering of tens of thousands of dollars in his drive to build a mega church campus in this rural community that had no need of it.

     For instance, “All those in favor of joining us to do a mighty work for God, stand up.”  I kept my seat but how do you think that vote went?   At issue was whether or not to pay some fund raisers 30K to show us how to more effectively raise money from ourselves. 

     That was done twice, overpriced property bought at the peak of the market after God had closed the door when we presented our fleece in the form of a final offer a few months prior, etc.   

      My friend started a home Bible study and my wife and I ended up being the only attendees so I got to know him well.

     We were sitting around talking one evening and he said, “I was driving down the road today, praying in the spirit and having a hard time getting my mouth around all the hard g and k sounds.” 

     I was fascinated as I’d never seen this first hand and asked him about it.  “What were you praying I asked.  “I don’t know, I don’t understand the languages, I’m just turning the Holy Spirit loose to pray.”  He went on to tell me he’d prayed for the gift of tongues and been given it.  In the nine supernatural gifts described in 1 Cor 12, interpreting tongues is a separate gift from praying in tongues.  At this editing, the Sad Lady, described in posting #9, is the only person I’ve known so far who seemed to have the gift of interpreting what was being prayed. 

     How did it happen, did he have control over it?  “Yes” he said, I can turn it on and off like a spigot.”  I asked if he could show me. Sure he said and started praying in a fluid sounding language, perhaps Hebraic in nature with lots of sh sounds.

     To me this was proof positive of someone having made a serious spiritual connection with God.   As I understand it, tongues may be any language spoken during or since the time of Jesus when He gave the gift to the apostles for going to foreign lands. 

     This man prayed his wife back to life from certain death of liver disease.  This experience happened prior to my divorce from my first wife. 
     I next encountered tongues while separated from my second wife, in the middle of my bizarre experience.  A new lady mentor I’d found through a craigslist personals posting, told me by word of knowledge that God wanted me to get into a men’s group and suggested I go to the Healing House for a prophetic reading.
     If you google the "Healing House," it's now headed by marijuana dispensaries but it's also a national organization of volunteers with gifts of prophesy and healing who come together to help others.  Miraculous healing comes from their work, both physical and spiritual.  They rebuke and cast out demons, curing many of their spiritual disorders.  
    They'll also give you a message from Jesus by way of the Holy Spirit.  Without knowing anything about you they'll speak right into your life.  Specifics are given only about current circumstances though, encouragement for the future is given symbolically.  For instance as I was once told, "You're very confused right now, Jesus wants to calm you down."  I was manic at the time I heard that, on a high dosage of a drug for obsessive disorder that I later learned causes mania as a side effect and I was very upset and outraged about the legal mess I was in over an incident that hadn't happened.  Then about the future, "I see you in a boxing ring.  It looks like you're losing but God says, it's not over until He says it's over." 

     At my Lady Barnabas's suggestion I joined a men’s group and was later sitting around a table in a huge north CO charismatic church where I was the only man who couldn’t pray in tongues. 

     They said I’d experienced a baptism in the spirit and you usually got tongues after that.  They told me, “Turn your mind off and let the spirit pray, it comes up from the diaphragm.”  I was embarrassed I couldn’t do it. 

     I’d had my experience, later explained to me as baptism of the spirit, in early Oct, 2011.  I’d divorced my wife of 30 years and moved from the mountains to the front range of CO, but still chatted with my old friend occasionally.

     He called me out of the blue and told me the spirit told him to contact me with a verse.  He said, “This has been rumbling around in my head, “let the word do the work”.  Is that a verse, look it up?”

     The closest thing I could find was John 1:1, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.”  That puzzled me for a while, at the time I didn't understand it but I now know the word being referred to is Jesus.  

     In hindsight, I can see that this was advice from God on how I should handle the upcoming legal mess I was about to be in but I misunderstood. 

     At a psychiatrist’s request, as therapy for obsessive disorder, I was to start a journal.  As I started writing, these experiences began to happen and I wrote prolificly. 

     I’d had 5 years of foreign language when I left home at 16 so am fairly articulate for a worn out old construction worker. 

     The journal turned into a blog, starting out as a happy story about how the greatest minds in science, like Stephen Hawking are coming up with theories of our universe that God and His miracles would fit nicely into, but evolved into an attack blog against individuals and a legal institution.  I was to fight a battle against flesh and blood, not the right fight as Ephesians 6:12 tells us, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

    I tried to do things with the written word, not Jesus.  It didn't work out for me.