Why Every Believer Should Speak in Tongues

A Study on Personal Spiritual Edification

Introduction
There is a lot of disputing and even division in the Body of Christ today over one of the most foundational and straightforward concepts in New Testament spirituality. There are scholars in favor of speaking and tongues as well as scholars who teach against it. Scholars such as Richard B. Gaffin Jr. teach that it’s wrong to assume the events described in the book of Acts were to continue for the rest of the Church and not just the early believers.[1] While other scholars in the “Third Wave” or “Charismatic/Pentecostal” camp diametrically oppose and teach that Paul emphasizes the common experience for everyone, not just the early Church. A proponent of this view would be C. Samuel Storms.[2] This paper is an attempt to briefly discuss the benefits of praying and speaking in tongues in a matter that hopefully anyone disagreeing with the use of it would be challenged to ask themselves why they would not want to speak in tongues on a regular basis. A brief glance at the important instructions given by Paul to the church at Corinth and personal experience will help to demonstrate why every believer should speak in tongues. This paper is in no way intended to be exhaustive since a twelve page research paper can only begin to scratch the surface of the world of praying in tongues. This paper is also not intended to focus on disproving the widely held doctrine of cessationism, but simply encourage the reader in his or her practice of praying in the Holy Ghost, and proving that there are benefits derived from speaking in tongues.

Cessationism defined

A brief explanation on the division of this matter is in order before we proceed. Many today in the Body of Christ actually disagree that the use of tongues is for the Church universal but was only intended for the early Church as part of the foundational signs and wonders that would accompany the Gospel’s spread to the Gentile world. The term ‘cessationist’ is used to describe someone who believes that the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased with the death of the last apostle or shortly thereafter.[3] Therefore the use of tongues in particular is also excluded from everyday use since its purpose would have ceased also after this period. This paper is takes as a given that this is not the case. Scripture nowhere states that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are only for a certain period, then were to cease, like proponents of the cessationist doctrine would insist. It’s clear that a key reason for the unbelief in this supernatural phenomenon is not based on anything stated in Scripture if one reads the book of Acts, 1 Corinthians 12-14, and other satellite passages on the matter carefully. These passages teach on the use of it in public gatherings, but nowhere imply or state that the use of the gifts, including but not limited to tongues, were only for the early Church and not the Church universal.

Diversities of Tongues

Diversity is a word simply meaning or indicating ‘differences’. Therefore, the term ‘diversities of tongues’ indicates to us there necessarily are different types of supernatural flows or manifestations of tongues.[4] A case can be made for 4 different uses of tongues in the New Testament. It is important that this distinction is made before proceeding to discuss and focus on one of its uses in particular, tongues for personal edification. In much of the Body of Christ, the same set of rules is imposed on all four uses or functions of the gift. Not much is taught on the diversities of tongues because in the Church not much understanding exists regarding the workings of the Holy Spirit.[5] Experience as well as research has shown most cessationists or noncharismatics reject tongues taking place in any shape or form in a public meeting because if the gift was in manifestation today, there’d be an interpretation following. This is what they believe Scripture teaches.

All five times in the New Testament when believers received the baptism in the Holy Spirit, the outward manifestation of tongues accompanied the experience as evidence that the baptism had happened (Acts 2:1-4, 8:5-8, 12-17, 9:17, 10:44-46, 19:1-6)[6]. Instead of arguing this, the cessationist would state that this was only an experience the early Church was to have accompany the baptism because this is when the Holy Spirit was first poured out on believers, but now that since then all believers receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit upon salvation, no outward manifestation is necessarily necessary. However, the duration of the gifts of the Spirit outlined in 1 Corinthians 12-14, including tongues, cannot in anyway merely serve as initial evidence of the Holy Spirit being poured out on believers and then never demonstrated this way again for the rest of the church age. If the function of the charismatic gifts determines their duration, then their edificatory, rather than simply evidential functions determine their continuation.[7] Until the fullness of the Body of Christ is attained, every believer will need the fullness of the Spirit, therefore we can’t limit the experience to just the early church.

Aside from being the initial evidence of reception of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, there is a function of tongues for interpretation. This is when in a public gathering a message is spoken by a believer in an unknown language, and then interpreted in our native language for the rest of the congregation (1 Cor. 14:5-6, 13). It is this use of tongues that require interpretation that Paul was talking about in 1 Cor 12:30 when he asked the Corinthian believers if all of them interpret, not any of the other uses of this gift, such as the personal prayer language—tongues for personal edification. The second congregational use of tongues is when used as a sign to an unbeliever (1 Cor 14:22-25). Paul says in this passage that when an unbeliever comes in to one of the church’s meetings, and hears something that is spoken in his own native tongue—assuming he doesn’t speak the same language as the congregation, then he will be convinced God is among them by the sign of a believer speaking in his own language miraculously. The third function is tongues of deep intercessional groanings, as talked about in Romans 8:26-27. This is where during prayer the Holy Spirit leads the believer to pray out stuff that he cannot possibly know to pray about with his natural faculties. Out of necessity more on this will be touched on later. The fourth, but probably most foundational and basic use of tongues is that of personal spiritual edification, which this paper seeks to discuss and expound upon, demonstrating why every believer should speak in tongues in at least this fashion.

Reasons why every believer should speak in tongues

1 Corinthians 14:4 mentions that “He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself”. Paul encouraged the believers at Corinth to continue the practice of speaking with other tongues in their worship of God and in their prayer lives as a means of spiritual edification. When praying in tongues, you are in effect praying directly to God in a manner that men listening to your words would not understand what you are saying, but the Holy Spirit is still directly involved in the prayers all the same. Praying in tongues as a means of edifying yourself has been described as though you were charging yourself up like a battery.[8] 1 Cor. 3:16, and 6:19 refer to the believer as the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is this temple that the Holy Spirit is building for Himself to abide in whenever we pray in the Spirit (pray in tongues) since “edify” simply means to build. The believer may not even feel emotionally or physically like the prayer is being answered, but that’s mostly because this is spiritual edification taking place, not emotional or physical edification. Your spirit is the one getting the answer to your prayers because it’s your spirit doing the praying (1 Cor. 14:14), and your spirit is where all permanent change comes from, not by your mind or will power alone.[9] Necessarily, if we’re praying in the Spirit and preparing a place for the Holy Ghost to rule our lives by doing so, then the things that don’t belong in God’s plan, like our flesh and sinful nature, will be purged from us. We can’t pray consistently in tongues for very long before the things that don’t belong in God’s plan for us begin to fall away. Through this process, the Holy Spirit is able to build into our hearts the understanding of God’s perfect will for our personal lives. Jack Hayford says this about the issue of tongues:
The miracle of speaking in tongues is a case of cooperation between humanity and deity. We speak in spiritual languages because we choose to allow the Holy Spirit to express Himself through us in that way. The Holy Spirit is the source – we cooperate. This does not mean that we lose control of our abilities and the Holy Spirit takes over. God never works like that. He gives us the gift and we have to choose to exercise it. God doesn’t do anything without our involvement and partnership with Him. On the contrary, every time we speak with tongues we are exercising our faith and are cooperating with the Holy Spirit.[10]

A second reason why tongues speaking is beneficial, is that it serves as a reminder of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence (John 14:16-17). Speaking in tongues is a flowing stream which should never dry up, and will enrich life spiritually. If one can be conscious of the indwelling presence of the Spirit of God every day, then it is bound to affect the way they live since it is the Holy Spirit who changes us from the inside out, not our own willpower or decision making.

The third reason to consider praying in tongues, as mentioned earlier, is that the believer is praying in line with God’s perfect will. Just because the believer knows how to pray doesn’t mean they know for what to pray as they ought, and therefore also, since it is the Spirit of God inspiring the praying, it helps eliminate selfishness from our prayers.[11] Romans 8:27-28 talks of how the Holy Spirit continually searches your heart. He does this with the intention of removing everything that is contrary to the will of God. Then the Holy Spirit replaces it with the plan He heard for your personal life when God formulated His plan for you. We are too ignorant to pray about our lives and things like our call, so the Holy Spirit’s great reservoir of wisdom and counsel resides within our spirits just waiting to be released with tongues.[12]

To flow with this point, a simple analogy is worth mentioning here to get this point across. As ambassadors of Christ on the earth (2 Cor. 5:20), the believer is here to represent another kingdom, one he currently doesn’t geographically reside in—heaven. An ambassador represents the one they’re sent by, and Christians are here on this earth representing the One who sent them, Jesus Christ, our Lord. For example, an embassy for the United States located in another country doesn’t get its authority from the country it’s in, but from the country it’s representing. Despite the fact this embassy is located geographically on foreign soil, it is not under the influence of the government of that country. An embassy worker’s salary is paid by the country that worker is representing, and is in no way based on the economic climate of that foreign country. They are in that country but not of that country, much like the believer is in this world but not of the world. To relate this all to tongues, consider how the ambassador communicates with his or her homeland. They have a secret mode of communication that the citizens of that country don’t know about and receive orders from their homeland. We as Christians, representatives of the King in heaven, can receive orders from a mode of communication that affects our spirit, enabling us to receive orders not necessarily knowing with our mind what they are! That way the enemy can’t get us to accidentally reveal any secrets under the threat of torture or death, since dead to ourselves as we already are (Rom. 6:2-3,6-7), we don’t know any of the secrets we’ve been praying about in the Spirit! The Holy Spirit hears what is being spoken out at God’s throne and can bring that message and inspire us to pray it out in a language that we don’t understand with our mental faculties and yet we are still praying out the will of God—all the while bypassing our mind!.[13] It’s a brilliant idea of God’s. So why would a believer not want to practice this?

A fourth reason for speaking in tongues, is that it stimulates the believer’s faith. Jude 20 states that by praying in the Spirit, we are building ourselves up in our most holy faith. If the Holy Spirit supernaturally directs the words I speak, then faith must be exercised to trust His inspiration and speak the tongues He gives us. It should be noted that the baptism in the Holy Spirit does not heal us, however, speaking with tongues helps us to learn how to trust God more fully.[14] A further reason for tongues is that it gives spiritual refreshing (Isaiah 28:11-12). Psychological studies have shown that tongues speaking tends to integrate and solidify the personality and make believers more able to cope with life’s problems.[15] Personal experience also confirms this.

Furthermore, tongues are a great means for giving God thanks. In 1 Cor 14:15-17 Paul was correcting the Corinthian believers in their overuse of giving thanks using this divine language, since an unlearned person in spiritual things would not be able to understand what Paul was saying if he were to proceed to give thanks in tongues in their presence. But notice however that he indicates that tongues are a great way of praising God--“you give thanks well” (v.17). People have objected to the use of using the personal prayer language in public meetings, since Paul states emphatically in the epistle to the Corinthians that he’d rather speak five words with understanding that he could teach others, than ten thousand words in a tongue (1 Cor. 14: 19). Also, Paul says that the believers should seek gifts of the Spirit that would cause edification of the whole body not just edification of themselves (1 Cor. 14: 12). Notice that Paul only objects to giving thanks publicly in tongues for the sake of an uninformed person in spiritual matters would not understand or be able to relate. What if a group of believers were together and none among them were uninformed and all were filled with the Holy Spirit and exercised the gift of tongues? Surely this set of rules would not apply, they are free to worship and praise in tongues.

One more use of tongues to include is the fact that speaking with this gift brings the tongue under subjection. James 3:8 says “no man can tame the tongue because it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.” Yielding the tongue to the Holy Spirit to speak with other languages is a giant step toward fully yielding all of our members to God. If we can yield this most unruly member, we can yield any member.[16]

The Holy Spirit As Our Teacher

As mentioned earlier, the Holy Spirit can bypass our mind and put God’s will into our hearts without us even necessarily knowing it. As well as edifying us personally, speaking in tongues can help inoculate us against false teaching. 1 John 5:7 says the Spirit and the Word are one, therefore if the Spirit is in you inspiring your prayers, you are not going to be praying prayers that contradict the Word of God. Rather, an increased hunger should take place in you since you are now praying according to the will of the One who wrote that Word. Praying in tongues never takes away from the Word of God, instead it builds up our spirit by giving us greater understanding of the revelation knowledge already contained in the Word. This kind of praying does nothing but enhance the working of the Word on the inside of us, causing us to receive and walk in more of God’s power as we become more yielded to Him because as the Holy Spirit is praying through us, He is in total agreement with the written Word. [17] This is also why the devil has removed tongues from ¾ of the Church; it’s much easier for believers to be deceived by the ever-changing doctrines of man when they have been separated from one of the primary teaching tools that enables them to learn from the Holy Spirit Himself![18]

Application

I personally grew up in a Brethren church and got saved eventually at the age of fifteen. The first two years of my Christian life, I never heard anything on the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and hence never learned about praying in tongues until I started attending a charismatic church in my hometown with a friend I met one summer. At first the difference in lifestyle among these believers was shocking to me as they had a passion for worship and personal holiness I was not seeing amongst my noncharismatic friends in my home church. The more teaching I got on the charismatic gifts and their functions, the more I started to see how the cessationist viewpoint that I’d grown up with was not founded on anything biblical, but on the lack of it in our midst as a Brethren congregation.
However I never got baptized in the Holy Spirit until a few weeks into my first semester of Bible school. My life changed radically as I prayed in tongues almost at least an hour a day, sometimes several hours a day when I didn’t have classes. A lot of my flesh died and many habits in my life, including things I was bound by, just seemed to have fallen off of me. I was truly a completely different person from the inside out as a result of praying in tongues. The sinful habits that kept me bound were suddenly no longer a problem and I felt like I was walking in new dimensions of Christianity I had never experienced in my most amazing mountaintop experiences. Not only that, but my Bible reading and study habits increased not in quantity but quality. It seemed more revelation knowledge came to me as I read the Word of God, and the Bible just came alive to me. From experience, I don’t personally understand how anyone could not want to practice speaking and praying in tongues. In fact, I felt like all those years I was saved without the baptism experience, that I had been ripped off and cheated out of God’s best for me by the people who although their motives were good in steering me away from movements they felt were dangerous, were clearly misinformed with their doctrine. Praying in tongues has totally changed my life and I can’t even imaging how to pray without this gift now, because it has become so integrated into my prayer habits.

It is unfortunate that disagreement exists in the Body of Christ over this issue, but it’s the person who lacks the experience who is without foundation for their argument, because Scripture lays out instructions and explanation sufficiently on the subject matter. Only someone who has never spoken in tongues would try arguing that it is not for the Body today because if he or she truly knew experientially just what God intended this personal prayer language for, their life would be radically changed. The devil knows what a threat a believer is to his kingdom of darkness who can tap into this revelation knowledge and edification process through a personal Tutor like the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead. It makes sense then that the devil would attempt to confuse its use and get believers to dispute it and avoid it by placing its use only to a certain era instead of the present.

Conclusion

A good number of reasons have been given on why the use of tongues as a personal prayer language used for spiritual edification is very beneficial to the believer. Once a clear case is made and all objections to use its use are cleared out of the skeptic’s mind, then the instructions on the use of the gift of tongues, and the purpose behind the tongues for edification are evident and clear. It really is one of the most enjoyable and spiritual acts the believer can do. Tongues serve a purpose of inoculating us from false teaching and deception; praying in tongues builds up the inner man, stimulates our faith, reminds us of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence, helps us to pray in line with God’s perfect will as well as enabling us to pray for the unknown, and give refreshing, and also serve as a great way of giving God thanks. In closing, Dave Roberson said that praying in tongues is about as supernatural as raising the dead since both have nothing to do with you but with God. With that kind of power working within us, accessible by praying in the Spirit, who wouldn’t want to pray in tongues?

End Notes

[1] Richard B. Gaffin Jr., Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? Four views. Ed. Wayne A. Grudem (Counterpoints book series, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1996) p. 39
[2] C. Samuel Storms, Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? Four Views, Ed. Wayne A. Grudem, p.177
[3] Dr. Josh Peters, Gifts and Baptism of the Holy Spirit class manual, p.58, Spring 2002, F.I.R.E. School of Ministry
[4] Dave Roberson, The Walk of the Spirit, the Walk of Power: The Vital Role of Praying in Tongues, p. 85-85 (Tulsa, Ok: Dave Roberson Ministries, 1999)
[5] Roberson, The Walk of the Spirit, the Walk of Power, p. 85-85
[6] It should be noted however, that 3 out of these 5 times tongues accompanied the baptism, and that one other time it was Paul’s conversion. Although Acts 9 doesn’t include him speaking in tongues upon receiving the Holy Spirit, he states in 1 Cor. 14:18 that he did speak in tongues. The other occasion it is implied with the converts in Samaria in Acts 8 since Simon the sorcerer saw some kind of evidence in v. 18 that the baptism in the Holy Spirit by the laying on of Peter and John’s hands was evidenced by some kind of outward manifestation, most likely it was tongues.
[7] Jon Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Post-Biblical Miracles http://www.home.regent.edu.ruthven/cess.html
[8] Kenneth E. Hagin, Welcome to God’s Family: A Foundational Guide for Spirit-filled Living, p. 59 (RHEMA Bible Church A.K.A. Kenneth Hagin Ministries, Inc., 1997)
[9] Roberson, The Walk of the Spirit, The Walk of Power, p. 211, 215
[10] Jack Hayford, Grounds for Living, p. 172 (Tonbridge, England, Sovereign World Ltd., 2001)
[11] Hagin, Welcome to God’s Family, p. 63-64
[12] Roberson, The Walk of The Spirit, The Walk of Power, p. 16
[13] Brian Parkman, Equipping for Ministry class at F.I.R.E. School of Ministry, Jan 22, 2003
[14]Hagin, Welcome to God’s Family, p. 65-66
[15]Guy P Duffield,., and N.M.Van Cleave, Foundations of Pentecostal Theology (L.I.F.E. Bible College, Los Angeles, c. 1983)
[16] Hagin, Welcome to God’s Family, p. 73
[17] Roberson, The Walk of the Spirit, The Walk of Power, p. 90
[18] Ibid, 129