What does speaking in other tongues sound like?
Hi, welcome to today's Little Lesson. Thank you so very much for joining me and our previous
two little lessons, we started talking about the biblical topic of speaking
in other tongues, a very biblical topic. Jesus talked about it. Paul talked about it in one of
his epistles. It's all through the Book of Acts, and so something worth our study. We've already
begun to look at this in our previous two little lessons so if you just happened upon
this little lesson, you really would be better off if you see the first two, because we're
building on a foundation here, okay. So you can go ahead and watch this. I can't stop you;
can't reach to that camera and make you do anything, but I'm just telling you,
because I love you. And I want you to experience God's best and we've laid a foundation.
So now, I want to talk about today. What speaking in tongues sounds like.
Well, speaking in tongues ... speaking in other tongues in the Bible is the
Holy Spirit given ability to speak in a language and I'll just keep it that. Speak a language
so it could be praying, speaking to God in a language you've never learned, or there's another
use of tongues according to scripture and we'll study this a little bit down the road, where it's
not so much prayer as it is more like prophecy, where God is speaking through an individual
in tongues and it's interpreted. Okay. So that's down the road,
hang in there. But speaking in tongues, it's supernatural. When Theologians say that speaking
in tongues, that's like our great professors who studied Latin and learned Hebrew and Greek.
If you're listening to those guys, just turn the channel.
They don't have a clue what they're talking about. In the Bible, the people that spoke in tongues,
it wasn't people that studied Latin and Hebrew and professors at seminaries; linguists. No,
no. On the day of Pentecost, all the apostles and about 120 people spoke in other tongues. And then
same thing happened other places in the Book of Acts, right? And it didn't say on the day
of Pentecost, they all went to college for four years and learned how to speak Hebrew,
no. They all suddenly started speaking in languages they had never learned. They didn't
know what they were saying, but others who rushed to the place where they were the upper room, heard
them speaking in their languages and they realized that these men and women were praising God.
And speaking of his mighty deeds, that's biblical speaking in tongues.
So what does speaking in tongues sound like? Well, it sounds like someone's speaking a language.
If you don't understand English, for example, if you're watching this right now,
you haven't got a clue what I'm saying, and I'm speaking in a language that you don't understand,
you can just tell it's a language, but you don't know what I'm saying.
Right now, you don't know what I'm ... you don't know that I'm saying that you don't
know what I'm saying. So speaking tongues is just people speaking in another language.
Now, how many languages are there in the world? Well, there's the major languages,
we all know that. English is the most broadly spoken language in the world, but I think
more people speak Chinese than English because there's so many Chinese people.
One out of every five people in the world is Chinese.
And then of course there are multiple languages that are widespread. Spanish spoken throughout
Latin America. And then you have a Russian of course, spoken throughout Russia and all the
former Soviet Union countries. And you've just got so many other languages. I mean,
there are literally thousands of languages in the world today,
but some of them are spoken by just a very small number of people. And they're actually
many cases dying languages. So it's really interesting, the whole study of linguistics.
Speaking tongues might not only be speaking in an unknown language that's on the earth
today. It could be speaking in a human language of the past because there are
dead languages and Paul in his famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13 said,
"If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels," he said. So it's within the
realm of possibilities that speaking in tongues could include angelic languages.
All right. So once you have spoken in tongues, and again, this is only for Christians. You
have to be a born again believer in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit has to empower you; give you
that ability. You just can't do it yourself. Once you've done it once, then you can do it any time
thereafter and you can use it as a regular part of your prayer life as supernatural,
Holy Spirit, given prayer. And I absolutely love it. I spend time just about every morning,
praying in other tongues and most the time I do not know what I'm saying.
All right. So let me just give an example just in case you've never heard anyone speak in tongues
and I'm going to speak in tongues and you can listen along and see what you think, okay?
Now, you notice that I started when I wanted to, and I stopped when I wanted to. That's
thoroughly biblical, not in this little lesson, but in a future little lesson in this series,
I'll show you in the Bible where that's thoroughly biblical. The apostle Paul made it very clear that
when he spoke in tongues, it was up to him. He started when he wanted to, he stopped when he
wanted just like you do in your known language. You probably didn't understand anything I said,
but you probably recognize that, "Oh, that sounds like a pretty authentic language."
Some people say, "Well, you're just making that up." Well, I don't think so. I don't think so.
If I was going to make up a language, I think the best I could do would be ooga,
booga, wooga, tooga, something like that, but that's not really a convincing language. I just
made that up. But what I was doing previously for that 30 or 45 seconds or so, that was speaking in
other tongues. I don't know what I said. The utterance did not come out of my head. It came
out of ... Bible talks about the utterance comes out of your spirit and we can pray with our minds,
in my case that'd be English because I only speak English, but we can also pray with the
spirit. What I just did ... And I might also add that I don't know what language that was.
And since 1976, when I first spoke in tongues, I've spoken in many different languages, not the
one you just heard. I've spoken in actually in Japanese three times to the degree that people
who were with me in prayer meetings while I was praying in that language, heard me speak Japanese
and told me what I said in Japanese. Okay. That's supernatural. I said one time in Japanese, "You
are so good." See, I was praising God. One time I said in Japanese, "Thank you very much." I don't
know how to say either one of those. Right now, if someone held a gun to my head and said, say
"You are so good, thank you very much" in Japanese, I would have to say, "Shoot me."
But I have said those things in Japanese. One time, I said in Japanese, according to the person
who understood some Japanese who heard me praying, "Come quickly, come quickly. I am waiting."
Well, that's pretty scriptural, right? Praying for Jesus to come quickly. I'm waiting for Jesus.
This is thirdly biblical. And this is not just something for a minority
of Christians or some kind of elite Christian or some kind of people that reach some kind of
spiritual status with God. No sir, no ma'am, this is a gift. And if you'll stick with me over the
next little lessons, I'm going to do my best to look at the scripture and explain it in light of
what I know and what I've experienced and so forth. And I'll tell you how you
can receive this gift and experience the blessing of it too. And your language is
not going to be the same language that I got. God's got a lot of languages. Okay.
All right. We're out of time for this little lesson. Thank you so much for joining me. If
you've never checked out, HeavensFamily.org, the word heaven, the letter S, family.org.
Check us out. That's the ministry I've been blessed to leave for 20 years
and the Lord's helping us to care for the least of these all over the world
and the advance Jesus' kingdom. Okay. Until next time, may the Lord bless you.