If it is in the Bible, it is so. It’s not even to be prayed about. It’s to be received and acted upon. Inactivity is a robber which steals blessings. Increase comes by action, by using what we have and know. Your life must be one of going on from faith to faith.4
— SMITH WIGGLESWORTH
To be honest, I had some bad experiences as the son of a Pentecostal minister!
I was baptized in the Holy Spirit on October 20, 1980. I’ll never forget it, but not just because it was an experience that changed my life. I’ll never forget it because it was the culmination of a five-month season where I questioned everything about this experience in general.
Just a few months prior, I had attended a youth camp. One evening the message was about the experience that Jesus called being baptized in the Holy Spirit. At the conclusion of the message, the speaker called us forward if we wanted to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Well, I was ready. I couldn’t wait for the moment to arrive. The message had filled me with such vision and hunger for the presence and power of God that I ran to the front as soon as they gave us the opportunity.
I understood what the Bible taught about this moment. In just about every case in the book of Acts when people were baptized in the Holy Spirit, they responded to His presence by declaring their praise out loud.
•“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them” (Acts 2:4).
•“The Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The [Jewish] believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles [non-Jews]. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God” (Acts 10:44–46).
•“When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied” (Acts 19:6).
So when I went to the front to receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit, I fully expected to speak in tongues. The speaker that evening had done a great job of painting the picture of what happened to those who experienced the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts. So I was ready, and so were those who were praying for me.
I guess it shows that I was loved, but there were way too many people converged to pray for me that night. It was a hot summer evening, and about fifteen of my friends and youth leaders were gathered around me. Most of them placed a hand on my head, or shoulder, or arm. The Bible talks about laying hands on people in prayer, and these good friends were reaching out to encourage me. Some were swaying as they prayed, so this large crowd of people (with me in the center) began to sway back and forth like the waves of the ocean. Many of them were praying out loud; some were shouting encouragements.
“Receive! In Jesus name! Now speak it out! Release the gift! Be filled! Be filled!”
I sometimes joke that someone was saying, “Hold on, hold on!” and another was saying, “Let go, let go!” I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I can tell you that I was thoroughly confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed by the expectation for me to perform some spiritual feat on cue. It was religious pandemonium. And it went on and on for what seemed like hours (although it was probably only about fifteen minutes).
Finally, I got the courage to break out of the circle of expectation. I retreated to the front row and sat with my head in my hands, hoping people would just leave me alone to think for a minute. Some friends came over to sit next to me and kept praying. I had to ask them to stop, and explained that I just needed a few minutes to pray on my own. They respected that, but I could tell they were disappointed. They wanted me to experience a breakthrough in this area so badly, and nothing visible seemed to happen.
My reaction to that experience was to question everything. My thoughts went something like this:
•Is something wrong with me? Do I have sin in my life and that’s why I couldn’t speak in tongues?
•Maybe everyone is just crazy? How can this be from God?
•What in the world is this “speaking in tongues” thing anyway? Is it really in the Bible? Is it necessary? Why do they make such a big deal out of it? It just seems weird to me!
•What does speaking in tongues have to do with the baptism in the Holy Spirit? Can’t I just be filled with the Spirit without all this other stuff?
•I’m more of a private person, so can’t I just experience this in my own way? Do I really have to declare anything out loud to be baptized in the Holy Spirit?
For five months, I wrestled through these questions. I asked my dad to sit down with me and I interrogated him on what the Bible teaches. He calmly answered every one of my questions from the Bible. I had to admit that being filled with the Spirit was in there. There was no denying the verses listed in the book of Acts and in other books like 1 Corinthians. But I still wasn’t ready to deal with the disappointment I felt from that night at youth camp. So I decided just to put the whole idea on the shelf for a while … but God wouldn’t allow it. Every place I went people were talking about it.
I showed up at church, and the speaker selected as his text a passage of Scripture that dealt with the baptism in the Holy Spirit. A few days later, I attended a youth small group, and the students leading the meeting brought up the topic and shared their testimonies about being filled with the Spirit. Even when I turned on a Christian radio station, someone was preaching about it. Dare I say it was kind of spooky?
Finally, I had my moment of breakthrough. It was in my living room. It was after our youth small group had met and once again this was the topic of discussion. Out of frustration, I said to one of my friends, “I give up! I know God wants me to experience the baptism in the Holy Spirit, but I just don’t think it will ever happen for me.” My friend gently and quietly challenged me, “Let’s pray right now.”
As we prayed, just the two of us in a quiet room, I began to feel something happen within me. It was that warm sensation in my chest that I often felt when I was in church or in a season of worship. It grew stronger and stronger as I verbalized praise to God.
Then my friend said to me, “God is all over you! I can sense that He’s baptizing you in the Holy Spirit at this moment. Now, what you need to do is tune into what He says to you. When you hear a syllable in your spirit that you don’t recognize in English, just speak it out loud. That’s what speaking in tongues is. It is speaking in a language that God supernaturally gives to you. So just say what you hear in your heart.”
And just like that, I spoke out in a spiritual language. As I did, I felt that rush of the river of the Holy Spirit flowing from within me. It was amazing. So I kept on praying out loud what the Holy Spirit gave me to say. As I did this, His presence flooded my being over and over again. An hour in prayer this way felt like just a few minutes.
I have never been the same since that night!
I realize that you may have some of the same questions I wrestled through. So just like my father did, I want to calmly and biblically address these questions one at a time. My dad sat with me at the kitchen table. We both pulled out our Bibles, and he took me through passage after passage to address my objections. So let’s sit together for a moment and do the same.
QUESTION 1:
IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME?
DO I HAVE SIN IN MY LIFE AND THAT’S WHY I CAN’T SPEAK IN TONGUES?
What a deflating feeling to believe that God has singled you out as unworthy. That was the bottom line of how I felt: rejected, unworthy, exposed, and judged before the entire world and found wanting. No one should ever feel this way. So often, where this experience is concerned, well-meaning people put a huge amount of pressure on those seeking to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. The result is that when people fail to speak in tongues, they feel like something is wrong with them or wrong with the entire idea of Holy Spirit baptism.
First of all, we need to understand that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is a gift. This is how Jesus described the experience to the disciples. “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised” (Acts 1:4, emphasis added). The word used here in the Greek is epaggelia, which means: “to announce the fulfillment of a promised good thing to be given.”
The baptism in the Holy Spirit is a promise that is given to all who show up for it.
The baptism in the Holy Spirit is a promise that is given to all who show up for it. It isn’t something we earn by being worthy. It’s something we obtain simply by showing up to receive what God has promised to give us.
I’m writing this book, in a coffee shop, at the moment. Earlier today, I received an email notice from this shop announcing to me that if I showed up today I would receive a free specialty drink because last month I had a birthday. The coffee shop gave me an epaggelia (a declared promise of a good thing to be given). When I showed up to receive my free drink, I wasn’t thinking about whether or not I was worthy to obtain this Grande Cappuccino. I didn’t do any self-examination before I made the request to the barista. I just asked to receive what the shop had promised me.
In a similar way, the Father promises to give the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks. It’s a gift that He gives by grace. None of us will ever deserve this gift, but God promises to give the Holy Spirit to all those who ask. In another place, Jesus said, “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke 11:13)!
First, the baptism in the Holy Spirit is a gift that is promised by the Father; we cannot earn it. Second, the baptism in the Holy Spirit is a grant that is conveyed by God so that we can begin to operate according to His purpose.
When I went to college, I applied to several organizations to receive a grant: funds conveyed to me to pay for my studies. Several of these organizations approved me and released a grant to me so I could afford to do what I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. This is what the Father wants for you and me. He wants to convey the Holy Spirit on us as a grant, giving us the capacity to be a witness for the resurrected Jesus, which we can’t accomplish without His help.
You don’t have to be worthy to receive this gift or to be given this grant. You just need to show up and ask for it. God doesn’t reject you and He doesn’t judge you as inferior or lacking. He doesn’t single you out as someone who is a disappointment to Him. He doesn’t expose you as a fraud or a failure. He wants to give you what He promised. I can say from personal experience that it’s fruitless to spend a lot of time grieving over your own unworthiness.
Yes, if you look close enough at my life, you’ll find plenty of reasons why God should just leave me and reject me. I fail. I’m a sinner. I fall short of perfection. My life is often selfish and sinful. But God didn’t save me because I was worthy. He saved me because He loved me. I don’t understand it; but it’s true. He loves me, and He isn’t going to change His mind about that fact. Not only does He love me, He accepts me and wants to do amazing things in my life.
In the same way, the Father wants to give me the Holy Spirit in greater measure just because He has chosen to do that for me. I’m His child; He’s my Father. He knows how to give His kids His best gifts. So if I ask for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in my life, He has promised to give it to me. I don’t have to earn it. I don’t have to prove that I’m worthy of it. All I can do is receive it.
QUESTION 2:
IS EVERYONE JUST CRAZY?
CAN THIS REALLY BE FROM GOD?
This is often the response I hear to the very idea of speaking in tongues. It just sounds odd, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just me, but the first time I heard of this, I thought, What? Speaking in a language you have never studied? Impossible! Weird! Spooky!
Then I heard a woman speaking in tongues in church. I think I was seven or eight years old. I heard a woman speaking in tongues in church. She was seated in the pew just behind me, praying in a very high-pitched tone, and it startled me. All of a sudden, she closed her eyes, started to cry, and belted out a prayer in a language that sounded something like Chinese to me. It freaked me out! I thought to myself, I will do a lot of things in life, but I will never do that!
Later, as I read the Bible for myself, I discovered this is something real. It’s biblical. Over centuries, millions of people have practiced it. The apostle Paul said, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you” (1 Corinthians 14:18). He was writing to the Corinthian church, which was well known for their use and pursuit of spiritual gifts. Obviously, for Paul, this was a regular and normal experience.
Once I had prayed in tongues, I understood that this experience isn’t spooky at all. I don’t have to stop being the quiet, introverted, private person that I am to pray in a spiritual language. I never have prayed like that woman who scared me to death when I was seven. My nature isn’t to be overly-emotional, even when God is working in my life. I haven’t had to become loud or emotional to experience the Holy Spirit’s work in my life. The great thing is, people who are naturally loud and emotional don’t have to be like me. They can be who they are and respond to God according to their own personality.
QUESTION 3:
WHAT IN THE WORLD IS SPEAKING IN TONGUES ANYWAY?
What makes the biblical experience of speaking in tongues unique is that it’s a supernatural act; a language miracle.
“Speaking in tongues” is a way to describe “speaking in another language.” In the book of Revelation, heaven is described as a place where every tribe and “tongue” will be present. “After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb … ” (Revelation 7:9 NKJV). The word tongue is used to describe various language groups. What makes the biblical experience of speaking in tongues unique is that it’s a supernatural act; a language miracle. We speak out in a language we have never studied and don’t naturally understand.
The first time this occurred in history is recorded in Acts 2. The people who had gathered there heard others speaking “in tongues” and knew that a miracle was happening. “Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation… . When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, ‘Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language”’ (Acts 2:5–8)?
As we participate in this “language miracle,” God does several things:
1. He reveals Jesus to those who hear.
When the believers were first baptized in the Holy Spirit, the people around them said, “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues! Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, ‘What does this mean?’” (Acts 2:11–12).
As you can imagine, this miracle of language was pretty convincing. The people knew such as thing could only happen if God were at work. Thousands gathered to hear Simon Peter speak because they had witnessed this language miracle. Speaking in tongues is just one of the many supernatural things that God wants to do in our lives.
My wife’s grandparents (Lewie and Evelyn Spencer) were missionaries in Costa Rica back in the 1930s. They wanted to take the message of Jesus to tribes of people who had never heard about Him. Their only mode of transportation to these remote areas was on the back of a mule. So they traveled for days, over high mountains, to reach these tribes and share the good news of salvation.
On one occasion, they encountered a tribe that was completely unfamiliar to them. None of their interpreters knew the dialect. The Spencers tried to communicate, but nothing seemed to work, so they stopped and prayed. They gathered in a circle and prayed for God to help them. As they prayed, my wife’s grandparents began to speak in tongues.
As soon as they started praying that way, the members of the tribe became animated. They began to jump up and down and wave their arms. It was obvious that something significant was happening. Within a few hours, they found an interpreter and he helped the Spencers communicate with the tribe. As soon as they started to converse, one of the tribe members asked, “How did you come to learn our language? When you gathered in that circle and started talking to the sky, one of you started telling us that God had sent you to us with some good news. How do you know our language?”
When they explained that God had performed a language-miracle through them and that He did this because He loved them, the entire tribe was ready to hear the message about Jesus Christ.
2. He uses this to help us pray more effectively.
Most often, speaking in tongues is used privately and in prayer. The Holy Spirit prompts us to pray in a special prayer language. We don’t know how to pray as well as the Holy Spirit does, so He helps us pray better.
Romans 8:26–27 says, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”
First Corinthians 14:2 adds, “For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to people but to God. Indeed, no one understands them; they utter mysteries by the Spirit” (emphasis added).
QUESTION 4:
IS SPEAKING IN TONGUES REALLY NECESSARY?
Many people ask, “Do I have to speak in tongues to be baptized in the Holy Spirit?” I like to respond with my father’s explanation to me, “It’s not that you have to speak in tongues; it’s that you get to speak in tongues.” You have the opportunity to allow the Holy Spirit to be released through you as you pray. The Spirit of God is praying through you as He is praying for you and for those in your world. That’s amazing!
The baptism in the Holy Spirit is the first step into a supernatural life.
Every time people were baptized in the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts, they prayed aloud in a supernatural way. When the Holy Spirit comes upon you, He gives you power to prove that Jesus is alive. So the baptism in the Holy Spirit is the first step into a supernatural life. Not only does God want to do this language-miracle in you, He wants to use you to see many powerful and miraculous things happen in the name of Jesus.
Remember, the goal of the baptism in the Holy Spirit is not for you to speak in tongues. Did you hear that? That is not the goal. The goal of the baptism of the Holy Spirit is to give you power to prove that Jesus is alive. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is a gift that releases the power of God into and through your life. Speaking in another language is just the first miracle that God wants to do through you. It certainly isn’t the last miracle He will do through you. He has so much more planned for you!
Sometimes, people have approached the baptism of the Holy Spirit as the completion of something. They pray for it. They receive it. They experience the first miracle of praying in a spiritual language, but that’s the finale for them. They stop seeking more of God’s power. They stop expecting more miracles to be released into their lives. What a shame. This experience was never designed to be an end in and of itself; it was always designed to be the beginning of a powerful spiritual life.
It’s the starting point for living out a supernatural life.
QUESTION 5:
WHAT DOES SPEAKING IN TONGUES HAVE TO DO WITH THE BAPTISM IN THE HOLY SPIRIT? CAN’T I JUST BE FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT WITHOUT THAT?
The real question is this? Why do you want to be baptized in the Holy Spirit? Do you just want to say that it happened for you? Do you want to cross it off the list of things you have experienced in life? Do you just want to feel better about yourself that you have attained a certain spiritual plateau and don’t need anything more?
Or are you seeking to live a supernatural life? Do you want power to be a witness of the resurrection of Jesus? Do you want to be a vessel Jesus can use to deliver His miracles to broken and needy people? Are you hungry to know the full release of the river of the Holy Spirit in your life? Do you want to feel the rush of His presence, purpose, and power unleashed through you?
If you want a supernatural life, then you need to think of speaking in tongues as the first miracle that He will do through you. Why is this the first? Why can’t He do other miracles with me first? Why does it have to be this?
The Bible gives a list of nine miraculous ways that God uses believers. It’s found in 1 Corinthians 12 and it involves things like: gifts of healing, word of wisdom, words of knowledge, prophecy, and faith. The Spirit of God distributes these gifts to each believer as He determines for the common good of the entire body of Christ.
Yet He begins with the baptism in the Holy Spirit and the language-miracle of speaking in tongues for several reasons:
•It’s personal—no one else has to be there. It’s just you and the Holy Spirit. All you have to do to see this miracle is to speak in out the words that He gives you to say.
•It’s a partnership—since speaking in tongues involves just you and the Holy Spirit, as you pray in your spiritual language, you practice a partnership with the Holy Spirit. Every time you pray in tongues, you are practicing what it is to operate in the supernatural. You are tuning into His voice. You are speaking out what you have heard in the Spirit. These are all the skills you will need when He uses you in a public fashion.
•It’s powerful—every time you speak in tongues, the strength of the Holy Spirit is released within you. This gives power to your inner being. Paul described it like this, “Anyone who speaks in a tongue edifies [builds up and adds strength to] themselves” (1 Corinthians 14:4).
So this practice of praying in the Spirit is something that becomes a gateway to a supernatural life. The Holy Spirit is released in your inner being, and His power comes out through your lips, before it comes out in your life.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER FOUR
1.When you first heard of speaking in tongues, what was your reaction?
2.Have you ever felt undue pressure to do something, spiritually, that perhaps you weren’t ready to do? What effect did that have on you?
3.What is the right motive to pursue any significant experience with God? What are some wrong motives?
4.Read Romans 8:26–28. What is the role of the Holy Spirit in your prayer life and in fulfilling God’s purpose for your life?
5.What next steps are you going to take to give the Holy Spirit a more active role in the way you pray?