But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. (Jude 20-21)
He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself…(1 Cor.14:4)
These are two interesting verses form the New Testament that both relate to a believer’s prayer language or praying in tongues. The phrases “build yourself up” and “edifies himself” are the same word in the original language. The word means “to increase the potential of someone or something, with focus upon the process involved—‘to strengthen, to make more able, to build up.’”
The above scripture taken from Jude suggests something very important. Jude suggests that our capacity to grow spiritually, to increase in our spiritual potential, and to be made stronger and more able in spiritual matters is directly proportional to the time we spend praying in the Holy Spirit. Paul confirms that principle by telling us that when we speak in a tongue we edify (build up and strengthen) ourselves. That is why one of the normative experiences in the New Testament after being baptized in the Spirit was speaking in tongues. If you just received the power of the Spirit, you need maturity to govern the power you’ve been given. Praying in the Spirit accelerates our maturity.
The counter-intuitive part of that process is that when we pray in the Spirit or in tongues, we have no idea what we are praying. “For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit… For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind” (1 Cor.14:2, 14-15).
Paul encourages us to pray both “with the understanding” and “with our spirits” but he tells us that praying in the Spirit has the effect of increasing our spiritual strength, enhancing our spiritual gifts, activating our spiritual senses, increasing revelation, and developing the fruits of the Spirit. Every part of the ministry of the Spirit in our lives can be enhanced when we engage with the Spirit allowing him to pray through us.
The great advantage of praying in the Spirit is that the Spirit prays for the things we need most to thrive spiritually and lifts those prayers up to the throne room of heaven with an eloquence and familiarity we could never achieve. Not only that, but the Spirit is quite aware of God’s will for our lives – his purposes, plans, and desires. “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 with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will” (Rom.8:26-27). The Spirit then prays things for us that we are yet clueless about so that God’s purposes can be perfected in our lives.
I believe the Spirit prays for us even when we are not praying in the Spirit but God always likes to partner with his people and accomplish things together. Praying in the Spirit helps to align our spirit with God’s Spirit. In doing so, I believe it also plays a key role in renewing our minds so that our intellect is submitted to the Spirit of God so that we can truly be led by the Spirit.
So…here is the point of all this. If you have your prayer language but just use it occasionally, begin to pray in tongues on a daily basis. Many of us only pray in tongues when we worship or when we are about to minister healing or deliverance to someone. But praying in the Spirit has a cumulative affect and, like physical exercise, needs to be increased for us to get stronger and go longer. Many of us have prayed and asked God for certain spiritual gifts we desire or to strengthen us is areas of our lives where we are often tempted and, perhaps, have not yet experienced the growth that we desire.
We can accelerate the process and fine-tune it by choosing to pray in the Spirit a significant amount of time each day. The testimony of many is that after choosing to pray in the Spirit daily for an hour or more they eventually realized that their spiritual lives had moved to new dimensions. Sometimes God is waiting to see how much we want him, his presence, his Spirit or the things of the Spirit. How much do you want it? Now much do I want it? Carving out time to let his Spirit pray through us and trusting the process – even though we don’t know what the Spirit is asking – is one clear measure of that desire. If you don’t have a gift of tongues for personal prayer, then pray for it, seek it, and ask others to help you receive. If you have it, use it as an exercise to become powerful in the Spirit. It is a gift unlike any other.
