Speaking in Tongues

Mike Connell

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One of them is to energise your spirit man, so the Bible tells us in Ephesians 3 verse 16: Paul prayed that you would be strengthened, with Dunamis (greek for energise) in the inner man.

Well what is that? Is that some experience you'll have one day? No, it isn't. It's something that comes - the Dunamis is the Holy Ghost. The inner man is where He lives, and when you pray in tongues, dunamis begins to flow. So what happens is, when you pray in tongues - and I mean pray strongly and give yourself to that - then what happens is, your whole inner man energises, becomes full of the life of God. So that word energise is like an energy battery - He fills you up with energetic life, the life flow of the spirit.

So when you're speaking in tongues, and you start to pray, you'll find your spirit energised, comes full of life, full of energy. Now some people, they say: I've never had that experience.

Let me tell you why you haven't. It's not that the Holy Ghost has failed, and it's not the gift doesn't work. It's something else. Don't bring God down to your experience. Always bring your experience up, and believe that what God says is true - so you get energised by the Holy Ghost.

I'll tell you why it is - because most people that I observe, and I've been to churches all over our nation, they live under a spirit of heaviness and apathy and unbelief. It's in the nation, and what it does is, it causes you to shut down; so your body feels a little drained of energy, and heavy, and your soul is weighed a little.

That's all it takes, and so when you begin to pray, it's actually a little bit of effort to pray, doesn't come easily, so you've got to pray, and you've got to work at the praying for a little bit.

So what I've observed with people, and I found it happens with me too, when I was starting out, I'd pray, and after about five minutes I'm a bit tired out of praying in tongues - five minutes, that was about it. There was no energy, no life, nothing of what I've been telling you at all.

Then I decided well, I'll pray a bit more, I'll just increase it day by day, so I increased it, increased it; and then I increased the flow and began to do a couple of other things, began to just shake my body, just make my body come awake - come on, do what the Holy Ghost wants you to do! Energise, come on, wake up! Wake up! Wake up! We're praying here!

I found just the simple thing of shaking my body, and then praying strongly [Prays in tongues] until I could feel it rising inside me. Then I found an interesting thing happened. Sometimes it was five minutes, sometimes it was 10 minutes, sometimes 15 minutes - took varying amounts of time, and there would come a point when suddenly I'd feel the flow unlock, and I am alive and energised and the flow is now unhindered.

So when I was starting, it would take me a little while to do that. Why is that? Simply, the body was used to controlling me. My soul was used to controlling me, and so it was a matter of making a decision: whether I'll do the work with the Holy Ghost, and energise, and just work until I broke through. It's not a matter of trying to make your body overcome your soul, it's actually just making the decision to activate what God's given you, until you get the benefits.

So I found that sometimes it can be a few minutes. Nowadays I can pray in tongues, it's a couple of minutes, I'm into it. Most days - sometimes I don't even need to pray that long. [Prays in tongues] I'm already awake and alive - but other times you can pray quite a while, and you feel a heaviness.