So with the flow of the spirit - that brings us to the next thing - is that speaking in tongues initiates revelation in your life. It initiates the flow of revelation; and a lot of people don't say: I don't hear from God. Well, God's wanting you to hear - it's not He doesn't want to speak - it's just learning how to recognise it.
So when you're praying in tongues, notice what's happening: you're not using your logic, you're not using your smarts to work it all out. You're not using intelligence, so that's quite good. It puts us all on a level playing field, so it doesn't matter whether you've been to university, or at least flunked out of high school - makes no difference.
That part of your brain isn't the bit that's going to be any use anyway, because the rest comes from the Holy Ghost; so it's nice that God levelled it all out, isn't it? I think it's quite good. He thought some of those fellas will be so smart, couple of these fancy falutin' prayers. Tell you what we'll do, we'll just give them all the gift of tongues, then it won't matter. They'll all be praying the same, and it won't help to be very smart, because all being smart just confuses you, because you can't understand things of God. They're received by revelation, so you don't use logic for the things of God.
The language of the spirit is a language of flow. It's a language of spontaneity, it's a language of pictures, of visions. It's a language of inspired thoughts; so as you're praying in tongues, you can begin to tune and focus your mind to listen, to receive and thoughts come.
Sometimes they come while you're praying, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they'll just drop into you a day later, a week later or two weeks later or three weeks later; and because they don't come just when we pray, our flesh gets impatient, and says: what's the use of this?
But the Bible's very clear, when you're praying in tongues, you're calling forth God's will, God's purpose, God's plan. You're speaking it into your life. You're speaking it out into the spirit world, you're speaking it to God, and interceding for it to happen.
There will come an uncovering of it, if you open yourself up to the spontaneous; the flow of the spontaneous. That's how God speaks, He just drops the thought in, but if your mind continues to govern your life, it will just shut it down, and deny it, and block it off all the time.
So for some people, there's a bit of a challenge in hearing God, because they're so used to controlling and using their mind to dominate everything; rather than just learning how to dial down and rest, and become rested inside, and just let the spontaneous thoughts of the Holy Spirit come. That's the way God speaks.
1 Corinthians 14:4 says: he that speaks in an unknown tongue edifies, builds up, his spirit man. Well I want to know how many spiritual midgets we've got here? The thing is, we've probably got heaps - because only you can build your spirit man.
See here's something that can be incredibly deceptive. You can be in a wonderful church, with wonderful worship, wonderful teaching, wonderful ministries, and still never grow - and yet you think you are, because you're in the environment where the spirit of God is moving.
Actually the only things that really make you grow, are what you put consciously into your life, and you have to apply yourself to do that. You have to do something yourself - and it's the doing something yourself, that actually is what changes you.