You don't have to do it very long, and you come alive. You can pray in other ways as well, but this will get you alive, and get you going; and not only that, the power of God starts to flow in and through you. Your whole life becomes energised.
The atmosphere begins to change. If the whole church does that, the whole atmosphere's completely different; but if they're all passive and shut down, it's just dreadful. I just scream inside, can't stand it, that heaviness and shut down religiosity - and you know the Bible abounds with noise and celebration.
David ushered in a whole new dimension of expressive praise and worship and dancing and rejoicing and celebrating. In the New Testament, James prophesied that God would do that again; but sometimes we just bring our cultural baggage in, and we think that because that's our culture, that's normal. But heaven is full of shouts and trumpets and noise and rejoicing and celebrating. There's joy unspeakable. It's expressive, full of life; so just practice praying in tongues, and giving more expression to your life with God.
Okay, so we've done: Baptism in the Spirit; and speaking in tongues. Now you can pray in tongues all the time. That's your personal devotional language, and it builds you up.
So we're going to go back into 1 Corinthians 12:7, diverse kind of tongues and interpretation. It talks about these – “the manifestation of the spirit is given to every man to profit with all: word of wisdom; word of knowledge; faith; healing; working of miracles; prophecy; discerning of spirits; diverse kinds of tongues; and to another, interpretation of tongues”.
Now this is not your devotional language. This is a gift, an operation of the Holy Spirit, like the other gifts, for a specific a person or specific group; so not all may flow in Tongues & Interpretations, as a gift.
Everyone has a devotional language; but not all might flow in it as a gift; and tongues with interpretations comes as a package usually, so if there's one there should be the other - otherwise you haven't got a clue what's going on.
So if someone prophesies, you know God is building the church. But if there are tongues, you can't understand it, unless it's interpreted; and so this is not your prayer language. This is actually a manifestation of the Holy Ghost - diverse tongues, as the Holy Ghost wills.
1 Corinthians 13 – “Though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels” - isn't that interesting? So when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you manifest the gift of speaking in tongues with an interpretation - it is a language of men; or it's a language of angels.
So it's a language you're given. For example, Doug had prayed among a group of Chinese. There was someone there who knew Hebrew, and he said: you have spoken in fluent Hebrew. He knew exactly what he was praying; so this is a specific demonstration of the power of God.
In the Book of Acts, they began to pray in tongues, and as they prayed in tongues, for some of them they were manifesting the ‘sign’ gift of tongues - and people could hear and understand them in their own language.
So the gift of tongues - it is a language. It is a real language, and it has expressions; so don't pray in tongues, or any gift operation, in a monotone, boring, way you know? Language needs to be interesting, and be alive and have expression; have you in it, not just (monotone) we're talking like this... and there's no expression. Let life and vibrancy flow - put yourself into it!
So the ‘tongues of men and angels’; so tongues means a different kind of language. It's a distinct language. Sometimes with the gift of Tongues with Interpretation, the tongues may be a language someone can understand.
Sometimes the tongues may be a language understood by angels, so clearly He said: “If I speak with the tongues of men or angels”, so quite possibly He spoke with the tongues of angels at times. I'll give you a couple of examples of this.
In Acts 2, they began to speak in other tongues, and everyone heard them speak in their own language. Now you had people from all over the world, and everyone who came there understood something that someone was praying, then how did that happen? That is supernatural.
They've never learnt the language, yet they're speaking, and they're speaking from their spirit a language they didn't know - and someone understood the language. A most amazing gift really isn't it? We don't see much of that. We need to believe for more of that - just to be able to pray and speak, and if someone from another language is there, they say “whoa, you were speaking something I understood! Do you know my language”? “No, don't have a clue, I just spoke in the Holy Ghost.”