Gift of Tongues

I wrote on my last blog about getting sick for a week and a half and I couldn’t speak. Even after I started talking again the idea of my voice kept coming up in different ways throughout my time in Turkey. Things like trying to have more biblical conversations with my team and voicing my opinion more and the Lord giving me the opportunity to meet with a local by myself. But the one that I’m talking about in this one is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, speaking in tongues. 

Half of my team, all the girls, have the gift of tongues and my team was having a conversation about it a few days after I started talking again. I couldn’t get the idea of tongues off my mind after that. So I prayed about it. I felt that God wanted me to start praying that I receive the gift of tongues.

I did NOT want to do that. The idea of tongues scared me. Hearing others speak in tongues didn’t scare me but the idea of doing it myself did. When I was in high school I went to a campus ministry a few times of the church my friend went to. It was a Pentecostal church and they said you had to speak in tongues to be saved. I was talking with a girl who went to my church when we heard the campus pastor say that. Neither of us believed that and I didn’t go back after that. It didn’t make me question my salvation but it gave me a negative view of tongues. I was also afraid of it because of all the warnings in 1 Corinthians 14 about the gift of tongues. I didn’t want to use the gift wrong. 

Then a few days before we left Turkey the Lord told me to get those who spoke in tongues on my team to pray over me to receive it. Again, I did not want to do that. I was still struggling with the things I wrote above. But the Lord was doing something in me. The Holy Spirit in me did desire the gift because 1 Corinthians 14:1 does say to desire the spiritual gifts. I tried to push this off as much as possible. Making up excuse after excuse for why I wasn’t asking my teammates to pray over me. One of those days I was procrastinating, I read 1 Timothy. 

In 1 Timothy 4:14, it says, “Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you.“

This convicted me, even more, to get my teammates to pray over me. But I still didn’t do it right away because I was still afraid.

Then on Saturday 2/26, just a few days before I posted this, the conviction was the strongest it had ever been because I had run out of excuses. We were talking as a team about how we were going to spend our time in Georgia. When we were finished we were going to do communion before going into our Sabbath. But before we did I had to get it off my chest because it was burning on my heart to share. 

I shared with my team how I felt that the people who spoke in tongues should pray over me but that I was still afraid and that I didn’t want it but was doing it out of obedience. One of my teammates did say that it seemed like my flesh didn’t want it but my spirit did, which I didn’t think about before then. That same teammate and the squad leader with us also asked for prayer for that because of 1 Corinthians 14:1.

It was one of the weirdest experiences of the Holy Spirit I ever had. My team leader, Sav, was praying over me and I was praying out loud things like, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty Who was, and is, and is to come,” and “I love you, God,” and other things. 

At one point Sav said something like forget what you think it should look like. So then I asked God what he wanted me to say. Then I heard, “holy.”

I started repeating holy again and again, nothing else. As I was doing it, I was starting to speak faster and faster and my body started tingling, specifically my hands and my mouth. Then at one point holy was no longer coming out of my mouth. I was speaking in tongues!

I was doing that for a few moments before I felt God tell me to pray over the guys next to me. Neither of them received the gift of tongues during that time but I know God was still moving in them through our prayers. 

After we finished that time of prayer, doubt almost immediately crept into my mind. Doubt that God didn’t give me the gift of tongues but that I was speaking gibberish for a performance. I had to take that thought captive and give it to God because I knew He gave it to me. I did ask Him multiple times afterward though if it was from Him and He repeatedly said yes. But it was an amazing night and I loved getting to see God move the ways He did.

God is so much bigger than we can possibly imagine. He still moves, in the same way, He moved back in the early church. Ask God to reveal Himself in new ways to you.