If you were to ask me to point to the one experience that has most impacted my prayer life, I would answer without hesitation—the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues. That one experience, more than any other, has caused me to advance in my relationship with God.

It changed me forever—and it’s still changing me today.

Oh, how grateful I am for the precious, supernatural language the Lord gave me on that wonderful March night in 1973! I’ll never forget what an answer it was to the cry of my heart.

For months, I’d been so hungry for God I didn’t know what to do. Day after day, my spirit had cried and my heart had wept to know Him better. Although I’d prayed as far as I could with my understanding, I yearned to talk to Him in a deeper way. The hunger inside me was so strong that night I couldn’t sleep. So I got out of bed, threw on my bathrobe, and went into a little room off our kitchen.

Kneeling down by a chair, I cried, “Lord, please, teach me to pray!”

Suddenly the power of God flooded the room and this beautiful language I didn’t know started flowing like a river from within me. At first, I was startled because I didn’t know what it was. I’d only been born again about six months, and I’d never heard of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, much less speaking in tongues. But as I gave voice to the expressions that were flowing from my heart, such peace and joy filled my soul that I instantly knew without a doubt—This is God!

Almost 43 years have passed since I spoke those first words in other tongues, but recently I’ve been thinking a lot about them. I’ve been reminded that what opened the door for them was the hunger in my heart for God. I’d been seeking more of Him, and as a result, I’d fulfilled a spiritual principle that works for all believers: whatever we seek, we find!

Whatever We Seek, We Find!
When our hearts are hungry, it creates a vacuum in us that God can fill. When we desire and esteem the things He has for us, it makes room for the supernatural in our lives and lifts us to higher levels in the Lord.

He does have higher levels for us, you know. He doesn’t want us to just park where we are right now. He wants us to go on into the knowledge of Him. He wants to express Himself more fully in us and through us. That’s why speaking in tongues is so absolutely vital. It increases our spiritual capacity in ways that nothing else can.

Just a few months ago, on September 30, the Lord spoke to me very clearly about this. I awakened at 4:05 in the morning and He gave me a word that was so profound I immediately got up and wrote it down. Here is what He said:

Tongues is the language of heaven. It is downloaded in your spirit and at the baptism of the Holy Ghost, the language of the Spirit is released. That language will change the world and it will change you when used. Because it is accompanied by the fire of God, the language carries the very essence and nature of God to any and every situation.

The language of the Spirit is very personalized and very individualized, marking each person with Heaven’s label: You are mine and I am here. There is much more to comprehend and understand about this gift: as the apostle Paul wrote, I would not have you be ignorant. The more you understand about speaking in other tongues, the more you will yield to it, growing exponentially.

Speaking in other tongues is a sign to arrest, attract, and to indicate the presence of God is here. It is the gateway and the door to the supernatural. The Holy Ghost will bring the full expression of Heaven through the believer.

Just consider for a moment how much emphasis the Lord puts on speaking in other tongues! Think about the place He gave it in the New Testament. He valued speaking in tongues so much that it was the first supernatural ability He gave to the Church.

The First Supernatural Ability God Gave to the Church
It was the first thing the believers did when the fire of the Holy Spirit fell on them on the Day of Pentecost. As they prayed together in the first corporate Church prayer meeting ever, they were baptized in the Holy Spirit and “began to speak in other (different, foreign) languages (tongues), as the Spirit kept giving them clear and loud expression [in each tongue in appropriate words]” (Acts 2:4 Amp.).

Those supernatural languages were a sign to the believers that day that God’s presence and power had been poured out upon them. But it wasn’t just a sign to them. It was also a sign to the unsaved multitudes that had come to Jerusalem from every country under heaven.

When this sound was heard, the multitude came together and they were astonished and bewildered, because each one heard [the apostles] speaking in his own [particular] dialect. And they were beside themselves with amazement, saying, Are not all these who talk Galileans? Then how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own (particular) dialect to which we were born…the mighty works of God? (vv. 6–8, 11 Amp.)

Even the unbelievers knew the tongues being spoken that day were supernatural. They weren’t just the utterances of men. They were a sign from God telling them that He was there! God has always wanted people to know He is here. He’s wanted it ever since the beginning.