The Filling Station | Speaking in tongues, as a Spiritual Discipline

Speaking in tongues, as a Spiritual Discipline

Posted by Simon Baddeley
in General News
on March 23, 2022

Simon Baddeley, Regional Consultant for South West England, shares about the power of tongues in growing our faith:

“Towards the end of last year, I heard a message.

I can’t even remember the man’s name, or what he spoke about, apart from this one thing.

He shared how he had started to take four hours once a month to pray in tongues.

As he did this, he started to notice circumstances and situations shifting in his life.

That’s all I remember from the message, but it provoked me.

He shared how he had started to take four hours once a month to pray in tongues.
As he did this, he started to notice circumstances and situations shifting in his life.
– Simon Baddeley

I have always been an advocate of speaking tongues and regularly devote time to doing it but this was a fresh provocation.

So I began.

I set myself the challenge that for a season I would make the most of every opportunity to speak in tongues. Every time I was on my own, every car journey, every walk.

I had to be disciplined at first but as I began pressing in I began to long for the moments when I could do it. I noticed that often the first 10 minutes sometimes felt like hard work, but I would then often sense a fresh touch of the Holy Spirit encouraging me to press in.

It says in Jude v20 that as we pray in the Spirit we build ourselves up in our faith, I could certainly feel this happening. I also started to notice a greater ease in ministering and greater revelation in the prophetic.

I have been aware for a number of years that I have a few different languages in tongues.

I have a regular language that often comes out in a time of devotion, but I am also aware of a distinct language shift when engaging in spiritual warfare. For some this may seem ‘out of the ordinary’ but for the New Testament church it was very normal and often considered along with prophecy as a sign that the Holy Spirit had come.

We only have to read Acts 2 and see that one of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit being poured out was that they spoke in different languages.

I have had the privilege to travel quite a lot and when in Kenya I have occasionally spoken in Swahili through the gift of tongues. I do not speak Swahili, but the Lord know all languages. You see, the gifts of the Spirit and the stories we read in the Bible are not something of history they are for now!

I would encourage you to make space to use the gift, set aside time, you will notice the difference.”