Tongues The Gateway To The Supernatural - Part 3 by Pastor Philip Olubakin: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Word Becomes Fire

Jeremiah 5:14 declares that when the Lord's word is put in a mouth, it becomes fire, and every dry, stagnant thing it touches becomes wood for that fire to consume. Every unhealthy appetite the enemy has planted in a life, every stagnation, is consumed the moment the word of the Lord is spoken over it in faith.

Isaiah 10:17 pictures the Light of Israel becoming a fire and a flame that burns and devours thorns and briers in a single day. Some evil patterns are not meant to take a year to break, they are broken today.

Six Reasons to Pray in the Spirit

Praying in tongues, praying in the spirit, carries real, specific benefits. There are six reasons worth understanding.

1. You Pray God's Perfect Will

   Romans 8:26-27

   The Spirit helps our infirmities, because we do not know what we ought to pray for. Ignorance itself is an infirmity. You may be praying for your shop to expand in one location when God's will is for branches across the nation. You may be asking for a scholarship to study abroad when God's will is for you to lead in your own country. Praying in tongues means the Holy Spirit, who searches the deep things of God, intercedes according to what God has already willed, not according to what we can see or imagine.

2. You Pray Selflessly for Unspoken Needs

   Ephesians 6:18

   Praying with all prayer and supplication in the spirit means praying for needs you don't consciously know about, even needs of your children not yet born. Because the Holy Ghost has no restriction of time or space, a prayer prayed today can be settling a matter ten or twenty years from now. Scripture speaks of the prayers of the saints kept like incense before God, valid long after they were prayed, even after the one who prayed them is gone.

3. You Build Your Spiritual Strength

   Jude 1:20

   Praying in the Holy Ghost builds you up in your most holy faith. There is power in tongues to stir something in your spirit the way an angel once stirred the pool of Bethesda, except this stirring is available continually, not once a year. Short, powerful public prayers and declarations are the fruit of long, secret intercessory prayer. Praying in the spirit is like sharpening an axe before the work, or recharging a battery before it is needed.

4. You Bypass Your Mental Limitations

   Your natural mind thinks at the level of your exposure, your competence, your current capacity. Praying in tongues bypasses that ceiling, along with the doubt that comes with it, because you cannot doubt what you do not understand enough to question. Any prayer prayed in tongues is, by nature, prayed in faith, not doubt. This is how the Lord does natural things in a supernatural way, growing a business or a ministry at a pace the natural mind cannot explain.

5. You Declare Mysteries and Divine Secrets

   1 Corinthians 14:2

   The one who prays in tongues speaks mysteries. When you do not understand what is happening in your life, in your finances, or in your family, you contend with that mystery by praying in a language you do not understand, engaging mystery with mystery rather than trying to reason it out with a mind that cannot see what is happening in the spirit.

6. You Receive Rest and Refreshment

   Isaiah 28:11-12

   With stammering lips and another tongue, God speaks rest to His people, the rest with which the weary are caused to rest, and the refreshing that restores strength as we wait in His presence, the same way those who wait on the Lord mount up with wings as eagles. The eagle does not flee the storm as other birds do, it flies into it and lets the storm lift it higher. That is what it means to do supernatural things naturally, to run and not grow weary, to build something from nothing at a pace that looks effortless because the strength behind it is not natural strength.

Settle It in the Place of Prayer

Even a small beginning, no bigger than a man's hand on the horizon, is proof that the Lord has already begun a work he will not stop until it is perfected. Every dead thing, dead finance, dead potential, dead anointing, is coming back to life. The Lord who caught the crafty in their own craftiness and disappointed the devices of those who said it would never happen for you is the same Lord bringing you to a place of testimony you will not be able to hide.