CAN TONGUES BE LEARNED ?
The short answer is “NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT !! . Not from a human being, that is. Praying / Speaking in tongues is a GIFT FROM GOD – a supernatural gift at that!
HOWEVER, there is something very useful that you can do to put your mind and heart in line with receiving this priceless gift. Knowing, by seeing and hearing, what tongues is MECHANICALLY SPEAKING will NOT … I repeat … NOT give you tongues!! But it could help a lot just to see and hear what it is like, as a kind of PREPARATION.
Tongue-speakers are very reluctant to demonstrate it – AND RIGHTFULLY SO – for fear that you will emulate them and (a) nothing happens or, WORSE YET, (b) You learn some mere mechanical contrivance and think you have tongues when you don’t!
Praying in tongues is a GIFT FROM GOD. PERIOD. God never said you couldn’t observe it to know what it looks like. Another Period.
It seems to me that many people make way too much of tongues – like there is something spooky … or, complicated … or, esoteric … or very difficult about praying in tongues. Or, they make way too little of tongues, dismissing it as trivial, crazy gibberish.
Some people would have you believe that it is so ‘out there’ and other-worldly that we’d be best served by leaving it alone. They assign to it fabricated rules and regulations, claiming that our poor Paul didn’t say we could do thus and so. Well, he didn’t say we could use electric toothbrushes either!
Puh-leeeeze, let’s give Paul a break. Why in the world would anyone think that he should have left us 2000 years later, an instruction manual on how to and how not to speak in tongues? There were probably as many variations of tongues on the Day of Pentecost as there were people applying them!
NOW, PLEASE, MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT: Speaking/Praying in tongues is a supernatural gift from God. Something totally amazing will take over in your mind and body when you really have “GOT IT” !!
