1 Corinthians 14:14 - when you're praying in tongues, your spirit is praying. Your spirit has a voice. Your spirit has eyes, your spirit has ears, your spirit has senses, your spirit actually can feel and engage and experience the whole realm of the spirit.
Your spirit man has spiritual senses, to enable you to live in the realm of the spirit, and to live directed by the Holy Ghost; so the first purpose of praying in tongues is to get your spirit activated, because if we don't activate our spirit, then we're forced to live out of our body and soul, out of the sense realm.
The interesting thing is, your spirit is incredibly important to you. Your spirit gives you life, your spirit keeps your body healthy. Without your spirit, your body dies. We need our spirit. Our spirit is vital; and praying in tongues will activate your spirit, get your spirit going. Every time you're praying in tongues my spirit is being stirred up. My spirit is coming alive.
The second thing praying in tongues does, it opens a direct line of communication with the Holy Spirit. Some people say: I can't hear God. That's not true. It's not true, you can hear God. It's like saying: I don't have ears. You have got ears, you've got a nose, and you've got eyes.
Can't hear God? Yes, you can, but recognising His voice - that's a different thing. You are wired to hear God, and God is inside you. He's inside you, so you can hear Him. He lives in you every day, 24/7, 365. Everywhere you go - the Holy Spirit is with you. God is with you, God is inside you. Everyone can hear God.
How can you build a relationship with someone, if you can't hear them? Very difficult. You say: well I don't hear God. That's just not true. God speaks. It's just you haven't trained yourself to listen. You get a room full of babies cry, mother will hear, say: that's my baby; because she recognises the sound. There's a lot of noise, a lot of things. Most people have got too much noise going in their life - that's why they can't hear God. It's quite simple to slow down, and get to hear God, and His voice is very easy to recognise. It's not very difficult.
In Acts 2:4, it says: they began to speak in other tongues, as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance.
So imagine now the Holy Spirit is joined to your spirit, two separate beings but joined, linked. That joining is like a marriage connection, like an intimate relationship, so you are joined spirit to spirit with the spirit of God. That's how close you are to God.
God is not far off. He's inside you, connected to your spirit. Now how close to God can you get! Well, I don't feel Him. Of course not - you're tuned in to something else. If you were just to stop you'd feel God. He's there with you, He's inside you.
The issue is, the development of your inner life to be sensitive to God, to be sensitive to the spirit of God, when we're so used to listening to the noise of our soul, and the demands of our body. If you could just silence those, and increase the other, wind the volume up on the inside, then you'd start to find you're hearing God a lot more easily, a lot more frequently, a lot more quickly.
So let me just talk about then how - so the Holy Spirit, it says: they spoke as the spirit gave them the utterance. So how on earth does it get from the Holy Ghost, how does this language of tongues work?
How is it I end up going [Speaks in tongues] and the language is flowing - oh, flowing without any effort! How does that happen? How does that work?