Q&A Forum

by Francis MacNutt
Summer 1997

Q: I've noticed that often when you are praying for someone for healing, you seem to be praying in tongues. Why do you do that?

A: Actually, I hardly pay attention anymore to the fact that I am praying in tongues because it seems so simple and natural. That may sound like an unusual answer, but let me try to explain.

My understanding of praying in tongues is that I am turning the prayer over to the Holy Spirit, who understands the situation far better than I do. Praying in tongues helps me escape the limitations of my own lack of knowledge of how best to pray for a person. In Paul's letter to the Romans, he writes:

''The Spirit, too, comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what the Spirit means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God." — Romans 8:26–27

Although Paul does not explicitly say in these verses that he's talking about praying in tongues, he might very well be referring to the gift of tongues. This certainly fits our experience. Often, I think prayer in tongues is better than if I try to make up a prayer on my own in English. I usually say a prayer in English, and then when I've done the best I can, I continue in tongues.

I first learned to do this when holding a healing service in a Presbyterian church in Cali, Colombia. A crowd of people formed at the front of the church, all wanting prayer. Since I didn't know Spanish, I couldn't pray in a language they could understand, so it seemed a lot simpler just to pray in tongues.

The next day, I was amazed to find out what had happened. The people told the pastor that some had been converted and come to the Lord for the first time, others had been healed, and others had received all kinds of wonderful blessings.

Another reason for praying in tongues during a healing service is that it takes a great amount of energy to pray for a large number of the sick. Once, in Phoenix, a high school athlete who helped pray in a team said that it was more exhausting than football practice!

So I find it much easier to pray in tongues. Making up prayers in English for three hours is an exercise in intense concentration. Add to that standing and perhaps holding your arms out for hours while you pray, and I think you can see how praying in tongues is God's way of really helping us to survive physically during a healing session.

Some people believe that those Christians who manifest these charisms see themselves as better than other Christians who don't. On the contrary, the best way to see these gifts, I think, is that they are God's way to help us in our areas of weakness. I need some of these gifts precisely because I am weak. I need the gifts of healing because I am sick — or because someone else is sick. And I need the gift of tongues because so often I don't know how best to pray.

A third reason I pray in tongues for healing is because we often pray for a long time for a sick person (we call this "soaking prayer"). Pretty soon, you run out of things to pray in English, but you can pray for a long time in tongues — say, for a tumor to shrink. Certainly, God hears us the first time we pray, and we don't have to repeat our prayer endlessly in English to catch God's attention.

So, what are we praying when we pray in tongues? Usually, we don't know, but on those occasions when someone receives the gift of interpreting the tongues, we find that the prayer is usually an amazingly precise prayer of petition for healing, or else it's a prayer of praise.

It also is heartening to occasionally hear that someone listening to me pray in tongues for healing of a whole group (especially when singing a prayer in tongues) actually hears the prayer in English — or Spanish, or Greek, or some other language. This amazes me because I hear the prayer, too, and I know it is not in English!

If this intrigues you, I encourage you to read more about it in a book like John Sherrill's They Speak in Other Tongues, mentioned in the cover article of this month's The Healing Line (see our bookstore order form). What I have written about here concerns only one aspect of the gift of tongues, and that is in relation to healing. It has many other extensive benefits, as in helping us to praise God. I believe that there are many, perhaps most holy, Christians who do not pray in tongues, but I also think it is a happy privilege and blessing to be able to exercise this gift. It's one of the blessings of baptism with the Holy Spirit.

And as Paul says, "I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you .... " (I Cor. 14: 18).

Francis MacNutt is a Founding Director and Executive Committee member of CHM.