Praying in The Spirit

By Calvin Purton

I want to take you to a moment in Acts that we tend to read straight past. It's an amazing moment, and important to us as Pentecostals because it's our history. Let's begin with Samaria, where Peter and John arrive to find that Philip has already been preaching there, and people have been getting born again — genuinely saved, genuinely changed. But the Bible makes a point of telling us that these same people hadn't yet been baptized in the Holy Spirit. So Peter and John lay hands on them, and something else happens. They're filled with the Holy Spirit. They prophesy. They speak in tongues.

That distinction matters. When you get born again — when you ask Jesus to come into your heart — the Spirit of God comes and lives inside you. That's real, and it's enough for salvation. But the Bible also describes a subsequent experience: the baptism in the Holy Spirit, where you receive power from heaven. Not just presence, but power — power that gives you the ability to witness, and power that opens the door to the miraculous.

It Wasn't Just for the Jews

A little later in Acts, we meet a Gentile called Cornelius, living in Caesarea, just north of what's now Tel Aviv. He's fasting and praying when an angel appears to him and tells him to send for Peter, who's staying in Joppa (modern-day south Tel Aviv). Around the same time, Peter has his own vision on a rooftop — one he doesn't fully understand yet.

Peter ends up making the roughly 60-kilometre journey to Cornelius's house — a trip that would have taken the best part of a day on foot. When he arrives, he preaches Jesus to a houseful of Gentiles. And while he's still speaking, the Holy Spirit falls on all of them. They start speaking in tongues and prophesying, and Peter and the others are stunned. Suddenly the vision makes sense: this baptism in the Holy Spirit isn't a Jewish privilege. It's for every person on the planet.

The pattern shows up again later, when Paul travels through the upper regions of Asia Minor and finds disciples in Ephesus. He asks them a simple but pointed question: "Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?" Their answer is honest — they'd never even heard there was such a thing. Paul lays hands on them, and the same thing happens: they're filled with the Spirit, and they speak in tongues and prophesy.

That same power is available today. Whatever the cessationists say, we're living proof of it.

A Fire That Keeps Getting Lit Again

Church history has a pattern to it. The church drifts into dead formalism, loses the plot for a while, and then God sends a fresh move to wake it back up. Martin Luther preaching justification by faith wasn't just a theological correction — it was a surge of something alive breaking through the crust of dead religion.

I think something similar happened with the baptism in the Holy Spirit. It got lost for a long stretch of church history, and then, in 1900, in Topeka, Kansas, a man named Charles Parham was running a Bible school where students had been wrestling with the question: is speaking in tongues still for today? They concluded it was — and over a New Year's Eve prayer meeting between 1900 and 1901, the Holy Spirit showed up in power. People were filled with the Spirit and began speaking in tongues. It was significant enough that city officials came to investigate. One woman reportedly spoke in sixteen different Chinese dialects she'd never learned.

One of the men present, William Seymour, carried that fire down to Los Angeles and started a mission on Azusa Street. Night after night, people poured in from across LA County and were filled with the Holy Spirit. The Azusa Street Revival is widely credited with affecting the entire known world — and it reached New Zealand too.

There's a man called A.C. Valdez who, as a young man, was part of that Azusa Street outpouring. He later felt called to plant a work in Melbourne. This was the 1920s, so travel meant a ship, not a plane. His ship left Los Angeles bound for Melbourne but had mechanical trouble and had to dock in Oakland for a couple of weeks. Rather than waste the time, Valdez booked out the Masonic Hall on Queen Street and held meetings. Night after night, the same thing happened — people filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, supernatural phenomena breaking out. Catholic nuns and people from every kind of traditional church background were showing up and encountering God. The fire got lit here, in our nation.

Valdez went on to Wellington, where the same thing happened again, before continuing on to start his mission in Melbourne. Not long after, Smith Wigglesworth came through New Zealand, travelling the length of the country establishing what became the Assemblies of God movement, with extraordinary miracles accompanying his ministry.

Then in 1967 — the same year as the Six Day War in Israel, which is worth noting, because what happens prophetically in Israel often echoes in the church — the charismatic movement broke out globally. Traditional, more conservative denominations like the Anglicans and Methodists suddenly found their people being filled with the Spirit, speaking in tongues, and operating in the gifts again. Out of that season came the modern Pentecostal movements — AOG, Elim, and eventually C3.

This is our lineage. This is the tradition we stand in.

Demystifying Tongues: There Are Actually Three Kinds

Some denominations have made an absolute mess of this topic. They've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, said some genuinely strange things, and in the process kept people from an experience that's meant to be theirs. So let's clear the fog. The Bible actually describes three main types of speaking in tongues.

1. Other tongues. On the day of Pentecost, the believers were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with othertongues — a specific phrase. These are known human languages that the speaker has never learned. The crowd in Jerusalem heard their own native languages being spoken. This still happens today, but it's rare — every now and then, someone praying in tongues will be understood, word for word, by someone else in the room who speaks that actual language. It's real, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

2. The gift of tongues. This is what Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12 as one of the gifts of the Spirit — alongside things like the working of miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, and the interpretation of tongues. Not every believer operates in this gift. It functions more like a spontaneous prophetic word in a heavenly language, given during a gathering, which then needs to be interpreted so the church can understand and be built up by it.

3. New tongues. This is the one Jesus points to in the Great Commission, when He says "these signs will follow those who believe... they will cast out demons... they will speak with new tongues." The Greek word for "new" here is kainos— brand new, never before existing. This is the one available to every single believer, and it's typically what you receive when you're baptized in the Holy Spirit: your own personal prayer language.

Paul devotes an entire chapter to this — 1 Corinthians 14 — which tells you something about how significant it is. Not many topics get a whole chapter. We get one on love, one on the resurrection, one on the gifts of the Spirit, and one on tongues.

Here's some of what Paul says about it:

• It's a direct line to God, not to people (1 Corinthians 14:2). When you speak in tongues, you're not speaking to anyone in the room — you're speaking mysteries directly to God, who understands even when no one else does.

• It builds you up (1 Corinthians 14:4). The Greek word translated "edifies" is oikodomeo — literally, "build the house." When I pray in tongues, I genuinely believe I'm building myself up spiritually, strengthening my body, and bringing clarity to my mind. It's not just a feeling, though I'll admit — when I've spent real time praying in tongues, I notice it. People around me notice it too. They'll say, "You're carrying something today."

• It bypasses your understanding, on purpose (1 Corinthians 14:14). Your spirit prays, but your mind doesn't need to know what's being said. That's not a flaw in the system — that's how it's designed to work.

• It was Paul's own priority. In 14:18, Paul says he thanks God he speaks in tongues more than all of the Corinthians — some translations render it "more than all of you put together." That tells you where tongues sat in his own prayer life.

Romans adds another layer: we don't always know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. My own English is limited. If someone asks me to pray for them, I can only pray according to what I know about their situation. But when I pray for them in tongues, the Holy Spirit prays through me — praying, the Bible says, according to the perfect will of God. So I don't choose between praying in English or praying in tongues. I do both. English lays out what I know; tongues fills in everything I don't.

No wonder the enemy fights this so hard. If he can't stop someone getting saved, and he can't stop someone getting baptized in water, the next target is the baptism in the Holy Spirit — because of the damage it does to his kingdom when a believer starts operating in this kind of power.

My Own Story

I want to tell you how I actually got this, because nobody explained it to me properly, and I think that's true for a lot of people.

I used to go forward at altar calls, hear the promise that I'd be filled and start speaking in tongues, and then just stand there. Nothing happened. I was hungry for it — genuinely hungry — and the Bible says those who hunger and thirst will be filled. But the enemy had a line ready for me: "It's not for everybody. It's a special gift." That's a lie, and it's one I've watched trip up plenty of people since. If the devil can't stop you getting saved or baptized in water, this is where he shifts his attack.

I'd go home after church, lie on my bed, and try to will it into happening. Nothing. It was deeply frustrating, mostly because nobody had told me what I'm about to tell you.

Then one day I was driving to work — right around where Eastgate is today, turning up toward Cashel Street, in my old Hillman Hunter — and this strange, nonsensical little phrase went through my head. Mishka. I couldn't even say it out loud in the moment. I just felt a bit odd and didn't connect it to anything.

That night I went down to North Beach, walked past the surf club to where there were no houses and no one around, and I said it out loud: "Mishka." I immediately felt like an idiot. My own mind told me I was making it up. I'm fairly sure every demon in the neighbourhood turned up to agree with that assessment. But there was something underneath it — some faint breath of something real — so I pushed through.

I kept going. Mishka, mishka, mishka, mishka. And somewhere in there, a strange, cheeky joy started bubbling up inside me. I started sensing the presence of God. I thought, maybe this is it — except I only had one word, and I'd been taught it had to be a full language. So the next day, driving to work again, I'm just repeating "Mishka" in the car while the enemy keeps insisting I've made the whole thing up.

Scripture actually describes exactly this: "With stammering lips and another tongue I will speak to this people." It grows from faith to faith, from glory to glory. It doesn't have to arrive complete.

The following day, driving the same stretch of road, I was still going "Mishka, mishka, mishka" when suddenly another sound got added. Then another. And before I knew it, I had a full language. I was speaking in tongues. To this day, you will not convince me that my prayer language isn't real — because I know exactly how it arrived, one strange little seed-word at a time.

I think that story sets people free, especially if they've been waiting for a complete, fully-formed language to fall on them out of nowhere. Sometimes it happens instantly and dramatically — I've seen that too. I remember visiting a woman in Timaru who wasn't yet a believer. She prayed a simple prayer to receive Jesus, and I watched the change happen in her face in real time. As we were finishing up, I slipped into praying in tongues without even thinking about it, and she stopped me and asked what that was. When I explained it was a prayer language available to Christians, she asked if she could have it. We laid hands on her gently, and she went down under the power of God with a whole language pouring out of her immediately.

I wish that was everyone's experience. It wasn't mine. Mine started small — a seed, a single strange syllable — and grew from there. If all you get today is a "Mishka" of your own, some little fragment of gibberish that feels ridiculous to say out loud, start there anyway.

Step out in faith with it. The Holy Spirit works with what you give Him, and before you know it, there's a language where there used to be nothing.

An Invitation

Speaking in tongues is like putting a V8 in your prayer life. It takes everything to another dimension.

If you've never spoken in tongues, there's no shame in that — and honestly, it takes some courage to step into it for the first time. If you've spoken in tongues before but it's gone quiet — sitting in the back seat of your life, rarely used — it's worth reopening that well and letting it flow again.

The baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the language that comes with it, isn't reserved for a select few. It's for every believer, today, the same as it was in the book of Acts.