About two years ago, I found out that Kenneth Hagin was once asked when he encountered the strongest presence of the Lord, and his answer was when he was praying with Oral Roberts. When I heard that I wanted to find out more about Oral Roberts and his prayer life, and started researching.
Oral Roberts felt that the majority of prayer should be spent praying in tongues, and that praying in tongues was “the single most formidable force for obtaining divine guidance”. That quote is life changing if we consider it and put it into practise in our life. The more we pray in tongues, the more we know what God is doing and what God wants us to do.
Most Christians, even born-again, Spirit-filled, tongue-talking Christians waver – they go back and forth – on whether God can speak to them and reveal the future to them. But the Word of God is clear – God can and will and does direct our paths. Oral Roberts taught that the best way to understand and encounter this divine leading is to regularly and consistently pray in tongues.
1 Cor. 14.13 says that when we speak in unknown tongues, we need to pray that we interpret. Most of us read that and apply it almost without thinking to messages in tongues in church services as we all know that a message in tongues in a church service should be interpreted to the people. However, Oral Roberts read this as praying in tongues, and used this verse to pray that he could interpret what was going on when he was praying in tongues.
He wrote:
“My personal experience is that when I finish praying in tongues, whether I am praying for a few seconds or a few minutes, I then pray for the interpretation.” In other words, he would pray in tongues, then pray to find out what he was praying about! He then got an understanding of the tongues he was praying. He would be doing what Paul said – I pray with my spirit and pray with my understanding. For Oral Roberts, that was not two different prayers – oh, I have prayed in the spirit, I will now pray in the understanding, but actually he would pray in the spirit, then flow into knowing what he had prayed, and then pray that in a language he understood.
He would be praying for the season, then know what the season was, he wasn’t praying problems and difficulties – he was praying the spiritual words that he was praying when he was praying in tongues. All his prayers were praying the mind of God for the hours he was praying.
That’s some great wisdom right there. I am now putting this into practice in my life and have been for the last few months, maybe for just over a year, and it is very powerful. These prayers have been what helped our summer conference be so powerful, have opened up the gifts of the Spirit in our churches, and are part of the healings and miracles we are seeing!
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