Leadership and Prayer 02 Kenneth Hagin and Tongues

I said in the last post that Oral Roberts prayed in tongues a lot. So did Kenneth Hagin. People would pull up next to him at traffic lights and he would be in his car praying in tongues. He would be heard at restaurants praying in tongues. He said “most victories come from praying in tongues”.

You see one thing I am discovering more and more is that the baptism in the Holy Spirit, when we start speaking in tongues, is just a beginning, what the early Pentecostals used to call “the initial experience”. We need more than an initial experience, we need all the experiences. We as leaders need to pray in tongues. We need to pray in tongues until we are deeper in the things of God than we were. Kenneth Hagin said if we keep praying in tongues right, we will never be nostalgic for the first day we were fillled with the Spirit, because we will have advanced far beyond that. Yet, today in 2025, I still meet Christians who are indeed nostalgic for the first time they spoke in tongues and haven’t gone any deeper since then. I have heard Christians who are pastors, travelling ministers, worship leaders, who are stunned when you tell them you pray for hours. There is a stunted growth in the flow of the Spirit in our churches because we have so limited time and intimacy with the Holy Spirit, and so little honour to do what He wants us to do.

We should be aware of the Greater One and His power and love inside us all the time, and if we are not, then we need to develop our intimacy with Him. The Holy Spirit and the spiritual realm should be more real in our thoughts and souls than the world. That can only be done by time – time in the Word, and time praying in the Spirit.

You see miracles happen – or do not happen – depending on our awareness of the spiritual above the natural. Many miracles are lost due to our hardness of hearts caused by a lack of time in the spiritual, a lack of time praying in tongues. Let the Holy Spirit lead you into the prayer closet, and spend time with Him becoming aware of His goodness, grace and glory. Amen!