Jesus spoke of being
born again.
“Jesus answered and said unto him,
Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
Except a man be born again,
he cannot see the kingdom of God. …
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” – John 3:3, 5
We see from our human experience, that
when a baby is born there is a sound. It is when the baby inhales his first breath that
the sound is emitted – the baby lets out a
cry. This is how we know the baby is alive outside the womb. He must take a breath,
or he will die. If there is no sound, there is a panic: the baby must breath to live.
That breath that a baby receives when he is born in the natural is like the Spirit we receive when we are born again of the Spirit. The breath a baby receives gives him life. The Spirit we receive gives us eternal life.
When the baby takes his first breath and
cries out, that is not the end of the story.
If he is going to survive, he MUST continue to breath, and if he is a normal baby, he will continue to make sounds. (As the baby grows, his words become more articulate, then become sentences.)
So it is in our new birth experience. If we
want to stay spiritually alive, we must
continue to be filled with God’s Spirit. And, as Jesus said, there is a sound accompanying the Spirit. We see in the Bible and from our experience today that this sound is speaking in tongues.
Note: “Tongues” means “language”
(specially, one naturally unacquired).
Tongues as the sign of receiving the Holy Ghost is speaking in a language we do not know, as the Spirit of God speaks through
us. We speak in other tongues as God is
filling us with His Spirit, trusting and allowing Him to change our words of praise into a language we do not know.
Note: Speaking in tongues when receiving
the Spirit is not to be confused with the gift of divers kinds of tongues, which is one of nine gifts of the Spirit given by God to MINISTER to the CHURCH BODY (along
with the gift of the interpretation of tongues). The gift of faith is another of the nine gifts of the Spirit. Everyone might not have the gift of faith, and everyone might not have the gift of tongues, but EVERYONE must have faith to come to God, and EVERYONE speaks in tongues when they are filled with the Spirit.
Note: Interestingly, both the Hebrew and
Greek words for “wind” is the same word
used for “Spirit” and
“breath, the breath of life.”
For more information on the new birth,
see what the Apostle Peter taught in
Acts 2:37- 40