Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father.
– Jesus in John 14:12
Jesus spoke in tongues, did you know that? I’ve never heard many others mention this but it is obvious from a few bible passages if you believe the bible should be interpreted with the bible. Also, I personally hold that this is what Jesus was doing when He would go off alone to pray. The most obvious place in scripture where Jesus prayed in tongues in when Jesus is on His way to raise Lazarus from the dead. In the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John we read this in verse 33:
Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned the in the spirit and was troubled.
It is important here to understand the Greek for groaned, or perhaps your translation is rendered muttered. The actual greek word there is (in our alphabet) enebrimEsato, literally, In-Thunders! This act of Jesus praying in tongues doesn’t just happen once while our Lord was walking towards the tomb holding Lazarus but a second time moments before the stone was rolled away.
Then Jesus, again groaning in Himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. (John 11:38)
C.S. Lewis once said that “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” So too should it be with us. Let us look at this lamp to our feet and understand it by the light of the rest of the Word. The Holy Spirit through Brother Paul explains this muttering or grumbling in the Spirit when in Romans 8 he says
Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
(Romans 8:26)
There is much to unpack in the verse and I will pick up on more of the revelation in the verse in two other pages titled, “The Ability to Pray Omnipresently”, and “Pray in Strenght as We Ought”. However for this teaching I will focus on the last 5 words of this verse. Again, I will in a later teaching address the meat in this verse and the verses nearby.
The groanings here are the same greek root word as the groanings found when Jesus prayed in John 11. The rest of the verse says “which cannot be uttered”. I ask you, does this make sense? Is not a groaning also an utterance? Try it. See if you can groan and not also utter a sound. Of course then this is not how this verse should be translated. I would suggest a better translation of this verse is the following, “…the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings too deep for words and our understanding.” Inspect the greek and see if you do not also agree.
The same groanings Jesus did when raising Lazarus from the dead are the same groanings the 120 did on Pentacost, the same groanings that Cornelius’s house experienced and the same groanings you will experience when you are baptized into the Holy Spirit!
So maybe you are asking yourself, why would Jesus pray in tongues before He raised Lazarus from the dead? The answer is covered in the page titled, “Charge Yourself”.
Fire Baptism 