Why You Can’t Speak In Tongues
The Number One Reason Why People Who Want The Gift Can’t Seem To Function In It
I’ve taught on tongues and hosted activations for years. Teaching matters. Impartation is just the other wheel on the bike.
But teaching isn’t just cracking open Acts and building a case for normativity, or quoting Paul about earnestly desiring spiritual gifts. It’s not just: “The Bible says it, so we believe it and do it.” That’s not teaching; that’s stenography with a pulpit.
Real teaching starts with understanding people’s epistemological grid—how they actually come to believe things. And most of the time, the blockages are painfully obvious. Embarrassingly simple. I almost said dumb. But we miss them because we forget the questions.
Jordan Peterson once said the best teachers are usually young, because they still remember the questions—the real ones, not the academic riddles we lob at each other in ministry echo chambers.
A youth pastor asked me yesterday what he should preach at his conference. The standard answer is: “Pray, read, study, listen—God will speak.”
Fine. No argument there. But you wanna know what I told him?
Doom-scroll TikTok for an hour. Or better—watch a 16-year-old doom-scroll TikTok for an hour.
The Holy Spirit will speak to you. (lol.)
Because every good teacher remembers the questions. And the questions are buried in the apps. Not so you can sound cool or quote trends in your sermon. But so you can hear the idols whispering back. So you can name them. And kill them.
Then—and only then—does the text light up.
There was this one tiny, weirdly specific question that I uncovered as I was hanging with brand new believers in New York City all the time, so I developed this response teaching about tongues—barely a footnote in my notes—and it unlocked the whole room. People started praying in tongues like floodgates bursting.
I taught it for years in NYC. Same line. Same result. Boom. Dam broken.
Here it is:
