MINDLESS HEAD BOPPING AND SENSELESS BABBLING

Paul the Apostle was a teacher of many things in the early church. Of head bopping and rhythmic babbles on the lips, maybe not, but somewhere along the lifeline of certain families of the Church, intensity and deep prayer became equivalent to this intriguing sight to behold.

In 2006, a neuroscientist known as Dr. Andrew Newberg led a team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to take brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues. They found that their frontal lobes — the part of the brain responsible for language, thinking, the willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were quiet. Dr. Newberg and his team concluded that it was unclear which region of the brain was driving glossolalia [the speaking of other tongues].

Among the many things, Paul taught on prayer; prayer in ‘other tongues’. When he explained it to the Corinthians, he said when he ‘prayed in an unknown tongue, his mind or understanding was fruitless’ [1 Cor. 14:14]. In verse 3 he explained that ‘anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to people but to God. Indeed, no one understands them; they utter mysteries by the Spirit.’

What’s clear from both science’s discovery and Paul’s teaching is simple:

When we pray in tongues, the brain is idle.

Does it mean your brain shuts down when you pray in tongues? In actual fact, you can be head-bopping and mouth-babbling while thinking about some conversation you’d just had and what you should have said differently, what you want to eat right after the prayer session, what notifications you may have on your phone…I could keep going 😆 The idleness really pertains to the syllables of the words you’re speaking in that moment –  they flow from a place other than your brain. So the decision to pray in other tongues, the pitch of your voice, the speed, the volume in ordinary circumstances rests on you to decide. The formation of the words, however, flow directly from your spirit as you are given utterance by the Spirit of God.

Yet was Praying in Tongues Intended to Be a Brainless Activity?

Absolutely NOT! In actual fact, you can almost never have a fruitful prayer time while praying in tongues if you leave your brain at home.

The writer of Hebrews recognizes the soul and spirit as two distinct but almost inseparable components of the human’s spiritual anatomy; separable only by the Word of God [4:14]. Within the soul sits the control centre of a man’s consciousness – his thoughts, his will, his emotions, and all through scripture, from David’s Psalms to Solomon’s Proverbs to Job’s grief and Jeremiah’s Lamentations, knowledge, wisdom, grief, choices and functions of the brain and emotions have been attributed to the soul [topic for another piece, maybe?].

So while the Spirit prays through you, what is God’s expectation of you? What should you do with your idle mind?

Occupy it!

The brain never rests. Neurologists have long established this fact [we can talk about men’s ‘nothing box’ in another post😁]. It’s why even when you’re not consciously thinking, you still find random thoughts swimming through your mind. The brain is much like fire – a good servant but a horrible, horrible master. If you refuse to take the steering wheel, it will drive itself whichever direction and at whichever speed your passiveness will let it. So while your spirit receives utterances from the Spirit of God, you engage your brain, your emotions, your heart, in the subject of your prayer. Let me explain.

Luke tells a story of Jesus praying in a garden on the Mount of Olives [Luke 12]. He reports a fascinating scene the scientists have come to call ‘Hematohidrosis’. Luke writes:

And being in such agony of spirit, he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground – v. 44.

There’s no telling whether Jesus spoke in other tongues, whether in Gethsemane or at all. It however ought not rob us of the reality that Jesus was a man of the spirit, and if we can glean anything from the records of his prayers, we should! So here we find Jesus, so conscious of the journey of torture coming His way that He was grief-stricken in His spirit.

I cannot help but remember Hannah in Eli’s temple as well…so caught up in her desire for a son that she babbled. Yup. Very probably swaying back and forth or side to side alongside as she murmured her heart’s desire onto a God who was more concerned about the voice of her heart and her motives than about the actual words she was muttering on her lips. So yes, I imagine that Hannah possibly head bopped and swayed and muttered babblings because her mind was so fixated on this one thing she desired of the Lord. So engrossed in the genuineness and sincerity of her desire that she lost focus on how she looked to onlookers or how she sounded, to the point that she was producing no sound at all!

And I imagine that when Paul talked about not being drunk with wine but being filled with the Holy Spirit, his intention was not for praying believers to mindlessly sway back and forth, head bopping and babbling nothings on our lips.

I imagine that it was an expectation for the praying believer to be so caught up in thought and meditation about what he was communing with God about that he did not care how he looked on the outside – even if it meant he was aggressively bopping his head and groaning unintelligible words through his mouth.

Was it just for show that when the Spirit helps us in our infirmity in prayer, it is through groanings which cannot be uttered? [Romans 8:26]. Certainly if God’s sole desire was a circus show, He could do better than a group of men groaning as though in pain.

If a man was so gripped in thought about a thing, it wouldn’t take a genius to recognize that this man was physically unaware of himself, and perhaps was unbothered about the direction of his stare or the speed of his breathing or the position of his hands while he was deep and lost in thought. Only in these times, when a praying believer is so focused on this single thing he is so imploring the Lord about, is head-bopping and senseless babbling justified. Only then.

It is not surprising that Matthew records Jesus as telling His disciples:

When you pray, don’t babble on and on as the Gentiles do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again. [6:7]

It was not as much about the babbling as it was about the Gentiles’ idea that the showmanship or the manner in which the prayer was made that would fetch the result. And if the spirit-filled, tongue-speaking Church does not teach that it is not the head-bopping and babbling on the lips that fetch the results, but a deep-seated understanding of what it is we desire of the Lord, and a genuine, transparent reliance on only His ability to produce the results we seek in prayer, we will only be reduced to a circus show of energetic men and women who know better than to waste our energies chanting and groaning as though we had no brains to put ourselves to work.

So what do we do? When next you pray in tongues, think!

Think on the prayer topic. Think on what God has said regarding that thing you’re praying about. Think on Jesus, the One by whom you’re able to enter into the Throne Room. Think on the Spirit through whom your lips have ability to move. Think on the object of your prayers – that soul you may be praying for, the reality of that missionary who may be going through depression. Think on the real need for men and women to come into an intimate fellowship with God when next you’re asked to pray for church growth, that when men have been stirred up to desire the Lord, they may find a home or a place in your church family, not just so that the church may grow for fame sake or popularity sake.

Only in this sincerity will the ‘noise’ of charisma in prayers penetrate the ceilings of our church buildings and reach the ears of the One whose ears are closer to our hearts than to our lips.

Until we meet again [hopefully soon😅],

Love,

Rad!