Ready for the next illustration? Once again, I will give a brief, skeletal overview of the illustration. Then, with the Holy Spirit’s help, you can personalize the illustration to become a powerful teaching tool.
The Importance of Praying in Other Tongues
Part 11 – Protect Your Spirit From This World’s Contamination
For this illustration, you will need a Bible, table tennis paddle and ball. It would also be helpful to be able to project this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiShX2pTz9A.
Long before there was a Sony Play Station or Microsoft Xbox or Nintendo Switch, a company named Atari introduced a revolutionary arcade game called Pong. For those unfamiliar with this game, Atari took the tennis game (show paddles and ball) in the early 1970’s and created a video game that amazed the world. In Pong, the player controls an in-game paddle by moving it vertically across the left or right side of the screen. (Show YouTube video clip.) Just as in the table tennis game, the player’s objective is to keep the ball from penetrating past their boundary and yielding a point to their opponent.
Here is a reality. We live in a world that has a lot of evil all around us. At school, the classrooms and playgrounds are filled with kids that don’t love Jesus like you do. It is so common to see bullying going on and students being disrespectful and nasty to the teachers. Daily, you hear language and jokes that you wouldn’t want Jesus to hear. In the “grown-up” world, it is everything that I mentioned about the school environment but multiplied exponentially. The reality is that when evil and wickedness is going on, you can’t quit school or leave your job. But, in this sinful environment, God has provided a way to not allow the contamination to penetrate into our spirit.
Ready for this? Here is where the Pong game comes into our teaching. The Bible (show Bible) tells us in 1 Corinthians 14:28 that praying in the Holy Spirit can be our spiritual Pong paddle! I recognize that this verse speaks of praying to ourselves and God in a church setting. But, if we can pray quietly in a church, we can also do this in a classroom, playground, locker room, or board room, right? When this world’s wickedness is trying to make its move on us and attach itself to our spirit, we can pull out our spiritual Pong paddle and begin to pray silently in other tongues. Notice that I said silently. No one around has to know what we are doing or saying.
What is the result of our spiritual Pong paddle (praying in our Holy Spirit-empowered language) weaponry? Quite simply, Satan won’t “score any points”! The spiritual garbage that he is trying to attach to our spirit will be “ponged” right back to where it came from!
