If there is anyone here that has spoken in tongues before, could you please give an account of how it went, and the spiritual benefits you received from it?
None of God's gifts are without purpose or benefit. There are main benefits and side benefits. Main benefits are praying to God in a tongue guided by the Holy Spirit. You are praying in the spirit exactly what God wants you to pray. For example, if you prayed in English , you might pray about your daily grocery shopping list , when actually God wants you to pray for world peace or perhaps a person you would not normally pray for because you don't like them. If you pray in tongues, you pray what God wants.
Tongues involves surrender of your will to God's will, and can result in teaching you greater self control.
Tongues can increase your faith, which has benefits in every area.
However, tongues can simply be praising God instead of lengthy prayers. Which is still useful, you are praising God with the right words.
Side benefits of tongues are the feeling of closer connection to God, and thereby resulting in more fervancy and time spent in regular prayer in English. And increased answers to prayer due to that. Tongues also helps a person operate in the other gifts such as prophecy, because they are so similar. You could think of prophecy as simply tongues in English. i.e. you guided by the Spirit to speak words in a language you
do understand. Tongues with interpretation is basically equivalent to prophecy.
We mustn't think tongues is limited to one purpose, such as world wide evangelism (which it isnt in practice, tongues has rarely been shown useful for evangelism or missionary work).
1 Cor 12:28 says there are
diversities of tongues.
Scripture gives about 3 (and theres probably more) types or purposes of tongues:
There is tongues for personal edification ( 1 Cor 14:4)
Tongues for interpretation (1 Cor 14:5)
Tongues for a sign to unbelievers (1 Cor 14:22).
The sign to unbelievers is an interesting one. It is a type of mockery or judgement. God's people didn't hear Him when people came speaking in their own language, so he decided to send foreigners, or at least, people who sound like foreigners.
Isa 28:11 For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people.
Logically, these people speaking in tongues, is not just meaningless gibberish just for the sake of having someone blabber to an unbeliever in another language. No. They are speaking inspired messages from God yet in another language. Which is why if accompanied with interpretation, it is equivalent to prophecy.
Now presumably, God would choose a language which is rare, so it really and truly is foreign to the hearer. Which is why I think God doesn't get many people today to speak in tongues whose tongues are German, French, Spanish, Chinese, or other common languages of the world. And it is because God chooses rare or even unknown languages, that Paul said asking God for interpretation is necessary (1 Cor 12:10). We can't rely upon language translators, because the tongue is most likely to be uncommon.
These reasons defeat the arguments that tongues are not real languages because they aren't in German or French or some language they expect it should be.
Some people say "if you tongues isn't a real language (and they expect it to be German or something common), it isn't from God". The thing with tongues is, it is not so much about the speaker, as about the hearer. It is not important whether the tongue speaker speaks in Chinese or an angelic tongue (if even possible), the focus is upon the hearer.
In the case of private prayer language, the hearer is God. He understands all languages, including the thoughts and intent of the heart and Spirit's will that accompanies it.