Day One: How to pray?
Scripture: Jude 20
Principle: Prayer is done in the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we are going to spend the next 21 days focused on prayer, then we should start with the basics. This is prayer, done in, by and through the Holy Spirit. Charles Spurgeon says,
“Praying how? By the book? Without book? In public? In private? By the way? In the house? On your knees? Standing? Sitting? Kneeling? Nothing is said about these; posture, place, and time are all left open. There is no rubric except one—“in the Holy Ghost.”3
As Spurgeon says, the time, the place and the posture are all up to you. There is nowhere in scripture which tells us to pray in the morning or before meals or before bed. There is no command to bow our heads and get on our knees. There are no limitations restricting prayer to the church or the privacy of our bedrooms. The only thing which is required is to pray in the Spirit.
What does this mean? I want to take the remainder of today and the next two days to talk about what it means to pray in the Spirit. First, it means that we must pray in the power of the Spirit. When a person becomes a disciple of Christ a miracle takes place. It is described as being born again, or born of the Spirit. It is the fulfillment of a promise God made to Israel through the prophet Ezekiel. “And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh,” (Ezekiel 11:19, ESV). Because of this, we have a new capability. We can do something we couldn’t do before. We have the capacity to understand and take spiritual action. Dagg says,
“We are, … dependent on the Holy Spirit, for the existence of spiritual life, and for the faculties and powers necessary to all spiritual action.”4
Prayer is a spiritual action and therefore requires us to pray in the power of the Spirit.
Application: Makes this your prayer:
Holy Spirit, finish the healing, saving work of Jesus my Lord, and do not let the
flesh or the world prevail. Be in me the resident witness of my Lord, the author of
my prayers, the Spirit of adoption, the seal of God, and the deposit of my inheritance.
—Richard Baxter5
3 C. H. Spurgeon, “Praying in the Holy Ghost,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 12 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1866), 618.
4 J. L. Dagg, Manual of Theology, First Part: A Treatise on Christian Doctrine (Charleston, SC; Richmond, VA; Macon, GA; Selma, AL; New Orleans: Southern Baptist Publication Society; S. S. & Publication Board; B. B. & Colporteur Society; B. B. & Book Depository; B. B. Depository, 1859), 234.
5 Richard Baxter, “To the Holy Spirit,” in Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans, ed. Robert Elmer (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), 270–271.