CULTIVATING THE SPIRIT OF PRAYER

Prayer is not a religious routine. It is the breath of the spirit-man — the vital, ongoing communion between the believer and his God that sustains, deepens, and enlarges the inner life. Yet prayer at its highest level is not a discipline that can be imposed from the outside. It must be cultivated from within. It must become a spirit — a sustained orientation of the heart toward God that produces not occasional bursts of intercession, but a life lived in continuous, prevailing prayer.

The Foundation: Desire

Every enduring work of the Spirit begins with desire. Where there is no desire, there will be no discipline; and where there is no discipline, there will be no development. The cultivation of a spirit of prayer must therefore begin with the cultivation of desire — a holy longing for God Himself, for His will to be done, for His purposes to be accomplished in the earth and in the lives of those under your care.

The psalmist expressed this desire with simple and profound clarity:

Psalm 86:11  Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name.

Notice the request: “unite my heart.” The divided heart — the heart that is partly given to God and partly distracted by the noise and demands of the world — is the great enemy of prevailing prayer. The psalmist understood that effective communion with God requires a heart that has been gathered, focused, and consecrated to one object. That gathering of the heart is itself a work of prayer. We must ask God to give us the desire that produces prayer, and the prayer that deepens desire, in an ascending spiral of devotion.

Maintaining the Glow

One of the greatest dangers in the life of the believer is spiritual cooling — the gradual dimming of the fire that once burned bright. The apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, issued a sharp and timely exhortation against this tendency:

Romans 12:11  Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord.

To be “fervent in spirit” means literally to be “boiling” or “glowing” in spirit — to maintain the heat of spiritual life at a constant and intense temperature. The glow does not sustain itself automatically. It requires intentional, consistent feeding. Just as a fire goes out when it is not stoked and fuelled, the spirit grows cold when it is not nourished through prayer and the Word. Cultivating the spirit means making a deliberate and daily choice to tend the fire — to refuse the cooling that always threatens, and to keep the spirit burning.

Praying for the Spiritual Growth of Others

One of the most significant expressions of a cultivated prayer life is intercession for the spiritual development of others. The apostle Paul’s letters are filled with prayers that model this kind of intercession. These are not prayers for comfort or physical wellbeing — they are prayers for spiritual depth, for revelation, for growth in the knowledge of God. They reveal the heart of a man who understood that the greatest gift you can give to another person is not material provision but spiritual enlargement.

To the Colossians, Paul wrote:

Colossians 1:9–11  For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.

The structure of this prayer is instructive. It begins with knowledge — the knowledge of God’s will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. This is not intellectual information but the living, operative knowledge that comes from revelation. From that knowledge flows a worthy walk; from the worthy walk flows fruitfulness; and from fruitfulness flows strength — the divine strength that produces not merely endurance but joyful endurance. Paul was praying for a complete and integrated spiritual life for his brothers and sisters in Christ.

His prayer for the Philippians carried the same spirit:

Philippians 1:9–11  And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ; Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.

Notice that Paul prayed for love to grow — not in sentiment but in knowledge and judgment. Love that is grounded in the knowledge of God is love that can discern; it can recognise what is excellent and approve it; it can navigate the complexities of life in the Spirit without being led astray by counterfeits. To pray for others in this way is to seek for them the deepest kind of growth.

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians went further still:

Ephesians 1:15–19  Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints, Cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers; That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power.

The prayer is for illumination — for the eyes of the understanding to be opened so that the believer might apprehend the magnitude of what they have been given. The hope of His calling. The riches of His inheritance. The exceeding greatness of His power. These are realities already purchased and provisioned; Paul prayed that the Ephesians would have the capacity to see them. And he continued in that same letter:

Ephesians 3:14–19  For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.

The ultimate horizon of this prayer is breathtaking: that believers might be “filled with all the fulness of God.” This is the goal of spiritual cultivation — not merely to manage sin, or to attend meetings, or to maintain a form of religion, but to be filled with the very life and nature and fulness of God Himself. That is what Paul prayed for. That is the standard he held for those under his care. And that is the kind of intercession that a cultivated spirit of prayer will produce.

The Spirit’s Help in Prayer

There will be moments in the life of prayer when we reach the limits of our own understanding — when the situation before us is too vast, too complex, or too deep for our human comprehension to frame adequately in words. It is precisely at those moments that the ministry of the Holy Spirit in prayer becomes most vital:

Romans 8:26–27  Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

The Holy Spirit does not abandon us at the boundaries of our knowledge. He steps in precisely where our competence ends. His intercession within us is always perfectly aligned with the will of God — which means that when we yield to the Spirit in prayer, we can be assured that what is being expressed through us, even in groanings that transcend articulate speech, is hitting the precise mark of divine intention. This is one of the great privileges of the Spirit-filled life. We do not need to know everything. We need only to yield to the One who does.

Asking in Alignment

The cultivation of the spirit of prayer is also the cultivation of the spirit of discernment — learning to ask not merely from appetite, but from alignment with God’s purposes. The epistle of James contains a sharp and sobering observation about unanswered prayer: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts” (James 4:3). To ask amiss is to bring to God the requests generated by self-will and self-interest rather than the requests born of the Spirit. A cultivated prayer life steadily transforms the nature of what we ask for — drawing us from the shallow waters of personal convenience into the deep waters of divine purpose.

Paul’s testimony in Romans speaks to the quality of prayer that a cultivated spirit produces:

Romans 15:29  And I am sure that, when I come unto you, I shall come in the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ.

That kind of assurance — a settled certainty that one carries the fulness of the blessing of the gospel — is not the product of wishful thinking. It is the fruit of a life lived in unbroken fellowship with God, a life in which prayer has become not an activity but an atmosphere, not a meeting but a mode of being.

Conclusion

To cultivate the spirit is to tend, deliberately and consistently, the inner fire of communion with God. It begins with desire — a genuine hunger for God and His purposes. It is sustained through the daily choice to maintain the glow, to refuse the cooling of spiritual indifference, and to feed the fire with the Word and with prayer. It expresses itself most powerfully in intercession for others — standing before God on behalf of those we love, asking not merely for their comfort but for their spiritual enlargement, that they might be filled with all the fulness of God.

And in all of this, the Holy Spirit is our ever-present help — interceding within us with perfect precision, aligning our prayer with the will of God, and carrying us beyond the limits of our own comprehension into the boundless reaches of divine purpose. This is the life of cultivated prayer. This is the spirit we are called to develop. And those who do will find that they have discovered the very heartbeat of God.