Different Levels of Prayer for Spiritual Growth

Your phone buzzes at 5 a.m. and you check it before your feet touch the floor. Messages, news, the office group. By the time you have finished, the day has started without God. Many believers in our city talk to everyone before they talk to their Father. This message is about prayer: what it is, and the three levels God wants to take you through.

Prayer is communication with God. If you do not pray, you cannot receive His guidance. A Christian must pray, the way a Christian must breathe.

Understand who you are first. God is Spirit, and you are a spirit too. You have a soul and you live in a body. The body is a garment you are wearing for a short time. Your body may be thin or heavy, young or old, and still you can have a great heart for the Lord. The age of the body is going down day by day. One day it will finish, and where you go after that depends on your obedience to God.

The soul is your mind, your thinking and deciding part; it decides and the body follows. To maintain the body, you eat, drink and exercise. To develop the soul, you go to school and train the mind until it makes you an advocate, an engineer or a doctor. But the spirit is God’s own element in you. “The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). From that moment we have been spiritual beings.

Yet many people never train their spirit to pray. All three parts of you are hungry. The body wants a good meal; the spirit is hungry for the presence of the Lord. If you have no appetite to pray or read the Bible, check your spirit, because it is starving. As you eat every day, you must pray and read the Word every day.

3 Levels of Prayer

Prayer has levels, and God does not want you to stay at the first one for the rest of your life.

Think of it like the stages of a friendship. First you ask a favour, then you sit and talk, then you would fight for that person. Prayer grows the same way.

1. Prayer is asking and receiving from the Lord

Anybody can ask God for something, but nobody can ask without faith, and prayer without faith is useless.

God is Spirit, so flesh cannot connect with Him. You must come to Him in spirit. Never walk into your prayer room in the flesh, full of the day’s noise and your own cleverness. Quieten down and come as a spirit to the Father of spirits. This is the first level.

Matthew 7:7 says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” The Bible is your guide to effective prayer. At this level you ask, and God gives. But you cannot ask without faith. As prayer without faith is useless, faith without prayer is also useless. Say it: “I believe God will do it for me.”

Look at Hannah. Year after year she had no child, and her rival mocked her at every festival. She went to the house of the Lord and prayed so hard, lips moving without a sound, that the priest thought she was drunk. She had faith, so she prayed like anything, and God answered her with Samuel. Faith-filled people are prayerful people. Do not quit your prayer. The more faith you have, the more prayer you will offer.

2. Prayer as fellowship with God

At the second level you stop coming to God only with a list and start coming to Him as a friend to a Friend.

If you ask according to His will, He gives; if not, He does not. So the second kind of prayer is learning His will by spending time with Him. Here you become friends with God. You call Him Father, Abba. “The Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (Romans 8:15).

People at this level miss His fellowship when they are away from it. They will spend a whole night with Him. They pray every day, not because the pastor said so, but because God is their friend. Nobody has to tell them to pray. They will skip a meal before they skip prayer. We are children of God, so we ask with the confidence of a child in his father’s house.

One test: if you are checking the clock or your phone during prayer, you have not yet given your heart to God. A friend does not keep looking at his watch.

3. Fighting in prayer

At the third level you do not only ask or talk; you take hold of God and refuse to let go until He blesses you.

Jacob wrestled with God through the night (Genesis 32:24-28). He was limping, exhausted, and still he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” God changed his name that night and called him Israel. That is fighting prayer.

• The Bible shows that prayer can change the outcome. God was ready to judge King Abimelech, but Abraham prayed and God spared his life.
• When Hezekiah was told to put his house in order, he turned his face to the wall and wept in prayer, and God added years to his life. We pray for the sick in the same spirit, trusting God with the answer.
• Pray for every member of your family by name. Bring your work, your money and your health to Him.
• Pray out loud. Take authority over the enemy in the name of Jesus.

Fighting prayer is not shouting for the sake of it. It is a spirit that has decided not to go home empty.

This week

• Set a 5 a.m. alarm and pray before you open a single message on the phone.
• Spend one evening this week with God alone, no list, only talking and listening, for as long as you can.
• Choose one family member and pray for them out loud by name every day until Sunday.

God bless you abundantly, and may your spirit grow hungry for His presence this week.