The most important thing for a baby at birth is breathing. In our spiritual life, prayer is breathing and is as crucial to a new believer as breathing is to a newborn babe. Hence, after we believe in the Lord and call upon His name to be saved, we must continue to pray and call on the Lord. Then we can receive the spiritual air, which is the Lord’s Spirit of life, that we may grow and be strong in the spiritual life.
The real significance of prayer is to contact God in our spirit and to absorb God Himself. Prayer is the contact of the human spirit with the Spirit of God, during which man inhales God into himself. Therefore, the emphasis of prayer lies not in asking God for things but in contacting and absorbing God.
A person needs the proper faculty in whatever he does. We need our eyes in order to see, our ears in order to hear, and our spirit in order to pray.
1) “God is Spirit; and those who worship [including praying to] Him must worship in spirit and reality” (John 4:24).
2) “Praying at every time in spirit” [that is, praying with the spirit] (Eph. 6:18).
The above two verses tell us that God is Spirit, and to worship and pray to Him, we must be in our spirit, that is, we must use our spirit. Our spirit is the deepest part of our being. To pray in the spirit, or to pray with our spirit, is to use our innermost part to contact God. Therefore, we must pray not merely according to the thoughts in our mind, but according to the sense deep within our spirit. The faculty of prayer is not the mind but the spirit.
1) “Having therefore, brothers, boldness for entering the Holy of Holies by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19).
To enter the Holy of Holies is to come before God in order to contact God and pray to God. This is by means of the redeeming blood shed by the Lord Jesus on the cross, which washes away all the sins that hinder our fellowship with God.
2) “That whatever you ask the Father in My name, He may give you” (John 15:16).
Here we are told that we should pray to the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus. To be in the name of the Lord Jesus is to be in the Lord Himself. When we pray, we need to pray not only by means of the Lord’s blood but also by means of the Lord’s name, that is, by means of the Lord Himself. We cannot come before God to pray by depending on our behavior. Even if our behavior is good, it is like filthy rags in God’s eyes (Isa. 64:6). Neither can we depend on ourselves, because we also are filthy and unacceptable to God. Thus, when we come before God to pray to Him, we must rely on the Lord’s blood to wash away the filth in our behavior, and must depend on the Lord Himself to replace our filthy being, so that it is as if the Lord Himself is coming to pray before God. Only such prayers are acceptable to God.