All prayers must be spiritual. A prayer that is not spiritual is not a prayer and will not see a result. If all the prayers on earth today were spiritual prayers, believers would have many spiritual achievements. However, fleshly prayers are numerous! Self-will in one's prayer renders a prayer spiritually useless. Today many believers consider prayer a tool to accomplish their own purposes. If they had more knowledge, they would realize that prayer is just man speaking God's will to Him. The flesh must be crucified no matter where it is found. Even in prayer one must not allow the flesh to exist. God's work precludes any possibility of being mixed with human ideas. Even when the motive is good and the work is beneficial to men, God will not permit man to initiate anything that requires Him to follow the lead of man. Believers have only one right, to do what God tells them to do. They have no right to tell God what He ought to do. Other than following God's leading, believers can contribute nothing to God's work. God will not participate in any works that are initiated by self-will, no matter how much man prays for them. Self-will only makes prayers fleshly.
When a believer truly enters the spiritual realm, he realizes how empty he is, and that he has nothing of life to give to others and nothing in himself that can oppose the enemy. He spontaneously takes God as his source, and prayer then becomes indispensable. A real prayer is one that expresses the emptiness of the one praying and the riches of the One answering. If the flesh has never been dealt with by the cross to the extent that a man becomes a "vacuum," what use and purpose does his prayer have?
A spiritual prayer is nothing other than a prayer that is not from the flesh. It is not something that a believer thinks of, something that he desires, or something that he decides to do. Rather, it is something that he practices according to God's will. A spiritual prayer is a prayer in spirit. This means that a person first understands God's will in his intuition and then prays about it. "By means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit" (Eph. 6:18). This is the command of the Scripture. If we are not praying in spirit, we are praying in the flesh. We should not open our mouth the minute we come to God. Instead, we should first ask God to show us what He wants us to know and show us how to pray. We have already tried repeatedly to pray for what we wanted. Why do we not now pray for what God wants? In prayer the flesh has no place. It is not what you want, but what God wants. Those who are not truly spiritual will not have truly spiritual prayers.
All spiritual prayers originate from God. God shows us what we should pray. He shows us a need and causes us to be intuitively burdened for that need. An intuitive burden is our call to prayer. But many times, due to negligence, we miss many of the small feelings in our intuition. We should never pray more than the burden in our intuition. Any prayer that is not initiated and inspired by the intuition is a prayer that originates from the believers themselves and is of the flesh.