Prophetic Urgings: 5 Ways God Speaks in Prayer

One of the fastest ways to venture out further in prayer and the things of the Spirit, is to become well-versed in how the Spirit leads.

The leading of the Spirit is available to us anytime. And He is always looking for someone to partner with Him in prayer. In Zechariah 12:10, He is described as the “Spirit of grace and supplication”—that the Holy Spirit will impart grace (supernaturally ability, access, means and opportunity) to pray out God’s plans.

A large part of cooperating with the Spirit of prayer is being available to Him. I think we can be so preoccupied with life and the responsibilities it entails that we become unavailable. Every second of our lives are scheduled and assigned for the benefit of someone other than the Holy Spirit. Or if you’re like some believers, there seems to be an addiction to enjoyment and entertainment. This happens when our lives center on the things and people we enjoy. We prioritize the thrill of life and not the joy that comes from being in God’s presence.

It’s these life cadences that make us unavailable to the Spirit in prayer. Please don’t misunderstand me: God wants us to be highly productive believers. In Luke 19:13, Jesus says to occupy until He comes. Occupy literally means to do business. Jesus expects us to do business, excel in our careers. But your schedule and systems should serve you and not the other way around. God wants you to enjoy life in abundance. He’s not opposed to your enjoyment of the life He’s authored for you. However, your prayer life should never be at the mercy of your enjoyment and entertainment.

Being available to God in prayer is key, but recognizing the Spirit of prayer moving on you to pray is essential. I meet so many believers who want to go to “another level” in their prayer lives. They ask me to pray for them or lay hands on them for an impartation to pray bigger

and better prayers. While I believe in the ministry of laying hands on people for impartation, that by itself won’t help you go to another level in your praying. If you want to be used of God in a greater way in prayer, you have to raise your awareness of His movement in prayer. The Holy Spirit is always ready to pray, and He passes to you cues for prayer all the time.

But we miss prayer cues because we don’t know how the Spirit invites us into prayer. If we can learn how the Spirit of God leads us into prayer, it helps us recognize opportunities to jump into flows of prayer. But if we don’t recognize Him moving us to pray, how can we give ourselves to it?

At times the Holy Spirit will impress you to pray about His plan for your life, a person, or an event. If you don’t recognize that it’s Him leading you to pray, you’ll dismiss it. You move right along with the rest of your day and credit that impression to mental energy. In doing so, you miss an opportunity to partner with God in prayer and follow the Spirit. Ultimately, it’s a bad spiritual habit to continuously ignore the leading of the Spirit to prayer, even if you’re doing it out of ignorance.

So if you are serious about growing up spiritually and praying out farther, we need to make this a priority—recognizing the Spirit of prayer is not optional; it’s necessary. In this chapter I share with you some of the patterns I have observed during my journey in prayer. There may be dozens of ways that the Spirit of God will lead you into prayer. But I want to provide some very practical ways the Lord has dealt with me in prayer that has served as a springboard into His presence. I believe that as you study these prayer cues provided in this chapter, that the leading of the Spirit in your own life will begin to take shape and you will give yourself to prayer more quickly and more deeply.

Desire to Pray

The desire to pray is probably the most obvious way the Spirit leads you to pray. I promise you that the desire to get alone with God and pray does not come from the devil. Sometimes the presence of God will begin to manifest to you throughout the day as you work, listen to music, or enjoy a podcast or sermon. As His presence manifests, it awakens the desire to commune with Him. Other times, you may encounter another person whose presence awakens a desire to pray in you. That happens to me quite often. When I get around praying people, it draws prayer out of my inner self. I leave their presence wanting to shut away with God and pray.

And I’ve found that if I give myself to the desire to pray, that direction will meet my desire. You may be asking yourself, How do I give myself to the desire to pray? Something as simple as worshipping the Lord or praying in other tongues. You can do this while you’re at work, doing chores, taking a walk, anything that doesn’t require all of your awareness to do. Of course if you’re doing this in public, you will want to pray silently under your breath. You obviously don’t want to bring attention to yourself. But as you begin to pray and worship the Lord, you become more and more aware of Him. His presence begins to manifest more and more.

Many times we think that the manifestation of His presence means we are finished praying. Nothing is further from the truth. In fact, prayer has just begun when the presence of the Lord manifests to you. As His presence comes to you, watch in your heart to see what He will say to you or how He will lead you. In that praying you can ask the Lord “What is it? What are You saying to me?” And just hold that question up before the Lord as you pray in tongues. As you focus and bring your attention to the indwelling presence of the Spirit, His leading will begin to take shape. Whatever needs to prayed about will begin to emerge in your heart. But it starts by giving attention to the desire to pray and not ignoring it as unimportant.

Restlessness

Sometimes God will interrupt your comfort to invite you into a place of prayer. Specifically, God will interrupt your sleep to get your attention for the purposes of prayer. I know it’s a bad habit, but I tend to sleep with my phone next to me on my nightstand. So, there have been times when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep.

The first thing I used to do was reach for my phone. First I wanted to see the time, then I saw all email, news alerts, and social media notifications. Since I was awake and couldn’t get back to sleep, I started scrolling and looking at funny videos and memes. Meanwhile the Spirit of God had been waiting on me to join Him in prayer.

Now don’t judge me. You may not sleep with your phone next to the bed and scroll endlessly on social media in the middle of the night. But maybe you’re a snacker. So when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep, you may go to the refrigerator or grab potato chips in an effort to satisfy hunger with midnight snacks. The problem with that is you’re feeding the wrong hunger. Your spirit is crying out for fellowship with God, but you decide to feed your flesh instead.

Both of these scenarios are examples of what I call using a pacifier. When you give a pacifier to a baby, it’s designed to soothe and pass the time. There is no nutritional value in a pacifier. It only satisfies the moment. When God is calling you into a space of prayer by interrupting your sleep, sometimes we pacify the leading to pray with natural substitutions. It is a learned behavior to look to your spirit when you are restless. Our knee-jerk reaction is to satisfy a spiritual issue with a natural solution.

Instead of using a pacifier, draw prayer up out of your spirit. If you don’t do anything but stay in bed and pray in tongues, it positions your heart to receive a prayer assignment from the Lord. He may or may not give you one. You could start praying in tongues and pray yourself back to sleep. That would be great! But what if in that praying, you find a door to the realm of the Spirit open to you and an urgent prayer assignment that needs your attention?

The Holy Spirit is not intrusive. He’s not trying to keep you from sleeping. If it’s time for bed and you are led to pray, trust me, it’s urgent. And if it’s important enough to the Holy Spirit to interrupt your routine, then it should be important enough to you, to give attention to it.

Prophetic Revelation

Anytime God reveals something to you, it’s never just to make you smart. It’s an invitation to process the plan of God in prayer. I remember one time when I was grocery shopping and the Lord spoke to me about a particular minister in Chicago. He said to me, “This man is an apostle. And within that apostolic mantle is the technology of the future for the church.” I remember hearing that so loudly in my spirit. And yet, I continued with my shopping.

A few moments later I could sense in my heart that I’d grieved the Lord in some way. And this question came up in my heart, “So are you gonna pray about that or not?” I immediately knew what I needed to do. So right there in the store, I began to pray for this minister. I said, “Lord, I thank You for him and the mantle on his life and ministry. Thank You for the inner workings of that mantle. Thank You for the systems, technologies, and all the varying parts working in him. Thank You for the preaching parts, praying parts, prophesying parts, administrative parts. Thank You for all the parts of that mantle working together to promote constructive spiritual progress in Your plan and the people You’ve sent him to.” Then I spent some time praying in the Holy Ghost for him.

Since that day, this minister has come to my heart dozens of times for the purpose of prayer. The Lord passed a prayer assignment to me through that prophetic revelation about that man. I didn’t need to call his office or reach out to him on social media. But I did need to recognize the leading of the Spirit to pray. It’s the same with anything God chooses to speak with you about. If God is talking, you need to be found listening and watching in your heart to see what response He’s calling for from you. Prayer is always an appropriate response.

A Burden

Have you ever experienced a sense of heaviness and didn’t understand why? For instance, you can be enjoying a wonderful day and just out of nowhere you feel a weight in your heart; it’s almost tangible, to the extent that it can feel like someone threw a weighted blanket on you.

Sometimes, this is the Holy Spirit helping you to identify with someone who needs prayer. Identification is a facet of intercession. Hebrews 4:15 says that Jesus is touched with the feelings of our infirmities. As we partner with Him in intercession, sometimes we will pick up on the afflictions of those we are praying for. It can manifest as a sense of heaviness or a burden.

You have to decide to take this burden to the Lord in prayer and trust the Spirit to help you intercede. The Spirit of God will begin to manufacture intercession within you concerning a person or a situation and it will start with a sense of heaviness. But the devil would love for you to misinterpret that and turn it into something it’s not. He would love for you to start thinking you’re depressed or that there is something wrong with you mentally. Believe me, I am an advocate for mental health. But let’s not misinterpret what is happening here. If you will take that burden in prayer, you will find clarity—and the burden will begin to lift as you pray. Knowing that the Spirit can lead you this way can rescue you from wrong thinking and rash decisions.

Unskilled believers have taken on burdens in prayer as a personality. And they allow it to affect their temperament. They become dark, gloomy, and quite frankly really weird. That is not of God. I don’t believe God is weird, do you? So when we find ourselves doing weird things, nine times out of ten, the Spirit of God is not in on it. He will lead you in line with the Word and good sense.

How do you handle a burden? Bring it to the Lord in prayer. Jesus says in Matthew 11:30 that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. If it’s not easy and light, you’re not doing it right. So bring the burden to the Lord in prayer with faith. Sometimes you don’t know who or what you’re praying about. But you can pray in faith because you know you didn’t initiate this prayer burden yourself. It’s God working in you.

So you can pray in faith like this, “Father, I thank You for the privilege of prayer. Thank You for the opportunity to work with You in prayer. I’m picking up something in my spirit, so I hold this up before You for a moment. I discern that prayer is what’s needed here, and I don’t know about what or about who. But You know! And I trust You bring me utterance in an unknown tongue and revelation on what to pray specifically as I need it.” Then pray in the Holy Spirit.

Watch in your heart to see what He will say that you should pray. Pray until you get a note of victory in your heart and the burden lifts. That simply means pray until joy and peace come through your spirit. That’s how you know that you’ve prayed it out as far as you need to. That burden may visit you again on another day. But you’ve offered a supply of faith for it in the moment, and the Lord is pleased.

I can’t stress this enough—what you don’t want to do is bring that burden out of prayer and let it affect your temperament. Don’t do that. It’s unnecessary and weird. I’ve met people who walk around burdened down with a dark demeanor and a very uninviting aesthetic in the name of being an intercessor. “The Lord is dealing with me. I’m just in a different place in God,” they’ll say. No, we are all in the same place in God. We are all in Christ. Don’t try to be deep. Just enjoy flowing with God. Be happy! Let the joy of the Lord flood you and fill you with everything good God has authored for you. Keep prayer fun, easy, and light by keeping prayer burdens in prayer and out of your personality.

The Truth in Scripture

The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Truth in John chapters 14 through 16. That simply means that He gives your heart truth. Jesus is praying in John 17:17 saying, “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.” So the Holy Spirit will give your spirit truth. He will announce scriptures to your heart. When the Holy Spirit brings a scripture to you, don’t just meditate on it. Invite the Holy Spirit into that time of meditation. Lift that scripture up to the Lord. It’s been said that meditation puts you in the verse and the verse in you. As you allow your mind to wrap around that verse and paint pictures of the verse playing out in your life, talk to the Father about it.

Praise and worship the Lord with that verse. As you do, the anointing will increase. God will begin to speak to you from that verse with more explanation. And from that place of speaking, direction for prayer will come. Now you find yourself fellowshipping with God over that verse and the Spirit is taking you out farther in prayer.