How to Develop a Prayer Passion

by Wesley Duewel

The most important measure of prayer is not its length or its depth; not its beautiful words—but its intensity. It is not necessarily a matter of how many hours you pray, but how intensely you pray when you do.

Learn to pray with passion:

1. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you His love, passion, and zeal.

2. Welcome and cherish any drawing of the Spirit to prayer.

3. Read and reread Scripture accounts or accounts in deeply spiritual books of how God called people to prayer and answered their prayers.

4. Keep deepening your own prayer life by faithfulness in your prayer habits and your prayer commitments.

5. Take several major prayer concerns or burdens on your heart and make them the special focus of your prayers: for special needs such as pornography, drugs, or child abuse. They may include a particular nation—India, China, Indonesia, Cuba, or another one God places on your heart. You cannot pray at length for everything, but you can ask God to guide you to several special prayer concerns.

6. Keep a listening ear for any special prayer assignments that God might give you as a temporary urgent prayer need. There may be a special need on a particular day or hour for your prayer. As far as possible, go to prayer for that need immediately. Use every free moment possible until God lifts from your heart the prayer concern. Your prayer passion will be greatly increased as you obey this call from the Spirit.

Whether short or long, let your prayer be fervent.

Excerpted from Mighty Prevailing Prayer, by Wesley Duewel, pgs. 76–79.

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