What kind of spirit is most conducive to God-exalting prayer? In his sermon, “Hypocrites Deficient in the Duty of Prayer,” Jonathan Edwards provides insight into an attitude that will stimulate believers into greater dependence on the powerful sufficiency of God:
The true spirit of prayer is no other than God’s own spirit dwelling in the hearts of the saints. And as this spirit comes from God, so doth it naturally tend to God in holy breathings and pantings. It naturally leads to God to converse with him by prayer. Therefore the Spirit is said to make intercession for the saints with groanings which cannot be uttered, Rom. viii. 26.…
[The true convert] sees himself still to be a poor, empty, helpless creature, and that he still stands in great and continual need of God’s help. He is sensible that without God he can do nothing. A false conversion makes a man in his own eyes self-sufficient. He saith he is rich, and increased with goods, and hath need of nothing; and knoweth not that he is wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. But after a true conversion, the soul remains sensible of its own impotence and emptiness, as it is in itself, and its sense of it is rather increased than diminished. It is still sensible of its universal dependence on God for every thing.
The true spirit of prayer, then, is a humble longing and dependence on God that utterly refuses any claim to self-reliance and self-dependence. In this attitude of prayer, the believer will increasingly find the sustaining and empowering provision of God in all his circumstances.
Words of Grace 