Praying in the Spirit by Peter Tan [Summary] 

Main Summary: Praying in the Spirit by Peter Tan is a practical guide to powerful prayer. It reveals how to move from desperate, crisis-driven prayer to a consistent, Spirit-led life that conceives God’s will, visualizes His promises, and births miracles through disciplined prayer and speaking in tongues.

Lessons You’ll Learn From This Post 

• Praying Into the Spirit Dimension
• Building in the Spirit
• Conceiving in the Spirit
• Consistency and Discipline in Prayer
• Sharpening God’s Vision Through the Qualities of Tongues
• Regular Long Hours of Prayer
• Levels of Praying in the Spirit

Also read A Better Way to Pray by Andrew Wommack [Summary] Pt1

Your spirit man right now through the fellowship he has with the Holy Spirit has information on your future, past and present… Your spirit man is billions of times smarter than your soul.

Praying Into the Spirit Dimension

• The spirit realm is timeless. God exists in a dimension where past, present, and future are all present and known. Our challenge is accessing this knowledge from within our time-bound existence.
• The primary role of the Holy Spirit is to show believers “things to come,” bridging the gap between God’s timeless perspective and our temporal one.
• The spirit realm operates at a vastly higher “frequency” or reality than the physical world. The higher spiritual frequency always influences and governs the lower natural frequency.
• Jesus operated from this dimension. His miracles demonstrated mastery over natural laws because He consistently operated from the timeless, authoritative spiritual dimension.
• Praying in tongues accelerates your spirit. This practice engages your human spirit with the Holy Spirit, moving you into higher spiritual frequencies and beyond the limitations of your natural mind.
• Your mind is the primary brake: The conscious and subconscious mind act as brakes, hindering full entry into the spirit realm. To flow freely, you must learn to move “beyond the mind” and trust your spirit.
• Your spirit knows more than your mind: Your reborn human spirit, in fellowship with the Holy Spirit, possesses knowledge of your past, present, and future that your soul (mind) cannot access on its own.
• Prayer in the spirit is foundational for the believer. The New Testament emphasizes praying in the spirit as the primary method for building faith, receiving revelation, and engaging in effective spiritual warfare. It is the gateway to God’s hidden wisdom.

You can never improve on the method God gives. If God tells you to do something in a certain way don’t skim around it just do it.

Building in the Spirit

• Everything in the physical world originates from the spiritual realm. To change your physical circumstances, you must first change the spiritual realm through faith and imagination.
• Your imagination is the “eye of the soul” and the bridge between your spirit and the physical world. What you consistently visualize in your spirit will manifest in your life.
• Replace negative, fear-based images with pictures based on Scripture. Your heart and imagination must be renewed by God’s promises for change to occur.
• Spiritual warfare happens in the realm of images. Demonic strongholds are built through negative imaginations, and they are torn down by visualizing God’s truth.
• Biblical faith involves “seeing” God’s promises in your spirit before they materialize. This process includes seeing, being assured, embracing, and confessing the vision.
• You paint your future with images from God’s Word and personal rhema (spoken word from God). Clarity and detail in your spiritual vision determine the clarity of its physical manifestation.
• Wrong images from the past can be washed away by applying the Blood of Jesus to your mind, allowing you to install new, godly visions for your life.

Also read Fervent by Priscilla Shirer [Summary] 

Your imagination will hold you stronger than physical bars. It is the battlefield where your freedom is won or lost.

Conceiving in the Spirit

• Effective spiritual prayer follows three stages—conception (desire), gestation (development), and birthing (manifestation).
• Conception requires intense desire. A passive or half-hearted desire is insufficient for spiritual conception. You must want God’s promise desperately enough for it to consume your focus.
• You must prove your desire through sacrifice: True desperation is demonstrated by what you are willing to give up—time, comfort, distractions—to focus on your prayer goal.
• Right desire must be paired with right relationship: Desperation alone is not enough. You must cultivate a close, obedient relationship with God through worship and living according to His Word.
• Follow God’s method exactly: You cannot improve on or substitute God’s prescribed methods (e.g., speaking to mountains, confessing His Word). Success requires using His specific instructions.
• The spiritual realm affects the natural: Any lasting change in the physical world must first be conceived and birthed in the spiritual realm through prayer.
• Apply the Word persistently. Lock onto specific scriptures related to your need. Confess them continually from a place of desperate faith until you see a breakthrough.
• Genuine spiritual conception will produce noticeable “symptoms” in your life: a consuming focus, a willingness to sacrifice, and a steadfast practice of God’s Word and methods.

Operating in the spiritual realm is like operating a bank account. Some people would like to make huge withdrawal in their bank account when they haven’t bank anything in.

Consistency and Discipline in Prayer

• Prayer is a discipline, not just a crisis tool. God desires a consistent, daily walk with Him, not a relationship where we only turn to Him in desperate times.
• Consistency builds spiritual deposits. Regular, disciplined prayer acts like making deposits in a spiritual bank account. This builds a reserve of spiritual strength you can draw from when challenges arise, often reducing the need for extreme “desperado” tactics.
• While God responds to desperate cries (as seen in Judges), He is more deeply impressed and moved by a steady, faithful life. Consistency touches the core of God’s heart more than sporadic intensity.
• Consistency requires a price and choice. Maintaining a daily prayer habit demands saying “no” to countless distractions and worldly pressures. This disciplined choice is a greater spiritual price than occasional dramatic acts of devotion.
• Intense prayer and fasting should function as a defensive response to heightened spiritual attack or an offensive move in obedience to a specific burden from God—not as your primary spiritual mode.
• Pray outside the lion’s den. Develop your consistent prayer life before a crisis hits. You cannot effectively pray in the midst of a trial (the “lion’s den”) if you have not built the habit and relationship in calm times.
• Be a lover, not just a beggar. Shift from approaching God only as a desperate beggar to making regular “dates” to fellowship with Him as a lover. This builds a deeper, more stable relationship.
• Hebrews 11:6 promises that God rewards those who diligently and persistently seek Him. Consistency is the key to unlocking the fulfillment of God’s promises in every area of life.

Also read Interceding Christian By Kenneth E. Hagin [Summary]

What we want is not our own vision. We want the Lord’s vision… The more we are able to see as the Lord sees the greater the ability to succeed in praying it into reality.

Sharpening God’s Vision Through the Qualities of Tongues

• Praying in tongues clarifies and refines spiritual vision. Extended prayer in the Spirit helps purify the mental pictures we have when praying, stripping away soulish assumptions and preconceived ideas to reveal God’s pure vision.
• Our initial vision is often “colored” by the soul. The image we see when praying can be a mix of God’s spirit and our own souls’ input (past experiences, fears, logic). Quality prayer in tongues filters this to achieve clarity.
• Five distinct qualities of praying in tongues exist: Moving beyond just “edification,” believers can experience different dimensions of tongues for different purposes.
  • Building Tongues (Edification): The foundational quality. It charges and builds up your inner spirit man, often with a relaxed, rhythmic flow. You can practice this while doing other tasks.
  • Dialogue Tongues (Communion): A conversational quality with God. It requires more concentration, sensing God’s presence, and allows your spirit to communicate mysteries directly to Him, deepening the relationship.
  • Interpreting Tongues (Understanding): As you dialogue, your mind (which has taken a “back seat”) begins to pick up glimpses of what your spirit is praying. This leads to private interpretation and prophetic insight, aligning your intellect with God’s will.
  • Tongues as a Sign (Miraculous Witness): A sovereignly given quality where the tongue is an actual human language unknown to the speaker but understood by a hearer. It serves as a miraculous sign to unbelievers or as a specific confirmation from God.
  • The Spirit Praying Through Us (Divine Utterance): The highest level of yieldedness, where the Holy Spirit fully takes over your vocal faculties to utter His direct commands, intercessions, or instructions into the spiritual realm (e.g., to angels or against demons).
• You typically need to be “built up” (Quality 1) before you can effectively enter into dialogue (Quality 2), which in turn opens the door to interpretation (Quality 3). Qualities 4 and 5 are sovereignly initiated by God as you yield to Him.
• Being aware of these different qualities allows you to recognize, yield to, and flow with them as the Holy Spirit leads, unlocking greater depth and power in your prayer life.

The only way you could last praying long stretches is to catch the heartbeat of God for the world… The moment you catch the world vision the desire to pray is quite unceasing.

Regular Long Hours of Prayer

• Marathon prayer requires discipline to become a custom. Consistent, long hours of prayer must move from a conscious effort to an ingrained habit or “custom,” like Daniel’s three daily prayer times sustained for decades.
• Develop a scheduled appointment with God. Treat your prayer time as a non-negotiable daily appointment. Schedule it, protect it, and train your body and mind to expect it until skipping it feels more uncomfortable than doing it.
• To pray for hours, you must catch God’s heart for the entire world. Focusing only on personal or local needs limits prayer fuel. A global burden for souls and nations creates unceasing motivation.
• The first hour is just “warming up”. Your initial period of prayer is often about breaking through natural resistance and getting into a spiritual position. The deepest spiritual current and impact typically begin after this foundational hour.
• Faith understands the law of spiritual accumulation. Answered prayer often operates on a principle of accumulated spiritual “points” or energy. Consistent, diligent prayer in faith builds this reserve until breakthrough manifests. There are no true spiritual shortcuts.
• Prayer work is as demanding as natural work. Accumulating spiritual blessings through prayer requires the same level of diligence, sacrifice, and “blood, sweat, and tears” as achieving success in the natural world. It is “knee work” instead of physical work.
• One hour of Spirit-born ministry, birthed from long hours of prayer, can have exponentially more impact than a hundred hours of activity born from the flesh. Prayer is the essential work that makes all other work effective.
• Jesus modeled a life of prayer. His 30 years of private prayer and intercession preceded and empowered His three years of public ministry. His example shows that major spiritual works require major investments of time in prayer.

When a Christian begins to live in the spirit, he begins to affect them. When you start praying, the wicked spirits in the high places asks, ‘who is shaking my throne?’ You begin to affect them. You become real in the spirit world to them.

Levels of Praying in the Spirit

• Praying in the Spirit is Spirit-led intercession. It is the Holy Spirit helping us pray effectively when we don’t know how, using “groanings which cannot be uttered”—the gift of tongues.
• Tongues are a voluntary yield, not an involuntary possession. You must consciously yield your mind (stopping the need to understand) and your vocal apparatus (tongue, lips, voice) to speak the utterance the Holy Spirit provides. God does not force you to speak.
• Speaking in tongues is you speaking, not the Holy Spirit: Your human spirit prays using a language supplied by the Holy Spirit. You retain control over your free will, volume, and speed.
• There are progressive levels of growth in praying in tongues:
  • Level 1: Stammering Lips: The beginner’s stage with limited, sometimes repetitive syllables as you learn to release the flow.
  • Level 2: A Fluent Language: With consistent use, your tongue becomes fluent in a distinct spiritual language, like a tap connected to an endless reservoir.
  • Level 3: Various Languages: You mature to flow in different kinds of tongues or spiritual languages for different purposes.
  • Level 4: Spiritual Song: You worship God by singing in the spirit, combining a new melody with your fluent tongue.
  • Level 5: Warfare Tongues: Your tongue takes on a commanding, authoritative tone to engage and defeat demonic forces, releasing the very glory and power of God.
• Tongues release God’s glory as a spiritual weapon. The consistent, prevailing practice of praying in tongues releases a substance of God’s glory and light that pierces spiritual darkness, scatters demonic forces, and affects the spiritual atmosphere.
• The enemy will resist your prayer life. Struggling to pray is often a sign that you are crossing a spiritual boundary and breaking demonic opposition. Perseverance in prayer releases the breakthrough.

Don’t just read about prayer—live it. Start today. Choose one principle: build consistency, visualize a promise, or yield in tongues. Your spirit is the gateway to God’s reality. Step through it and watch your world change.

Finally, here is a question we’d love you to answer.

Have you ever considered that speaking in tongues is more than a heavenly language? What if it’s a direct line for the Holy Spirit to pray God’s perfect will through you and a weapon to break spiritual strongholds?

We would love to hear from you. Please leave your answer and comment in the comment box below.

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