The Secret To Spiritual Flight Mastering The Art Of Intercession by Apostle Arome Osayi: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

We Are Designed to Pray

Jesus entrusted an unlikely group of ordinary people with a global mandate because He understood something they didn't yet grasp: the power available through the Holy Spirit and through prayer. Luke 18:1 reveals that people "ought always to pray, and not to faint" — prayer isn't optional extra credit, it's built into human design. To live without a consistent prayer life is to function outside that design.

There are levels of maturity in intercession. Those who have prayed for years become either "custodians" — carriers of divine secrets that sustain their generation — or "guardians," who stay spiritually alert while others sleep on their watch.

Praying With Confidence

1 John 5:14-15 ties answered prayer to praying according to God's will. Since His will is contained in Scripture, praying the Word is one of the most accurate ways to pray — it aligns the request with what God has already promised.

Psalms 19:14 shows that prayer involves both speech and thought — the words of the mouth and the meditation of the heart must both be acceptable to God. Because of how much weight both carry, it becomes essential to understand the wrong ways to pray before learning the right ones.

How Not to Pray: Avoiding the Hypocrite's Pattern

Matthew 6:5-6 warns against praying like the hypocrites, whose real audience is people, not God. Four marks distinguish that pattern from genuine prayer:

• True prayer is communion with God for His glory — the hypocrite prays to glorify himself.
• True prayer seeks to be heard by God — the hypocrite prays to be seen by people.
• True prayer engages the heart — the hypocrite is unconcerned with what's actually happening inside him.
• True prayer is an act of humility, an acknowledgment of dependence on God — the hypocrite turns it into a display of pride.

Isaiah 26:15-18 compares this to a woman in labor who, after all that travail, brings forth only wind instead of a child. A prayer life driven by performance rather than the heart will, over time, produce nothing of substance, however impressive it looked.

Two Checks for a Praying Heart

1. Stay conscious of your heart's condition. Psalms 139:23 models this, inviting God to search the heart and expose anything hidden. Elijah's posture of prayer for rain, bowed low, sending his servant to check the sky repeatedly, illustrates patient attentiveness to what is forming, even when the sign is small.
2. Lay aside every weight. Drawing on Hebrews 12:1, unresolved offense, bitterness, or emotional heaviness weighs the heart down and blocks spiritual ascent. A lighter heart moves more freely in prayer, the way a trained athlete moves more freely once excess weight is shed.

Learning to Fly

A story was shared of intercessors laboring for hours over a difficult situation without breakthrough, while a shift came within minutes once the burden of the heart was set aside first. The point: effort in prayer is not the same as freedom in prayer. Carrying grief, offense, or borrowed burdens into intercession weighs a person down; setting it aside allows genuine spiritual ascent.