Hello everyone, Jim Staley, Passion for Truth Ministries, and welcome to this broadcast. This is a follow-up to the broadcast that I just did, sharing with you guys what the Father has been showing me as I’ve been getting up at 5:30 in the morning. I promised you at the end of that broadcast that I would share the acronym I use to stay in prayer, pray longer, with more vitality, and with more power, to really get in that zone.

It’s an acronym called PRAY, and that’s what we’re going to learn right now. So, get out your pens and paper, because the Father is in the business of transforming people. He’s in the business of radically transforming people, and He does that through two things.

He sets it up through the foundation of prayer, which enters into a spirit of faith, and then He does it through obedience. That’s what this channel, Passion for Truth Ministries, is all about—helping you transform your life and make you more successful in Him and in the rest of your life, in all of your relationships, both vertically and horizontally. And I’m telling you, the answer to everything is simple prayer.

So, let’s dive in, and let me share with you in just a few short minutes exactly what I do. There are lots of different ways that you can pray, lots of different ways you can enter into the Holy of Holies, if you will. But every day, whenever I get into warrior mode, and God calls me into a place of total atmosphere change, that’s why I wore this shirt.

I’ve worn this shirt many times, but creating the atmosphere for your life first starts with creating the atmosphere with Him. That atmosphere with Him is initiated through prayer. Like seeds in the ground, ladies and gentlemen, that don’t come forth without water.

It doesn’t matter how much seed you put in the ground. If you don’t water it, it will never come out of the ground, much less ever produce fruit. There are a lot of people that can get the seed in the ground, which is their dream, vision, or goal, but then they water it right away. It pops out of the ground, and they get that temporary success, and then they stop watering it.

They stop giving it the nutrients it needs. It’s like someone whose desire is to lose 20 pounds in the next 60 days. That’s their vision. They know their why: they want to please their spouse or feel good about themselves again.

They want to wake up with a little bit more pep in their step, and they get to the gym. They work out for three or four days, they see the first couple of pounds lost, and then they start falling back into old patterns. That’s making a New Year’s resolution last all of about 48 hours. Two weeks at most, if you know what I mean.

So, we don’t want that kind of success in our spiritual life. We want absolutely transformative success.

If you want transformative success, you have to have a plan in place to achieve it. It’s your path; it’s your goal.

Many people are good at knowing their goal. They know where the end zone is, but they have absolutely no idea how to get there. Okay, enough of that.

Let’s get into the acronym itself, and let’s discover how to pray. People ask me all the time, “Jim, how is it possible that you can pray for hours? How do you do it? After 15 minutes, I’ve completely run out of things to pray for. I’ve prayed for every flower in my yard, I’ve prayed for my grass, I’ve prayed for my grandkids and my wife—what else do I pray for?”

When I give you this acronym, and I’ve shared this with thousands and tens of thousands of people through the Nehemiah Challenge—if you go all the way back to PFT 1.0, you’ll remember the Nehemiah Challenge—it transformed people’s lives, and what I’m about to share with you will too.

So here is the acronym, and I promise you, you’ll be able to pray for as long as I do because it just puts it into a structure. Again, we can say, “I want to pray,” but we’ve got to know how to pray.

Teach this to your children. It will revolutionize their lives. Okay, so here we go.

How do we pray?
The very first thing we need to do if we’re going to pray is to learn how to praise. So, in the acronym PRAY, the letter P stands for Praise. I always start off by praising.

I begin by just praising Him. I praise Him and glorify His name. I say, “Father, I just glorify your name. I praise you. I thank you so much for everything that you mean to me. Thank you for the opportunity to come before you. Thank you for your doors being open 24/7.”

I just thank Him and thank Him and thank Him. And I’m telling you, your life is so blessed. I don’t care where you’re at—someone has a worse-off life, right? So, no matter how bad your life is, I can promise you that at a certain point when I was sitting in the hole underground in a 7×9-foot cell with a guy that wanted to kill me, and guards who were encouraging him to do so when I was in the shower or when I came out—they weren’t feeding me, and I lost 17 pounds in 84 days—I can promise you my day was probably worse than your worst day at that time. And there are people who have worse days than I had.

There is so much to be thankful for. You could spend a lot of time, ladies and gentlemen, just in praise. You could spend a lot of time in praise alone. Praise should be a considerable part of your prayer time.

You could praise the Lord for an hour straight. Just think of all the blessings that you have—the fact that you’re breathing right now. 165,000 people die every day. There is a lot to be thankful for in just the fact that you’re alive, that you even know the one true God, that you have children, or that you might have a best friend. Thank Him even if you don’t have a best friend. Thank Him for the ones by faith that you will have.

Sometimes I spend 10 minutes thanking God by faith for all the prayers I have asked Him to answer. By faith, I thank God that I have defeated struggles in my life, even though I’m still in the middle of them. So, I enter into a spiritual realm of faith.

Okay. The second thing that we can do after we praise, so now we’ve got P is Praise, and R—what do you think R is? Put it in the chat right now if you know what R is. Let’s see what you guys come up with. What do you think R is out there? P is Praise. Here’s what R is. Drum roll… It is Repent.

That’s right, R is Repent. This is the opportunity where… well, yeah, some of you guessed Request, but very good guess! Repent is your opportunity to truly humble yourself before God.

Give yourself the opportunity to abase yourself. I’m telling you, everyone has sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, right? Romans 3:23. And if you go three more chapters, you find Romans 6:23, which says, “The wages of sin is death.”

But there’s a big comma that says, “But the free gift of God is eternal life.” So, the good news is that there is forgiveness for our sin. But what we need to do before that is repent.

This is your opportunity to come clean before God. I repent even in the morning. This morning, at 5:38 a.m., I was down in my office praying, and I said, “Father, I repent that I am eight minutes late. My alarm went off at 5:30, and I should have been down here by 5:31, but I was down here at 5:38. Forgive me for being tired right now.”

Now you might say, “Jim, that’s silly.” But you know what? I promise you, when deer hunting season comes up, and all you hunter husbands out there know, we get up at 3:30 in the morning, and we jump out of bed into our camouflage because we can’t wait to get into our stand. It’s opening day, or whatever your thing is, we get excited! But when we want to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to pray, it’s “Oh God, how am I going to do this? Lord, I’m so tired,” and we just snore right back into bed.

So, we need to get to a place where we’re as excited to meet with Him as He is to meet with us. And I’m telling you, that comes from practice—just like working out. It comes through practice.

Repentance is an area that is super important. Go through your life, discover everything. And in this process, by the way, this is really important: Most people don’t do this—write this down—it’s really, really important in the process of prayer: You must get into the prophetic part.

And most people don’t know how to do this. This is what I do, and it makes my prayer life highly successful, because I’m letting Him be a part of it.

So, most of us, when we pray, it becomes a one-way street where we are praying to the Father. And we think, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly what Matthew chapter 5 says—Our Father who art in Heaven, pray like this.” And yes, that’s great.

But I have found the most successful prayers are when I allow the Holy Spirit to partner with me and begin to tell me what to pray for, because I admit right up front, “Father, I repent. I don’t even know what to pray for sometimes. I don’t even want to pray.”

You know, my prayer becomes, “Father, God, I just give you my emotions. I’m not in a good mood right now. I don’t want to do this right now. I’m hangry right now. I haven’t had my coffee. My wife said something mean, or I said something to her that was mean. We got into an argument. My child didn’t do something. Life didn’t go my way, or someone took my parking spot.” Holy cow, that’s a big deal. I’ve got a big pickup truck, and it’s not easy for me to find a parking spot.

All these things are true, by the way, that have happened in my life in the last week. So sometimes, I just admit it. “God, I don’t want to do this,” and I want divine assistance from Him. I want Him to come into my world. So I’ll say, “Father, I’m repenting before you, but I want you to bring to my mind the things I need to repent of. Just bring them before me, God, because I’m not very good at admitting that I’m wrong sometimes. And I need you to help me.”

And you’ll be shocked at what will come into your head, ladies and gentlemen. It will just come into your head, and you will begin to repent for things. You’ll begin to pray for things that you never even thought of before. So yes, you might only have 15 minutes of prayer inside of you, but I promise you that if you ask the Holy Spirit to come into that moment, come into that room, and begin to fill you with what really needs to happen in that prayer, you won’t even realize it.

Some of you have never heard from God. You won’t even know you’re hearing from God. You’ll think that it’s just thoughts coming into your mind, but it’s the Holy Spirit downloading divine assistance to bring you into the throne room to transform you and shore up some of the covenant walls that have been breached. Some of you have walls in your life that have been breached, and you don’t even know it.

There are covenants you’ve made, oaths you’ve made—whether it be a marriage covenant, a covenant with your kids, promises you’ve made that you broke, and you don’t even know the seriousness of breaking those. You need to get back into covenant, and that starts with prayer. It starts with absolutely unadulterated, unfiltered, powerful, intentional, uncomfortable prayer. Get out of bed, put your jammies on, get into a different place, and get into a position of prayer, praise, and repentance.

So, let’s go to the next one, because that’s what we want to do. We want to learn this acronym so that we can absolutely discover the power we’ve been missing by connecting the umbilical cord of the inner man into the heavenly realm.

First is Praise, second is Repent, and the third is Ask for others. Okay, so third is to ask for others.

We haven’t even touched on ourselves yet. You’ll be 45 minutes in, and I promise you, guys, especially those out there who have a bit of a gift for gab, you will shock yourself. I had one person email me years ago after I shared this and said, “The most I could ever pray was about 15 or 20 minutes. My wife and I wrote it down, got on our knees, and began to pray. We didn’t even realize it was four hours later before we finished. Four hours we prayed!”

And that’s how they went through their acronym. God began to highlight things. Listen, if you can pray for four hours straight and not even realize it, you’ve touched the hem of His garment, and the bleeding in your life begins to stop.

Ladies and gentlemen, can I just share with you what the Holy Spirit gave me right there? You saw it. Some of you already caught it. Yeshua was walking through the streets, and He felt the power come out of Him because someone came up with so much faith. All they knew was, “If I can touch the hem of His garment, I will absolutely be transformed. I know I will be healed.”

She knew that the Old Testament said there were healings in the tzitzit—the healing was in the wings, as they called it—the little strings, the tzitzit, hanging down from His outer garment as a rabbi. They knew, “If I can just touch that, the power of God will heal me.”

I’m here to tell you, if you have that much faith that you can pray and be intentional, and you get uncomfortable, and you say, “God, I’m doing this. I’m creating a prayer covenant. I want to change my scenario,” you know what chaos is? You know what insanity is? It’s having the same goal but never reaching it, and never changing the formula to get to your goal. That becomes insanity.

Some of you live in constant insanity, and you wonder why you are never going to be successful and why you’re not successful—because you’re not changing the formula.

So, let me ask you, when someone says, “Oh man, this is what you need to do to be successful,” I’ll ask them, “How’s it working out for you?” If you’re not successful, then it’s not working.

It’s like a guy making $30,000 a year who wants to make $150,000 a year but is getting advice from someone who makes $40,000 a year. That’s insanity. They don’t know how to do it—they’re not doing it. You need to find someone who is successful.

I’m here to tell you that the success God has given me in my life—in certain areas, though not every area—there are areas right now that I’m still warring in the spirit for, because I’m unsuccessful in certain categories of my life. I am a firstborn, alpha male perfectionist, and I want perfection in every area of my life at once. I want to be right with God, but there are areas I struggle with, just like you.

And I know the answer: Get on my knees.

The Father has taught me that before I get on my knees for myself, I first need to praise Him. When you enter the throne room, the first thing you do is bow before the King and tell Him how wonderful He is. Secondly, you need to repent: “Oh King, just in case you decide to pull out your gavel and pass judgment on me—off with my head—I’m going to repent of everything I’ve ever done.” It just makes sense.

Then, third, is to ask requests for others, not for yourself. Be like Queen Esther when she went before King Xerxes. After she praised him and bowed before him, she made her request for her people.

Now you can request for everyone around you. Start with the President of the United States—for God knows how much prayer he needs in that position. Pray for all your governors, for all those in authority, for police officers, for firefighters—go outside your own box, for crying out loud! Why do we always have to stay inside our own box? Why do we only care about the things and the people that are in our neck of the woods?

How about we pray for people in Africa, in Kenya? Pray for the 30 pastors that I teach every Wednesday night in India who are just babies in learning the front of the book. They can barely understand my language through a translator, but they need to understand. They have the capability of impacting thousands of people in their area. Pray for the 15 children we have in an orphanage in a different part of India that we just started. These 15 kids need the Lord and the people around them to love them.

There are so many things you can pray for before you even get to your personal family. If you’re married out there today, I can assure you, you probably have marriage problems because there’s no way you can be married and not have some sort of issue—even if the issue isn’t directly with your partner. It might be a financial problem or something else combined together.

Before you make any kind of complaint, pray for them. There’s no faster way to make someone change than to get in the war room and pray to the Heavenly Father with emotion. Say, “Father, my spouse is treating me unfairly. I’m praying for them, God, that You would open their eyes.” And I’m talking about war prayer. I’m talking about intentional, absolutely travailing prayer.

Do you hear what I’m saying? There’s a difference.

I can talk like this, and I can teach you the acronym of prayer, but how much more attention does it get when you put passion behind the words? God hears the intentional, passionate prayers. This is how He heard the widow’s prayer when she gave her last mite. She gave everything she had.

The problem in America today is that we don’t give anything. There’s no sacrifice. Christians are lazy, and then we wonder why God doesn’t answer our prayers. We don’t give out of sacrifice; we give out of our abundance. Most people take and never give at all. And on top of that, we request that God answer our prayers when we shoot them up while driving to the mall or wherever we’re going.

But try getting up before the sun comes up or doing something uncomfortable, something outside of your zone. Say, “God, I’m willing to fast. I’m willing to pray because the effective prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”

Are you righteous for God to hear your prayer? Because the ineffective prayer of an unrighteous man availeth nothing. So let us get righteous. And the fastest way for you to get righteous, by the way, is not for you to get righteous. It’s to understand righteousness.

The first step to understanding righteousness is realizing that you can never be righteous enough.

So the first prayer that God will ever hear is the prayer of salvation. It’s the prayer that says, “Hey God, I can’t do this, but Your Son, Yeshua, did this. I’m going to bank on His righteousness until my righteousness gets to a place where You can actually hear my prayers.” I’m going to plead the blood of Christ over my entire life. Amen? Amen.

All right, so pray for others. Now we’ve praised, we’ve repented, we’ve asked for others, and lastly, of course, the Y stands for Yourself.

This is where you have the opportunity to come before the Holy Spirit and say, “Father, I need to know what it is that I need.” Don’t immediately just start praying for yourself. This is a huge mistake people make: they pray for themselves without asking the Father what their needs actually are.

You might be praying for something that you don’t even actually want. Let me prove this to you in a kind of a funny way. How many of you can go back to your high school years and remember that boy or girl that you absolutely wanted to marry? I mean, you were convinced that they were the one, and that’s what you wanted to do. But 20 years later, you look back and go, “Oh my goodness, Father, thank you so much for not letting me marry that man, or thank you for not letting me marry that woman!”

There’s even an old country song that says, “Thank God for unanswered prayers.”

The point I’m making is this: It’s really critical that we ask, “Father, what do you want me to pray for?” Bring the Holy Spirit into this. If you’re not familiar with the prophetic, the prophetic is simply allowing yourself to channel the Holy Spirit while you’re in communication with Him. It’s like having one earbud in.

Right now, I’ve got earbuds in both ears. Imagine if I took one out and left one in—I could hear what’s coming from my speakers in one ear, and everything else around me in the other. It’s like someone speaking into my left ear and someone else speaking into my right. I can hear both at the same time.

This is the concept of walking in the prophetic: Your entire life gets to a point where you’re so used to listening to the Holy Spirit while simultaneously speaking back to Him.

So, now we get to Y, Yourself. You can begin to pray for yourself, going through everything inside of you that needs to change, and ask God to give you the strength to overcome this, this, and this. I’m telling you, you need to start with, “Father, I don’t know how to pray. Teach me how to pray. Help me to be a better prayer warrior. Help me to care more about others.”

Look at the acronym again: right above “yourself” is others. If you focus most of your life on pushing others up, you’ll find yourself being pulled up by everybody else you’re pushing up because people want to be around those who are encouraging them. The more you push people up, Father God will push you up because it takes humility to push others up.

Why do you think I do this? Why do you think I’m up right now at 9:37 PM doing a live broadcast on how to pray? It’s because I care about you guys. I want you to engage. I want to share the excitement of waking up at 5:30 in the morning, knowing that there are thousands of people around the world on their knees—not just praying, but intentional praying—praying with zeal, like warriors, travailing over their spouses, relationships, and all the things that aren’t going well. By faith, they declare: “We’re going to change that by faith! I refuse, enemy, to let you win this war. You’re not going to win!”

Put that in the comments right now. If you have a situation in your life where the devil is beating you, put it in the comments: “You’re not going to win, devil. You’re not going to win.” You have to state the obvious. Say it out loud, because doubt and fear will creep in, and then the enemy will begin to take over. Tell yourself: “Devil, you’re not going to win.” In fact, put this in the comments: You’re already defeated. You’re already defeated.

The only difference between “You’re not going to win” and “You’re already defeated” is your understanding that it has already happened. The second step is that you need a plan of action to bring that already-defeated reality into your own reality. In God’s reality, the devil is already defeated. He’s scared out of his mind. He’s already smelling like sulfur from the hell he came from, and he’s going back. He doesn’t want you to know that.

What you’ve got to do is figure out how to pull heaven into your reality, and that’s what I’m here to help you do. That’s what I’m here to do—as a pastor, as a shepherd, as a minister, as a Bible teacher, and a historical guide. This is my passion: to help you be successful using biblical principles.

But most of us are not successful because we don’t know the patterns, the principles, or the steps to get there. I’m not a guru on getting there; I’m trying to get there myself. But I want to share with you the things that have caused me to be successful and the people around me to be successful—these simple steps.

So, prayer is simple: Praise, Repent, Ask for others, Ask for yourself. When you get to a place where everything you do in life, you do nothing without prayer, you will find transformation. As a matter of fact, God always says, “I’m not going to do anything without telling it to the prophets.” What if we did that with God? That would be called prayer.

So technically, God doesn’t do anything without “reverse prayer” (I just made that up). It’s a bit corny, but you understand what I’m saying: God speaks to us before He does anything. Maybe we shouldn’t do anything until we speak to Him.

My friends, I’m telling you: This is the answer you’ve been looking for. It is! It’s so simple.

My mom used to always say, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Use the KISS method: Keep it simple. Right?

When we keep it simple and we pray—Praise, Repent, Pray for others, and Pray for yourself—I promise you, there will be transformation in your life beyond all imagination. You won’t believe it. You won’t understand where it came from. Ideas for your business will come out of nowhere. You don’t think you have time for prayer? You don’t have time not to pray, because the solutions in your life sometimes have to do with God’s hand being against you. Things will fall apart in your business, things won’t work, because you’re not connecting with Him. You’re taking all the glory, and He wants it back. He’s creating a gap, and the gap is things going wrong. So that when you recognize the gap, you’ll get back to praying.

Well, guess what? If we just start praying, maybe there won’t be a gap. Maybe the bridge is already there in the quiet time, in the quiet place.

Even the Messiah, the Creator of the universe, came in the form of a man. And before He did anything, ladies and gentlemen, He spent time in prayer. Don’t ever say, “Prayer isn’t helping me,” or “Prayer is not making a difference.”

The moment you say that, you’ve become agnostic. You’ve become an atheist. You’ve become the enemy of the Lord God. You’ve literally told God, “Don’t answer my prayers because You don’t work. You’re not there.”

Do not get to a place where you require God to manifest and answer your prayers in your time period. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not about you. It’s about recognizing the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Sovereign God, the King of the Universe in your life, and whether or not He ever answers your prayer the way you want Him to, give Him your all, my friend. Give Him your all.

All right, my friends, I’m Jim Staley with Passion for Truth Ministries. It’s so awesome to spend this short amount of time with you—well, a little longer than I planned, 30 minutes, oh my goodness—but I pray that God blesses you and keeps you. And I pray that when you take on this challenge, whenever and wherever you see this, you get on your knees, and God will transform your life.

Shalom, shalom everyone.
I’m Jim Staley, and I’ll see you in the next video

Watch full video teaching here: HOW TO PRAY IN 4 EASY STEPS