The Spirit of Prayer

The Spirit of Prayer presents prayer as the habitual inward direction of the heart toward God. William Law’s concern is larger than methods of prayer or the choice between written and extemporaneous forms. He asks what must happen within a person for prayer to become living, continual, and spiritual. His answer begins with creation and the Fall, moves through regeneration in Jesus Christ, and culminates in an inward life animated by the Holy Spirit in which desire, will, love, and prayer increasingly move toward God.

Law begins by describing humanity as created for participation in divine and heavenly life but fallen into a self-centered, earthly condition. Adam’s fall is therefore more than the beginning of outward wrongdoing: it is a change in the principle of life governing humanity. The spirit of the world, self-will, pride, earthly desire, and natural life become dominant where humanity was made for the life of God. Genesis provides the basic creation-and-Fall framework, while Revelation imagery and New Testament language concerning the inward or new man help Law describe the spiritual restoration he believes redemption accomplishes.

Regeneration is central. Law repeatedly insists that Christianity cannot consist merely in improving the old life or adding religious duties to it. The nature, life, and Spirit of Jesus Christ must be manifested in the inward new man. John’s teaching on birth from above is especially important to this argument. New birth restores divine life within, and union with Christ becomes practical as His disposition, love, humility, and life replace self-rule. Eternal life and the Kingdom of God are therefore treated not only as future blessings but as realities that begin inwardly where the life of Christ is active.

Within this framework, the spirit of prayer is the heart’s continual hunger, thirst, desire, and tendency toward God. Law argues that every heart is always directed toward something: wealth, honor, pleasure, self, or God. True prayer is present when the deepest working desire of the person turns toward God. Spoken prayers, manuals, and appointed times may help, but they cannot create this inward state. A person becomes a person of prayer when the heart itself continually seeks God, Christ, eternity, divine life, and the government of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is indispensable. Prayer that reaches toward God is not generated by flesh, natural reason, or the worldly spirit; it arises from the Spirit of God working within. Law connects prayer for the Holy Spirit with the Spirit already awakening desire for God. He also describes spiritual life as growth: as a plant lives by continually reaching toward light and air, the inward person grows by hunger for God and dependence upon His Spirit. This gives the book a practical concern with spiritual growth, inward guidance, and the difference between living spiritual knowledge and religious ideas held only in the mind.

The daily Cross supplies the negative side of that transformation. Law treats self-denial, dying to self, and dying to the world as necessary because the old self-centered principle cannot be the source of the new life. The Cross is applied to self-will, pride, possessiveness, natural desire, and conformity to the worldly spirit. The aim is not outward austerity for its own sake but the removal of what resists the life of Christ. First Corinthians 2 contributes to Law’s contrast between the natural person and spiritual discernment, while 1 John 2 helps define the worldly spirit that separates the soul from the life of God.

The positive result is a life characterized by divine love, humility, meekness, resignation to God, and increasing union with Him. Law’s dialogue also distinguishes true inward inspiration from mere religious form and from deceptive or self-generated spiritual impressions. His remedy is deeper surrender to God, the Holy Spirit’s inward work, the life of Christ, and the death of self-will.

The Spirit of Prayer therefore addresses readers asking what continual prayer means, how prayer can become more than words, why new birth is necessary, how the Holy Spirit produces genuine prayer, what it means for Christ to be formed within, why self-denial and the daily Cross are essential, how to overcome the spirit of the world, and how the Kingdom and love of God become inward Christian experience.