Luke 18:1: “And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;”
A) When the Spirit Speaks Beyond the Surface
There are certain scriptures that carry a depth far beyond the subject matter being considered. Sometimes, when the Spirit begins to speak, it’s important to listen carefully to what He is saying within the context of that subject, because the utterance of a spirit is crafted from its realm. It can be difficult to discern what a spirit is saying at face value unless you understand the depth and scope of that spirit’s reality. If you engage with the Spirit only at face value, you may fail to grasp the burden in His heart. Because of that, you might assume His words are meant only to address the immediate subject. What you may not realize is that even after the issue is resolved, the utterance from that Spirit is meant to become a life philosophy.
For example, a doctor may prescribe an antibiotic because you have a cough or some other illness. Once the crisis is resolved, the use of the antibiotic is finished. It is not the same with the Spirit. When the Spirit tells you to “pray,” you may be facing a challenge and think prayer is only meant to deal with that problem. Meanwhile, that challenge may simply be an alarm system, prompting you to enter into a spiritual economy that will define the meaning of your life.
So, the Spirit may take advantage of that situation to introduce you to a syllabus upon which the essence of your life is designed. Until you begin to treat what the Spirit says as an eternal strategy rather than a temporary solution, you may never fully benefit from it.
B) Prayer Is a Lifelong Spiritual Economy
Some people study the Word of God or pray only when they are in trouble. When they are healed or the challenge passes, they think prayer or study is no longer necessary. Then the spirit behind the challenge returns, this time with greater intensity. Now, they don’t even have the strength to pray. But if they had been wise, they would have realized that prayer is not just a tool for emergencies — it is a lifelong spiritual economy.
C) Prayer is part of our spiritual infrastructure
Jesus said that when an evil spirit goes out of a person, it wanders through dry places seeking rest but finds none, so it returns. The person who was delivered may recognize that the power of God was needed for deliverance, but may not realize that this same power is meant to become a daily, lifelong spiritual economy by which he lives. Instead, after being delivered, he drifts away from God’s presence and returns to business as usual. But Jesus said that when the demon returns, it brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and the final state of that person becomes worse than the first. That condition may grow so severe that he no longer even desires deliverance — he may become completely lost.
If that person had been wise, he would have continued to engage with the power of God every day of his life. Prayer is not merely something we use to address occasional needs; it is part of our spiritual infrastructure. We were designed to be people of prayer. The moment we neglect prayer; we open the door for challenges in our lives.
In that parable, the first issue was that the widow had no prior relationship or influence with the judge. When her challenge arose, she had to develop the strategy of persistently appealing to him. But if she had understood the wisdom of building a relationship with the judge beforehand, the crisis might never have escalated. Her influence could have resolved the matter before it became a serious problem.
Instead, she had to exhaust herself, repeatedly pleading with the judge to solve an issue she might have been able to prevent through an established relationship. This is why many people who are meant to be healers walk the streets sick. When they fall ill, they begin to make demands on the healing anointing, even though they are supposed to be dispensers of the healing virtues of God.
D) The Meaning of “Always” in Prayer
The second key word is “always.” This means you pray both when you have a problem and when you do not, because the purpose of prayer is greater than simply having your needs met. Jesus was revealing that prayer, as a divine economy, is a deeper spiritual infrastructure than merely addressing a need. Your need is the least of the reasons prayer exists. You may use prayer to address a need, but prayer is deeper than any need you will ever have in life. Its purpose transcends your problems.
If you pray only to meet needs, then you have not yet understood the depths of prayer. Jesus was teaching that as long as we live in mortal bodies, prayer is meant to be a way of life. As long as you are human — whether you have a challenge or not — you are meant to pray. Prayer for a person is like breathing oxygen; it is part of the design of life itself.
E) Prayer as Spiritual Consciousness
If someone claims to be human yet does not live a life of prayer, something is missing. From a divine perspective, one of the indicators that you are truly living as a person on the earth is the degree to which your prayers rise to Heaven.
If your prayer is not reaching the heights of Heaven, it may seem as though you are something less than you were created to be. If you are on earth and not praying, Heaven may barely recognize your true spiritual identity. From Heaven’s perspective, one of the clearest indicators of a person’s spiritual vitality is prayer. Think of it this way: when doctors want to determine whether someone is truly responsive, they check for consciousness. If consciousness is gone, the person is said to be in a coma. At that point, doctors are often uncertain about the outcome. They can offer life support, but meaningful interaction resumes only when consciousness returns. In a similar way, prayer is a sign of spiritual consciousness. It is one of the ways Heaven recognizes that a person is spiritually awake and engaged.
Revelation 5:8: “And when he had taken the book, the four living creatures and the four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odors, which are the prayers of saints.
Every time a person prays, it is as though that prayer is stored in Heaven. The prayers that rise to God are like incense — they come before Him as fragrances, as spiritual aromas. They testify that, on earth, mortal people are still aligning with Heaven’s purposes. One of the ways a person remains spiritually relevant in the heights of Zion is by offering this aroma before God. Scripture says these fragrances are precious to Him, so much so that they are stored like incense in golden vials. This means that even after someone has passed from this world, the spiritual impact of their life can still speak.
This is one reason the name of Abraham still carries weight today. His life of faith and obedience created a legacy that reached Heaven. Immortality is not only about existing forever — it is also measured by a person’s lasting relevance before God. As long as we live on this side of the divide, names like Abraham remain significant because of what rose from their lives to Heaven.
But imagine if Heaven were opened and we were shown the record of our own spiritual lives. For some, the last time a heartfelt prayer rose to Heaven might have been a year ago. We wake up, say a quick “thank You, Father,” and rush off to work. Our identity becomes defined by our jobs and daily responsibilities. Yet many of those assignments are temporary. They do not have the capacity to journey with us beyond this life. When a person dies, their certificates, achievements, and reputation remain on earth. Very few things travel with the soul beyond the veil. We do not control that journey ourselves. There is a spiritual passage beyond this life, and only certain things endure through it. One of those enduring things is the quality of a life of prayer — the incense that rose to Heaven.
E) Building Spiritual Substance in Heaven
It is possible for you to be valuable in Heaven while you are on earth. It depends on your echoes in Zion. That’s why some men walk on earth like immortal entities. A man will come and say, “So long as I live, there will be no rain or dew,” and Heaven backs it up. He is not only living on earth; he has infrastructure built in Heaven. So, when he talks, Heaven has no choice but to back him up.
Jesus was saying, “The Son of Man who is in Heaven.” He had an account in Heaven, and that account was robust. So, when He spoke on earth, He was spending a currency from Heaven. You think it is just to come and speak boldly. Go and speak boldly, and you may feel the resistance of forces you were not prepared for, because you don’t have anything stored in the warehouse of Heaven. The reason one man can come into your family and end a plague that has killed fifteen people is because he knows how to store substance in Heaven.
You may just be a man breathing, with your value based only on the breath in your nostrils. But there are men like Abel who, even after they died, had so much stature that they could command the courts of Heaven to listen. God said, “The voice of his blood is crying to Me from the ground.”
You are alive and you are praying, but Heaven is not hearing; Heaven doesn’t even know whether you have a problem. But there is another man who, even after he is dead, can still assemble the courts of Heaven. All of Heaven would have to pay attention because, in a sense, he could not die. He was an immortal entity. He had done business with the Spirit so much that even after oxygen was taken from his body, he was still relevant. He understood the economy of immortality. He knew how to store substance in the heights of Heaven. Even though we must do what we need to do to be relevant in time, there are economies higher than everything we know in time. A man must first become known among spirits before he can truly rule among men.
F) Prayers give you spiritual ranking
A man must first of all gain rank in Heaven for him to have rank on earth. This is why a ten-year-old witch can paralyze a professor, because she is doing business in a higher plane. The professor may be a professor emeritus, and he may have taught in the university for years. He is a university professor, but a witch of ten years comes and, because she understands how to travel beyond time into eternity, she does something and the professor becomes paralyzed.
The professor may even be a neurosurgeon. He understands how the brain works, but he does not have the power to mobilize spirits. You are only invincible on earth to the degree that you can stay in Heaven.
Men ought always to pray and not to faint
G) Men of Prayer do not die
You can journey through this life and walk by your skill and technocracy. You can walk through life by human wisdom, and then you build something, and after 35 years, it crashes. Sometimes you see a man who has a beautiful family. After graduating from the university, you later hear that while they were driving home for Christmas, a trailer crushed them, because he did not know how to store data in Heaven. The enemy was just waiting for him. He labored, and after 35 years, a trap was set for him — a trap that had been prepared long before he got married — but he did not know how to enter into the future.
Men of prayer do not truly die; they journey from time into eternity. They can determine what happens to them on earth. They can shape things on earth. They can move the hand of God. They are never taken unaware. Even if they die, it is because they submitted themselves to it. That is why a man like Paul would go to Jerusalem. He knew he needed to bear witness before kings, and for him, that was his gateway into Heaven. Things do not just happen to such people — they make things happen.
Imagine how painful it is for a man to labor for 35 years, only for him and his family to be wiped out suddenly. And sometimes, you may describe it as a spiritual attack, as though unseen forces interfered with what he built over decades. Because a witch — and sometimes it’s even a ten-year-old — stood on the road and stopped the front tire, and the car somersaulted. Do you know what that witch may be doing? Maybe that’s her weekly practical. And then she came to do her practical on your family that you labored to build for 35 years.
H) Prayer as Spiritual Covering for Family
I was a preacher and was popular and known, but every three years, a hawk came to my family and picked someone. My mother died. My cousin died and my brother died. And I said, “What is this?” Then God began to teach me priesthood intelligence. God said, ‘you pray for people and they are healed. You pray and things happen. But you do not have surveillance over your family because your prayer is directed only to needs; your prayer is not an economy in Heaven. The day you begin to pray as an economy, you create a radar around your family. The enemy will have no passageway anymore.’
Then the following year, when the hawk came, we saw it in the spirit. I called my friend, and we began to pray. By midnight, an angel descended, and the angel was burning, and I knew judgment had come. Two months later, the man died. He began to decay in his room. Before he died, he confessed. He said he had killed my brother two years earlier. That meant the life of my brother was in my hands. But because I did not understand priesthood, my brother slipped through my hands. While I was crying and asking God why, God was asking me why. The purpose of that young man was in my hands, but I did not know I was a priest.
I would pray for things to happen, but I never knew that prayer was part of the heritage of God in life. The purposes of God will not be accomplished until people learn how to fill the clouds of Heaven with the dew of prayer, because man ought always to pray and not faint.
I) Altars Speak Across Generations
I am a preacher today because it was an investment of my mother for more than 30 years. She kept me before the Lord and said, “This one will serve You.” Many years later, in the university, I met strange friends, and they began to teach me the ways of the clubs. Things became worse when my mum died. I said, “I will become a bad boy.”
But you know what? My voice could not reach Heaven. Her voice was already registered in Heaven. On the strength of her voice, there was a signature on my head. Even though I said I would be a bad boy, Heaven could no longer hear that. It was in the club, while I was dancing, that a light came out of the wall and arrested me. That was how I was carried to the altar. I did not just become a preacher because I chose to serve God — my mother laid the foundation for it.
Jacob was a man of the flesh. He was the custodian of the Abrahamic blessing, yet he lived for his appetite. One day, while he was journeying, he came to Bethel. When his head touched the altar of Abraham, the heavens opened, and he was arrested. Jacob had no plan to serve God, but Abraham had already negotiated the destiny of his children on the altar of prayer. As long as you come from the bloodline of Abraham, you have a spiritual heritage calling you toward God. The altars Abraham raised follow that lineage, and wherever you go, they call you back toward Him.
J) The Evil Day & Spiritual Stature
We spend hours in our offices from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and even have 10 million in the bank, and may think that is what life is about? You are a joker if you think that way — and may no demon do practical on your family. The Bible says there is an evil day for every man because the devil is moving like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. When evil comes, may God help you to have enough stature, because if you faint in the day of trouble, it is not because your God is not on the throne — it is because your strength is small.
The prayers of the saints ascend to Heaven as odors and are stored in golden vials. May we not testify to something that the devil wants to use to ridicule us. We should testify not about narrowly missing an accident all the time. Rather, our testimony should be about the souls we have won and the Kingdom of God we have brought into our workplace — not about escaping a ghastly car accident or evading thieves.
If we truly spend time in the presence of God, our testimonies will not center on evil occurrences, except in rare instances where the adversary seeks to prove a point before God, as seen in the life of Job. Often, what we describe as escaping tragic accidents may actually be God calling our attention to the fact that we are not living a life of consistent prayer.
Many sicknesses, accidents, failures, depressions, and life challenges can be signs of a prayerless life. When someone escapes a serious problem, it should serve as a call to deepen their prayer life and dwell more in God’s presence — not merely as a story to share publicly. Many people enjoy testifying about how they escaped tragic incidents in order to display God’s power. While we thank God for His protective hand, such experiences should also remind us of the need to pray more earnestly so that such events do not occur again.
Personally, I choose not to testify about escaping tragic incidents. Instead, if such things happen, I will be moved to pray more. I would rather testify about how many orphans God has helped educate through me, how many widows have been supported, how many churches have been planted, how many industries have been built to provide employment, and how many souls have been won in my company. That is the kind of testimony that truly showcases the might of God.
Men ought Always to pray and not to faint
Inspired by Apostle Michael Orokpo Sermon
