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There is a sacred rhythm in every pastor’s life that no one else sees — when the Bible is open, the room is quiet and our heart bends toward God. Not to prepare a sermon. Not to make a plan. Just to be with Him.
A.W. Tozer once wrote, “What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is and no more.” That line humbles every spiritual leader because prayer isn’t what we do before the work, it’s how we engage with the One who is already doing the greatest work in, through and beyond us.
Though I’m writing first to pastors, this isn’t limited to those who hold ministry titles. Every parent is called to be a spiritual leader in the home. God has placed people under our care, and prayer is our lifeline to the living God who gives us everything we need to lead, love and disciple them. Titles don’t make us spiritual leaders — dependence does.
Prayer As the First Work of Every Spiritual Leader
As pastors, we’re not meant to be good at prayer because we’re paid to be. We pray not out of obligation but out of desperation, because apart from Him we have nothing to give. Prayer is the posture of a heart that knows its limits and trusts in the limitless power of God.
Before we speak to people about God, we speak to God about people. Before we solve problems, we surrender them. Before we plan, we pause. In every generation, God’s leaders have discovered that influence begins in intimacy.
That kind of dependence reshapes how we think about spiritual disciplines. They’re not burdens to bear but pathways that keep our hearts connected and sensitive to the voice of God.
Why Spiritual Disciplines Matter
Prayer is a spiritual discipline that can easily start to feel like duty. We feel weighed down by checklists, guilt and the sense that we should be better by now. But spiritual disciplines are not about performance, they’re about formation.
When I coached my kids’ basketball team, I asked them to practice dribbling every day. None of them liked it. You don’t invite friends over to watch you dribble in the driveway. It rarely looks or feels great. But you don’t dribble to become a better dribbler, you dribble so you can play the game well when it matters.
Prayer works the same way. We don’t practice prayer to be “good pray-ers.” We practice prayer so we can recognize God’s voice when it matters most. The point isn’t the practice itself; it’s the relationship the practice develops. The habits of prayer — quiet time, Scripture meditation, reflection—are not ends in themselves. They are the court where we learn how to move with God.
Sometimes our focus shifts and prayer starts to feel like a performance review: Did I log my minutes? Did I say the right words? But relationships don’t thrive on quotas. If I told my wife that my goal was to “spend ten minutes listening to you each day,” she’d smile politely — and know I’d missed the point. She doesn’t want a timer; she wants my heart.
Prayer is the same way. God isn’t impressed with perfect phrasing or long streaks of consistency. He wants authenticity, attention and affection. There are countless prayer tools and methods —and many can help — but when the method becomes the focus, we lose the point. Prayer is not a technique to master, it is a tool to nurture a relationship. Just as in parenting, it isn’t the hours that shape us most, it’s the presence. Five minutes of honest, attentive prayer often forms us more deeply than fifty minutes of distracted words.
Hearing God: Sensitivity Over Callousness
One of the greatest challenges for pastors and parents is recognizing God’s voice in a noisy world. It’s not that God has stopped speaking, it’s that we’ve lost the sensitivity to hear Him.
Just as skin can grow calloused and lose feeling, our hearts can grow dull from hurry, distraction or self-reliance. The goal of prayer isn’t simply to log time on our knees, it’s to keep our hearts soft enough to sense His whisper.
And here’s what I’ve learned: our prayer life isn’t built on the big questions or dramatic moments of decision. The foundation of our prayer life is the constant, steady interactions and honest exchanges with God. It’s listening, sharing and walking with Him day by day. Those small moments form the relationship that helps us recognize His voice when the big moments come.
Some of the biggest turning points in my life, leaving an engineering career, serving overseas and stepping into pastoral ministry, were shaped in prayer. But those decisions didn’t come out of one intense night of seeking God, they came from years of daily, ordinary conversations with Him. Desperation keeps us listening and teaches us to recognize the voice of love that calls us forward.
Prayer doesn’t just help us hear God, it forms who we become. It is where conviction deepens, endurance strengthens, compassion grows, humility takes root and wisdom is shaped. Prayer doesn’t change God, it aligns our hearts with His. Even Jesus modeled this. He slipped away to pray, invited others to pray with Him and reminded us that some breakthroughs “only come out by prayer.”
Throughout church history, God’s most effective leaders have been people of prayer. Martin Luther said, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” John Wesley believed “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.” These weren’t slogans, they were confessions of dependence.
One of the clearest pictures of that kind of listening heart comes from Elijah.
Elijah and the Gentle Whisper
Elijah was exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually. He had obeyed God, seen miracles and still felt utterly alone. He wanted to quit. God could have given him new instructions right away, but instead, He allowed Elijah to walk through his journey while enduring fatigue, fear and silence.
When Elijah reached Mount Horeb, God sent the same elements He had used before: the earthquake, the wind and the fire. Elijah had already seen all these — the child raised from the earth, food brought by ravens through the air, fire called down from heaven. Each represented the power and presence of God he already knew. Yet this time, God wasn’t in any of them.
Elijah had witnessed national revival. People had cried out, The Lord, He is God (1 Kings 18:39). And still, he was disheartened, wondering if any of it mattered. Then came the gentle whisper. Not another display of power, but quiet presence. Not new information, but restored intimacy.
It was the whisper of a Father who doesn’t love His child for what he can do, but simply because he belongs to Him. Like a dad taking his little one to Home Depot to “help” build something for the family, God doesn’t need our contribution, but He delights to have us with Him.
What’s striking is that after this moment, God finally revealed His plan. He already had it all in place: kings to anoint, a successor to mentor, thousands who had stayed faithful. The strategy was never the issue; the relationship was. God waited until Elijah’s heart was re-anchored in love before giving him the next assignment. He wanted Elijah to know his place was with Him first, not just in the mission.
That same whisper still calls to us as leaders today — pastors in the church and parents in the home. God isn’t after productivity; He’s after presence. Our confidence to lead comes not from what we accomplish but from the quiet assurance that we are loved, known and invited to join Him in His work.
Modeling and the Culture of Prayer
When our kids see us pause to pray before reacting, when our churches see us depend on God instead of ourselves, they learn something far deeper than technique. They learn that prayer isn’t about saying the right words, it’s about proximity to a Person. As Paul said, Be imitators of me as I am of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). That is leadership at its core — pastoral and parental alike.
The culture of prayer in a church flows from the pastor’s secret place. The culture of prayer in a home flows from the parent’s quiet moments with God. The goal of all our ministry, all our parenting, all our leading is to remain intimately connected to the Father.
Prayer is not an accessory to discipleship, it is the atmosphere where discipleship happens. It’s where pastors learn to shepherd and parents learn to equip. It’s where we find that the God who sends us out is first the God who draws us close.
And in that closeness — in the gentle whisper after the noise — prayer keeps us continually reminded, renewed and refreshed by the gospel truth that our worth was never in what we could accomplish, but in the One who calls us His own.
Santosh “Tosh” Swamidass is a pastor, author and founder of Launching Ground, a family-discipleship movement that equips parents to raise spiritually resilient world-changers fully surrendered to Jesus as Lord. He is the creator of 9 Steps to a Spiritually Vibrant Family and helps families cultivate everyday rhythms of discipleship rooted in Scripture and the presence of Jesus. Santosh and his wife, Christy, joyfully raise seven children in Southern California.
