Before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he prayed. But what he did in those moments, the actual practice, the interior shift that preceded the miracle, that's been lost to modern Christianity. Not because it was hidden deliberately, but because it requires something most religious education no longer teaches, a method.
If you've ever felt like your prayers echo in space, like you're speaking into a void with no one listening, you're not alone. You were taught that prayer is talking to God, asking, pleading, hoping he might answer if it's his will, if the timing is right, if you're faithful enough. And when nothing happens, you're told it's because God said no, or your faith wasn't strong enough, or his plan is simply beyond your understanding.
But here's what almost no one tells you. That's not what Jesus did when he prayed. When Jesus stood outside Lazarus's tomb, he didn't ask God to raise him from the dead.
He didn't plead or bargain. Instead, John 11 records something extraordinary. Jesus lifted his eyes and said, "Father, I thank you that you have heard me.
" Notice the tense, past tense. He thanked God for something that hadn't happened yet, as if the miracle was already complete before there was any physical evidence. That's not a prayer of request.
That's something else entirely. Go back through the Gospels and you'll see the same pattern before every miracle. When Jesus healed the paralytic in Mark 2, the text states that he saw their faith and then spoke.
But between seeing and speaking, something happened that the gospel doesn't name. When he fed the 5000, he looked up to heaven first, not to ask, but to align. When he walked on water, Matthew 14 tells us he went up the mountain alone to pray before doing the impossible.
Before healing the woman with the issue of blood, he felt power move through him. He didn't decide to heal her. He was already in a state where power could flow.
There's a consistent sequence here. Withdrawal from the crowd, solitude, an interior shift, and then power. The question no one asks is this.
If Jesus gave plain instructions about how to pray, why does modern Christianity treat it as a mystery rather than a method? In Matthew 6, Jesus says something that most people misunderstand their entire lives. He says, "When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who is in secret.
" You've probably heard that interpreted as advice about privacy. Find a quiet place. Don't be showy.
Pray where no one can see you. And whilst that's true on one level, it completely misses what Jesus actually meant. The Greek word he used for room is tamon.
It doesn't mean a bedroom or a cupboard. It means an inner chamber, a treasury, a hidden place inside something. Jesus isn't giving you advice about external location.
He's giving you a map to an interior space. He's saying when you pray, go inward into the part of you that exists beyond your thoughts, beyond your identity, beyond the noise of your conscious mind. Go into your inner room.
And then this is critical. He says, "Close the door. " Not try to focus, not minimize distractions.
Close the door. Seal it. Shut out the world of the senses, the mind's chatter, the version of yourself that's afraid and wanting and asking because the father doesn't exist out there somewhere listening from a distance.
The father exists in secret in the inner room in the place most people never access because they don't even know it's there. And Jesus went to that place every single time before power moved through him. This isn't speculation.
It's a pattern. Every healing, every miracle, every moment where the invisible became visible, it followed the same sequence. Inward first, alignment, silence, and then power.
But here's the problem. You were never taught how to go inward. You were taught to close your eyes and start talking.
To think about God, to imagine him listening, to hope he's paying attention. But thinking about God is not the same as entering the place where God is present. And that distinction is why the miracle stopped.
Not because God stopped listening, but because the method, the actual practice of entering the inner room and closing the door was gradually lost as Christianity moved from small contemplative communities to a religion of empire. You can't systematize silence. You can't standardize interior development.
You can't train priests to guide people into a place many of them have never entered themselves. And so the instruction remained in the text, but the practice, the how faded from common teaching. What remained were rituals you could perform, prayers you could memorize, forms you could follow without ever having to develop the interior capacity Jesus was describing.
The words stayed, the method was forgotten. So, let me tell you what Jesus understood that's almost completely absent from modern Christian teaching. Prayer isn't about persuading God.
It's about coherence. Let me say that again because this is the turning point. Prayer, the kind Jesus practiced, isn't about convincing God to do something.
It's about entering a state of alignment where you and the source are no longer operating as separate entities. where your will and the father's will aren't in conflict or negotiation. They're the same.
Where there's no gap, no distance, no division, just union. And from that place, when you speak, you're not hoping reality will change. You're recognizing that it already has.
That's why Jesus spoke in the past tense at Lazarus's tomb. That's why he thanked the father before the miracle appeared. Because from inside the inner room, from the place of complete alignment, the future and the present collapse into one.
What you see with your physical eyes hasn't caught up yet. But in the realm of cause, in the invisible, it's already finished. So you don't speak from want.
You don't speak from hope. You don't speak from the anxiety of asking. You speak from agreement, from alignment, from the place where the father's will and your will are no longer divided.
Listen to how Jesus himself described it in John 14:10. He said, "The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. " He's not taking credit.
He's not claiming personal power. He's saying, "I'm not doing this. The father is doing it through me.
But notice he doesn't say the father is doing it for him or to him. He says through him. Jesus became the vessel, the doorway, the place where heaven and earth met.
And he did that by entering the inner room and closing the door to everything that wasn't God. But only from that place. If you try to speak from your personality, from your ego, from your separated mind, nothing happens because you're not aligned.
You're still outside the door, still operating from the place of lack and need. And the outer world doesn't respond to separation. It responds to source.
And you only access source when you go where Jesus went inward behind the door into the silence that exists before thought, before identity, before the noise of your own wanting. This is why he spent 40 days in the wilderness before his ministry began. This is why he went up the mountain to pray before choosing the 12 disciples.
This is why he withdrew to solitary places again and again. Even when crowds were pressing in, desperate for his attention. He wasn't recharging.
He wasn't resting. He was realigning. He was returning to the inner room, closing the door, and remembering who he was beyond the human personality.
And every time he did, he came back with power. Now, here's what I'm going to give you. Not the complete method, because the inner room only opens for those willing to stay at the threshold, but the entry point, the foundation that makes everything else possible.
If you want to go where Jesus went, you have to stop doing what you've been doing. Stop talking to God in your head. Stop asking.
Stop wanting. Stop imagining him somewhere out there listening from a distance. Instead, do this.
Sit somewhere you won't be disturbed. Be still. Close your eyes.
And instead of starting to pray, instead of launching into words, just breathe. Not special breathing, not a technique. Just notice your breath.
Feel it move in. Feel it move out. And with each exhale, consciously let go of one layer of noise.
Let go of the thoughts about what you need to do later. Let go of the conversation you had earlier. Let go of the version of you that's worried about tomorrow or replaying yesterday.
Just breathe. And as you do, begin to feel for the place behind your thoughts, the stillness that's always there underneath the mental chatter, the silence beneath the noise. It's subtle.
You won't hear a voice. You won't see a vision. You won't have a dramatic experience.
But if you stay there, if you resist the urge to start talking, start asking, start performing the prayer ritual you've been taught, you'll begin to feel something, a presence, not external, not separate from you, but closer than your own breath, closer than your own heartbeat. That's the edge of the inner room. And when you feel it, don't rush forward.
Don't try to make something happen. Don't start asking for things or listing your needs. Just be there.
Stay in that place. Even if it feels like nothing's happening, even if your mind tries to pull you back into thinking, into wanting, into the familiar pattern of asking God for things, stay. Because the door doesn't open by force.
It opens by recognition. And recognition takes time. You might sit there for five minutes and feel nothing.
You might sit for 10 and think you're doing it wrong. But you're not. You're learning to be still.
You're learning to close the door. You're learning to stop talking long enough to actually listen. You're learning what it feels like to not be the voice in your head.
Not to be the one who's afraid. Not to be the one who needs something fixed, provided, or changed. You're learning to rest in the presence that's always been there waiting for you to notice.
And that's the foundation. Without this, nothing else works. You can learn every prayer technique in the world.
You can memorize scripture. You can fast, worship, and serve, but if you never learn to enter the inner room, if you never learn to close the door and be still, you'll always be praying from the outside. And the outside has no power.
But here's what changes once you've established that foundation. Once you've learned to recognize the presence in the inner room, there's a second movement that Jesus made after the stillness, after the alignment, after entering the inner room and closing the door. Not a word, not a request, a shift in awareness that turned alignment into authority.
It's the difference between praying to the father and praying as the father. When Jesus said, "The Father and I are one," he wasn't making a theological claim about his unique divine nature. He was describing the state he entered before every miracle.
The place where the boundary between self and source dissolved completely where my will and thy will weren't two different things being negotiated. They were the same movement. And from that place of union, he didn't ask for miracles.
He recognized them. He saw what was already true in the invisible realm and spoke it into the visible. That's why he could say to the paralytic, "Rise and walk with complete authority.
" That's why he could command the storm to be still. That's why he could call Lazarus out of the tomb. He wasn't hoping God would act.
He was acting from the place where he and God were unified. This is what happens when you learn to stay in the inner room. When you close the door and rest in that presence long enough, consistently enough, something shifts.
You stop experiencing yourself as someone separate from God, asking for help. You start experiencing yourself as the place where God's will is expressed. Not because you're special, not because you've achieved some elevated spiritual status, but because you've simply stopped being in the way.
The personality, the ego, the version of you that's constantly afraid and wanting and needing, that's what blocks the flow of power. And when you enter the inner room and close the door, you're temporarily setting that version of yourself aside. You're stepping out of the way so that what's always been there can move through you unobstructed.
Jesus called it the kingdom of heaven. Not a place you go when you die. A state of consciousness you enter whilst you're still alive.
And he said it's within you inside in the inner room. Now I want to be clear about something. This isn't instant.
You won't try this once tonight and wake up tomorrow performing miracles. The inner room opens gradually. It requires practice, patience, and a willingness to sit in apparent nothingness whilst your nervous system learns to recognize a frequency it's not accustomed to perceiving.
But it does open. And when it does, prayer stops being something you do to God and becomes something you do from God. Your words carry a different weight.
Your intentions align with a larger intelligence and reality begins to respond differently because you're no longer operating from separation. You're operating from source. This is what the mystics knew, what the desert fathers practiced, what contemplative Christians have been doing in monasteries and hermitages for 2,000 years, whilst the broader church forgot how to teach it.
But it was never meant to be locked away in monasteries. It was meant for anyone willing to learn. Anyone willing to stop talking long enough to listen.
Anyone willing to enter the inner room and discover what's been waiting there all along. So, here's what I'm asking you to do. Don't just watch this video and move on.
Actually try it tonight, tomorrow morning, whenever you have 10 minutes of uninterrupted time. Sit. Close your eyes.
Breathe. Let go of the noise. Feel for the stillness behind your thoughts.
And when you find it, when you touch that presence, even for a moment, stay there. Don't ask for anything. Don't try to make anything happen.
Just be in that space. Learn what it feels like. Train yourself to recognize it.
Because once you know how to find the inner room, once you've closed the door, even once, you can always return. And the more you return, the more natural it becomes until one day you realize you're not visiting anymore. You're living there.
That's when prayer stops being a practice and becomes your permanent state of being. That's when you understand what Jesus meant when he said, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Not coming someday, not somewhere else.
Right here, right now, within you. " If this resonated with you, if something in you recognized the truth of what we've explored here, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button. Share this with someone who's been searching for a deeper way to pray.
Leave a like if this gave you something valuable. Because the more people who discover the inner room, the more people who learn to close the door and align with source, the more this world transforms. Now go be still and discover what's been waiting for you in the silence.
